Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Debian

Yesterday I arrived back from Spain and DebConf, so I should be finally back on track to process mails, bug reports and other similar things. If you're waiting for my reply more than month, you should be soon handled ;-).

I really enjoyed DebConf and meeting all the people there. And as well I did enjoy rest of travel through Spain. Except the day when they stole my backpack in Barcelona. But I can hardly do anything about that, it just made my vacation quite expensive because loosing my DSLR camera with lenses.

It has been really nice week in here, but it's time to leave. Last night, wake up in the morning and leave by train (in my case to explore Barcelona).

Thanks to all people who organised DebConf 9, from my POV everything went really smoothly and I enjoyed time here. I finally met people I meet daily on the mailing lists and now I can finally imagine people behind those email addresses.

Now it's time to pack my things and finally have some sleep, otherwise I will not be able to wake up tomorrow and I will miss my hardly booked train.

It looks like some things will be changing in Debian in next months. The most known thing which is already widespread know is switching to time based freeze cycles, what should make us synchronised with Ubuntu LTS release cycles. This gives advantage of sharing work done on security support, because both distribution will be quite similar code base.

The other thing which we saw today is new website proposal. From what I could see in the audience, it has been accepted quite positively, so maybe Debian will finally have nice looking website in (near?) future. The discussion showed up that also somebody else is working on that, so we will have even two competing proposals. I just hope it will not end up in some huge flamewar :-).

I never thought I will have such big trouble to buy train tickets online. Some hints for anybody who has not managed it so far:

• Do not even try to register in English, it will fail for some obscure reason.
• Once the thing has failed, it has so broken javascript that you have to reload it.
• Relax your spam filters, otherwise you will not get any mail from them.
• If you have only one credit card, you might be lost. Mine did not work and I had to use another one.
• Be patient, when your third payment attempt ended nowhere.
• If you are not sure whether you booked or not, you can find existing bookings under Mis viajes / Impresión.

But finally I have the tickets from Caceres to Barcelona. I'm going to manage rest on the way.

I finally managed myself to book the flights and ask for vacation, so yes, I'm going to DebConf 09. Will be there for whole DebConf and I will travel around Spain a bit before and after.

PS: I will come there also with new PGP keys to sign, see announcement.

Hmm, again another general resolution. Yes, but this one seems to be really tricky. During discussion, several almost unrelated options have been merged into single vote, what really does not make it easy to understand and choose preferred option. Yes they are related in the way that they will affect time of Lenny release, but I think splitting it into several votes would make more sense.

On the other side, Lenny release is getting delayed more and more and boycotting this vote also does not seem as a good choice to me. Such choice will practically delay Lenny release after another decision will be made or all firmware issues will be solved. And neither of these choices seems to be possible to happen in a timely manner...

I just wanted to fix some RC bugs till I'll go home, so I looked at the list of open ones and randomly chosen two bugs about roxen fonts which looked like low hanging fruits. Both were in fact same issue, just copied to two packages.

I worked on the fix, creating some intermediate version and then I finally wanted to upload the package. Unfortunately in this step I somehow managed to use the intermediate version, which did not really fix the issue. As packages were already uploaded, there was not much I could do except yet another NMU, now with full set of changes.

Just as accepted emails arrived I also noticed that I messed up bug numbers in changelog - I used same bug number in both changelogs. Okay, manually closing the bug worked around this.

But now I'm afraid what else did I mess up. Probably it's time to go for a dinner and stop working on computer for now :-).

When finishing series of articles about Debian packaging and writing about dbconfig-common, I just had to ask myself, why it is not used in phpMyAdmin package. I did not find any reason and as Thijs did not have any objections, I hacked it together this evening.

So what you will get? All fancy features where phpMyAdmin requires it's database to manage some additional features. For example you can create PDF pages with structure of your database, add additional comments to databases, notice relations between MyISAM tables, etc. Simply see wiki for more details.

Besides this, phpMyAdmin is now automatically configured to use database you choose using dbconfig-common, so you can also connect to remote MySQL server without manually configuring anything.

The only thing which scares me a bit is that we now increased a lot number of debconf questions user has to reply by this...

Release team Debianu (kromě nepodstatných věcí jako informací o zmražení a počtu kritických chyb Lennyho) dnes přišel se zásadní informací – následovník Lennyho se bude jmenovat Squeeze a tradice postaviček z Toy Story tak nebude narušena.

Pokud nevíte jakou roli si v Toy Story zahrál, Wikipedia napoví .

(Obrázek je dostupný pod CC na Flickru .)

Okay, I will again miss DebConf. This time it is not because of time, but because of money. The flight to Buenos Aires is far too expensive to go there just for DebConf and I didn't manage to plan some more travelling around South America...

Hopefully it will get better next year, at least DebConf will be much closer :-).

PS: Just after deadline for confirmation and my decision for not going there, I got an email that my sponsorship for travel was approved. Unfortunately too late to change my decision.