Archive for the ‘Planet Debian’ Category
Less cruft for a better release
Now that Squeeze is frozen, and release date is approaching, removing unused and buggy packages from the archive is a nice task to save maintenance burden which often involves several people (QA guys and Release Managers, mostly).
A lot of removal bugs are coming to ftp.debian.org pseudo-package, so I’d like to thank fellow contributors who spent part of their time on this task. A special thank goes to Moritz Muehlenhoff, who filed tons of bugs, and contributed to remove a lot of unused packages.
If you’re interested too, you could look at these guidelines.
Keep up the good work, guys!
Lightspark news
Lightspark, the modern and efficient open source Flash player, just landed in experimental!
Few days have passed since 0.4.2 release, and thanks to the great packaging efforts made by Didier Raboud, package is ready to be widely tested.
Don’t expect a fully functional Flash player, though. Some features aren’t implemented yet, and it’s still buggy, but it looks very promising. Stay tuned for updates!
waf removal, almost done
Some months ago I wrote about my intention to drop waf from Debian.
Some bugs I filed were fixed shortly after they appeared, while I managed to upload three NMUs to fix remaining bits (flowcanvas, patchage and raul), all uploaded to DELAYED/15 to give maintainer time to react.
In the meantime, jack-audio-connection-kit was uploaded build-depending on waf, this brings in a little unplanned delay, but I provided a workaround to get rid of it, it just need to be improved.
I want to remove waf before Squeeze is released, so please do not upload more packages build-depending on waf, this way you can help its removal. Thank you!
My first GNOME patch
Yesterday I was sponsored my first GNOME patch! OK, it’s small, very small… but I’m happy anyway 
Kudos to Scott Balneaves for making that possible!
… and me too!
Today I joined Sandro and Christian in “Those Who Reviewed The Entire Debian Mailing Lists Spam Team”!
Helping with spam is one of my goals as a Debian Developer (I gained DD status on Aug 25, and started reviewing stuff on Aug 26), and I gave a look to the last ~2500 messages in the backlog during Christmas time.
Help is always welcome, it is not necessary to be a Debian Developer to tag messages as spam. For additional informations, see this wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ListMaster/ListArchiveSpam.
Gimme more! 
Deb-o-Matic, translators needed
… and when you’ve finished with GTG, you can give a go to Deb-o-Matic translations too, 19 strings are quick to process, so you will have a lot of time to try the software
Getting Things GNOME! 0.1.9, call for testing and translations
GTG developers recently released first beta of Getting Things GNOME!, you can see release notes here.
Final 0.2.0 release is due very soon. If you’re a GTG user already, or if you are looking for a task manager for GNOME desktop environment, you can contribute to the process by testing it (0.1.9 packages are already available in Sid and Lucid), reporting bugs or helping with translations.
Enjoy it!
News from gdebi
After reading Zack’s post, I decided to help Gustavo and Michael maintaining gdebi in Debian, trying to get it in sync with upstream and fixing some bugs. Result was 0.5.9debian1 upload, which fixed 14 bugs (including annoying #493352, which I also plan to fix in Lenny).
That wasn’t enough, I also needed a vte fix to get rid of an ugly bug which prevented gdebi-gtk from installing anything, soon in your favourite mirror
If you have some free slots, there are some easy bugs you can work on, help is always welcome
What does “DD” mean?
Dungeons & Dragons? No time to play right now… no!
Dolby Digital? My PC doesn’t support it… no!
Due Diligence? We already did them multiple times last year… no!
Donald Duck? I like comics, but… no
Debian Developer? YAY!
I think I owe many people a beer:
- Cédric Delfosse, who originally advocated me
- Bernd Zeimetz, who assigned me an AM and reviewed my application
- Martin Meredith, my brave AM
- Christoph Berg, who approved my application
- Jonathan McDowell, who added my key to the Debian keyring
- Peter Palfrader, who created my account
Thank to the several Debian Developers who assisted me so far.
A special thank goes to Piotr Ożarowski for bearing with me
And now… stop celebrating, there’s a lot of work to do!
