December 5th, 2011
On Saturday evening I started talking with Mònica about Bug Squashing Parties and how they work. I am not sure how it happened, we started doing one. Then it was too fun to stop :P
NMUs by Mònica:
Funny, there were a couple of NMUs by others uploading patchs by Mònica.
NMUs by Ana:
I also closed #646449 (libosip2) that has been fixed in a new release upload, sponsored a NMU to Sven Joachim who had a patch sitting in the BTS for a month NMU-fixing #646147 (lie), sponsored dbus-c++ and reviewed for sponsoring a new version inspircd.
November 5th, 2011
Debian has applied to the Google code-in program as mentoring organization. In the Google code-in, pre-university students (ages 13-17), have the opportunity of contributing to Debian, trying to complete different tasks.
We are hoping to get accepted and improve our outcome from last year. To achieve this, we need the help of more Debian contributors proposing and mentoring simple tasks for the students. Please take a take a look at the archives in the mailing list and join us with your proposals.
The list of tasks is at http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2011/Applying, we are specially missing translation and training tasks!
You can also join us in the IRC channel #debian-soc (irc.oftc.net)
May 1st, 2011
With KDE 3 almost gone in unstable, the KDE team is not longer interested in Qt 3 and we are looking for new maintainer(s).
If you want to have Qt 3 in wheezy, now is the time to step up! Please, read this email and reply in list.
March 31st, 2011
The student application period for applying to GSoC opened last Monday and we already have a couple of very good applications from students. We are still missing yours!
The list of Debian projects includes a nice variety of projects:
There is only one week left, so do not leave it for last minute. Get in touch with the mentors of the projects you are interested in and add your proposal to the Debian wiki and in Google Melange.
If you are a Debian contributor wanting to mentor a project, you still can. Please read this email with some hints.
March 21st, 2011
I have been working in the last weeks in the removal of the last pieces of KDE 3 from the Debian archive and I have found there are a lot of packages that is sad having to remove.
If you are looking for a good idea/excuse to learn and improve your KDE 4 / C++ /Qt4 skills, have to do a small application for school or you just feel like some useful coding, here is the list:
- creox – real-time guitar effects
- kbarcode – barcode and label printing application for KDE
- kbiff – KDE mail notification utility
- KKBSwitch – keyboard layout indicator for KDE (see this post also)
- kmyfirewall – iptables based firewall configuration tool for KDE
- kpogre – a graphical administrator tool for PostgreSQL
- kredentials – KDE taskbar applet to update kerberos/AFS credentials
- ksociograma – technical educational software to make sociograms
- ktechlab – circuit simulator for microcontrollers and electronics
- qalculate-kde – Powerful and easy to use desktop calculator – KDE version
- score-reading-trainer – trainer for reading music notes
Note that I do not list here software whose port in KDE 4 is being developed although it is still not finished and therefore it is not packaged in Debian.
By the way, even if all those packages are being removed from Debian testing and unstable, they will remain in Squeeze, so you can keep using them or install it from there.
February 7th, 2011
The last weeks before a Debian release are usually boring with respect to working on new stuff since unstable is pretty much closed to development. Now that the release is finished, this fun is back \o/
I have been in an ‘upload frenzy’ since yesterday night and I have updated some packages in unstable: KOffice[1] and KOffice-l10n 2.3.1, yakuake, rsibreak and tintin++. Another of my packages, kid3, got magically updated itself in unstable before I had time to look at it, the magic of having active co-maintainers.
[1] Thanks for the gentle push to update this, Pino :)
I also emailed one of my upstream maintainers to ask him about the KDE 4 version of his application and he will likely make a release soon. One of the goals for wheezy is remove completely KDE 3 and Qt 3. If you are maintaining a KDE 3 or Qt 3 based application, we are about to start annoying you about this! See http://wiki.debian.org/kdelibs4c2aRemoval and http://wiki.debian.org/qt3-x11-freeRemoval
The last 2 weeks before the release I had some fun watching how the Squeeze release countdown banner I published at http://news.debian.net spread to a lot of websites, personal blogs, community sites, forums to news portals.
The traffic has been increasing little by little through the 2 weeks the banner has been online and currently is still moderately high, since people keeps retweeting the news item about the Debian release. While writing these lines, the banner has been served 449575 times to a total of 244975 unique IP addresses!
February 1st, 2011
As you might know, Debian was one of the 20 organizations selected to participate in the first Google Code-in.
We got a moderate success since we started preparing the contest very late (I joined as mentor/admin the very first day of the contest!). Because of this, unlike other organizations, we did not manage to engage interested students from the very beginning of the Code-in. Since we did not have too many Debian tasks the first days, we did not attract many students, and thus did not have very many throughout the contest.
Given Debian tasks were mostly about improving and contributing to Debian, it was quite hard having tasks that did not require having a Debian installation and that made it difficult for many students to get involved. Also, until the last two weeks we did not have any translation task that could have attracted earlier students without too much confidence in their technical and English skills.
Nonetheless, Debian got 39 tasks done:
With about 30 students participating and at least one of the students has keep contributing to Debian after the contest!
The contest was sometimes stressful with several students wanting their tasks to be reviewed at the same time, and the date was problematic due to the winter (or summer!) holidays but still I am quite happy with the final result :D
Debian will be also participating again this year in the Google Summer of Code 2011. Join the soc-coordination mailing list and stay tunned if you want to participate as mentor or student.
January 9th, 2011
It took a bit of time due to the holidays, but KOffice 2.3.0 is finally available from Debian experimental (give some hours to your mirror to sync!). If you are unstable user don’t be afraid to fetch it from experimental, it is there only because the Squeeze freeze. Squeeze will ship with KOffice 2.2.1, while not all the applications are so polished as it would be desirable, it clearly offers huge improvements over old KOffice 1.6.3.
I do not know if there will be a KOffice 2.3.1 upload but I know for sure the future is with Calligra :)
October 3rd, 2010
Los videos de la dudesconf, (la mini-debconf española) están ya disponibles en http://dudesconf.org/2010/programa.html. Una vez más, me gustaría aprovechar estas líneas para darles las gracias a todo el mundo que trabajo para hacer la tercera edición de dudesconf posible.
Poco a poco, empieza a haber mucho material en español sobre Debian, como echaba en falta tener un sitio desde donde enlazarlo todo, he creado una página en el wiki de debian: http://wiki.debian.org/VideoTalks/Spanish. Si sabes de algún video, no dudes en añadirlo :)
Actualización: Hay problemas con los enlaces de los videos de las dudesconf, espero que en unos días estará arreglado.
May 28th, 2010
As some of you might have seen, KOffice 2.2.0 was finally released today. Quoting the release announcement:
“There are still areas in the user interface that we want to work on before stating that KOffice is fit for the general public. We are, however, at a stage where we think that KOffice can be used for real work by some users.”
I agree with this statement and it is still to be decided if KOffice 2.2.0 will make it into Squeeze. I am inclined to do so but I would love some well argumented feedback. Take into consideration some applications are more mature than others.
The packages will be uploaded to the official archive soon, but they still need some minor work and given they include new deb files (kformula shape and kexi), they need to go thru the NEW queue, it might take some time.
Meanwhile, you can find packages for amd64 & i386 from the semi-official repository at: http://qt-kde.debian.net/.
You also have available the localization packages (see the list here) and braindump, an interesting application based in KOffice libraries.
These packages are not in the Debian archive so please *don’t* report bugs against them in the Debian Bug Tracking System. If you see any packaging problem, please report it in the debian-kde mailing list.
If you find a bug, miss a feature or have a wishlist, please file a report in the KDE bugzilla: https://bugs.kde.org/ Include all the information you can about your system (Debian experimental, KOffice 2.2.0) and all the details you are able to give. In the case of crashes, install the package koffice-dbg to get a backtrace. Read more at this techbase article.
