Tim Retout's blog

Masochism

2008-08-05T14:05:32Z

For my first trivial bit of coding while I'm here, I patched the debconf IRC bot to announce nicknames as well as the real name of new arrivals (a feature request from madduck). I'm hoping to resist wasting time adding lots of features to it - the code is awful.

This morning I went running at 8:30 - in theory there are going to be group runs in the morning and afternoon sometime, but for now I went on my own. It was quite nice with the ocean views... the local runners seem to wear tracksuit tops at this time of year, though.

Argentina

2008-08-04T23:10:22Z

I arrived in Mar del Plata yesterday - DebConf this year is all in one hotel (with a nearby hotel for overflow accommodation next week), which makes everything very convenient. When they're not serving meals, they're usually serving coffee and cakes in the hacklab.

There were some teething troubles with the networking today, so I took a walk down the beach. Mar del Plata reminds me of Llandudno - it's a popular beach resort in the summer, but it's winter at the moment. Not that I've ever been to Llandudno in the winter, come to think of it... but imagine a cold summer day in North Wales. There's a run-down pier and everything. The big difference is that Mar del Plata is a huge city - I walked a couple of miles down the coast today, and the buildings were just stretching on. Oh, and everyone speaks Spanish.

When I got back, the network was fixed (yay), so I messed around getting SIP calls working. Outgoing works pretty well now, but I've yet to see whether my UK number is going to ring my mobile. I should have voicemail set up now, so people can leave a message instead of just not getting through to me.

At some point I'll stop settling in and do some packaging or something - but as a holiday, it's quite relaxing.

Vital Statistics

2008-07-31T23:43:09Z

I finally registered with a GP's surgery in Rugby today (that is, Thursday). This went fairly smoothly once I managed to decipher the way to Waiting Room 2.

I am 180cm tall, and weigh 75kg. This gives me a BMI of 23.1, which is normal. I didn't get the numbers for my blood pressure, but apparently it's fine. :)

GNU Hackers' Meeting 2008

2008-07-13T19:48:45Z

On Thursday and Friday, I took time off work to visit Bristol for the GNU Hackers' Meeting 2008. Around 20 people attended - obviously these were all people contributing to GNU, but (surprisingly) I didn't feel too much like I was surrounded by giants. Instead, it was all quite relaxed; most people there seemed rather like me - with a mild caffeine addiction, permanently short of spare time, and just trying to improve their small projects as best they could.

The impression I have of the GNU project after this meeting is one of a disparate organization with many small contributors; it is clear we have massive communication problems, both internally and externally. From the outside, I suppose GNU looks like a monolithic, perhaps US-centric project, with the strong leadership at the top controlling the direction of all these sub-projects. In reality, these sub-projects are more or less autonomous. There may be some checking at the centre that no two GNU programs are directly competing to solve the same problem, but the maintainers are largely on their own, struggling to build up whatever community of contributors they can. The feeling of isolation is much greater than in Debian, for instance - there, although package maintainers generally have some sort of authority over "their" packages, you will get bug reports filed if you are not following Debian policy, and you are expected to observe common freeze periods around releases. There are no real equivalents in GNU.

So naturally, considering the amount we had in common, this meeting was always going to be a success. It was very well run by Brian Gough, and there was just the right amount of structure versus "corridor time" (although everything took place in a single room, except for lunch/pub). There were a few talks from people about the projects they were working on - for instance, a nice game called GNU FreeDink, although I need to fix a segmentation fault to progress any further in level 2, and a very impressive sound generation program called Psycosynth.

It was suggested that a UK-only GNU hackers' meeting could be organised sometime, which I think would also work very well. Simply meeting up like this every once in a while was quite inspiring; I much prefer developer-oriented meetings over user-oriented meetings, and this was one of the best.

OpenJDK in Debian main

2008-07-13T19:46:56Z

After much anticipation, the free-as-in-freedom version of Sun's Java JDK has arrived in Debian's `main' section. There are still a few bugs in the packaging, but these will be ironed out before the lenny release. Various other useful packages still need to adapt to its presence, but many will be able to move from the `contrib' section into `main' as well.

Going forward, this makes Sun's Java platform quite attractive for developing future free software applications. There is a reasonably performant implementation now available in most distributions, that will receive security updates, has a good team of developers behind it, and already has a large community of people with skills in the language. If static versus dynamic typing becomes an issue, Jython might offer a nice competing implementation of Python. We might one day get to see what this `Groovy' thing is all about. In terms of GUI applications, Andrew Cowie's new java-gnome 4.x bindings will allow truly native integration with the rest of GNOME - or stick with plain Swing for cross-platform portability.

This also brings the Java/.NET competition to free software. Mono has been playing catch-up with both Microsoft's implementation of .NET and with Java - it has enjoyed some success with Gtk#, which has provided much more compelling rapid development than the old java-gnome bindings and gcj. MonoDevelop is trying to compete with Eclipse and NetBeans, and probably has a better-integrated GNOME UI editor. Still, if the potential for rapid application development is as great as is claimed, it can't be very long before the various successful Gtk# applications (banshee, f-spot, tomboy) have Java counterparts (unless people are happy with the C equivalents). The most difficult part of the process is finishing off any required library bindings (such as to gstreamer and libgphoto2).

It will be interesting to see whether Java free software developers bring with them the same bad habits that have been seen with many Windows-based C# free software developers. When you want to use a library, bundling a binary-only copy of an unstable version is not really the right thing to do. At least many Java .jar archives also contain source code, and there are quite a few home-grown Java hackers who might understand about how to play nicely with distributions using proper dependency-management systems.

One thing that strikes me is that, while Mono has been around for quite a few years now, I can't think of any big non-graphical applications that are built on it. (Beagle is perhaps the exception - it does make use of a Gtk# GUI, but the main program is the indexer.) Java might benefit from a network effect, as projects such as Apache Tomcat are also widely used. (Let's not mention Choob at this point.) There are a few non-GNOME graphical apps waiting in the wings (like freecol and robocode). The scaremongering over possible patent infringement in Mono (or the Windows.Forms libraries), while probably unfounded, cannot help its cause.

But of course, ruling out something catastrophic like a patent infringement suit, free software projects very rarely die - they just fade away into obscurity. Both platforms are likely to be around for some time yet.

gnu-standards in Debian

2008-07-04T19:09:12Z

An update to Debian's gnu-standards package is now in incoming. This package contains the GNU Coding Standards and the Information for GNU Maintainers document. It is now in the `main' section rather than `non-free', so is officially part of the Debian system.

This has taken several months; at the end of December I asked whether the maintainers' document could be relicensed. RMS evidently approved, because the licence was changed in January.

Then there was the small matter of updating the Debian package; I prepared an update, but wasn't quite clear on whether I was preparing an NMU or a normal upload, so stalled for a while. Last month the package became orphaned, so I quickly grabbed an ITA, and started working again. KiBi was very helpful with pointing out all the remaining cruft in the package, and he generously sponsored the final result. Then we just had to wait for it to get through the NEW queue.

Hopefully it will migrate to testing before the freeze.

The things I do for Debian

2008-06-30T20:24:01Z

Blue and White G3 PowerMac on eBay, collection only: £10.
Train fares to and around London: £26.
Fixing an annoying PowerPC f-spot bug: priceless.

It weighs 13kg, apparently, and my arms still ache. Thanks to Anton and Dan for letting me stay at their place on Saturday night, and use their fast net connection to download Debian packages.

Licence club

2008-06-27T00:13:31Z

The first rule of licence club is, you do not talk about licence club.
The second rule of licence club is, you DO NOT talk about licence club.
If a copyright holder says stop, gets confused, is bought out, the licence is over.
Only two parties to a licence.
One exclusive licence at a time.
No CDDL, no Jörg Schilling.
Licences will go on as long as the copyright is enforcable.
If this is your first night at licence club, you have to hire a lawyer.

Recent fixes

2008-06-21T11:38:34Z

Some small victories:

You can now install devscripts-el without needing to install elserv, an http server written in emacs lisp and Ruby. (The devscripts-el package provides various useful emacs commands to help with Debian packaging.) This is good, because I don't need Ruby for anything else.
It is now possible to use irssi's default theme on terminals with a white background, at least in Debian. I found that in bright sunlight, black-on-white terminals were actually more visible on my laptop screen - but when using IRC, I couldn't see who was using /me any more. Apparently upstream are yet to be convinced of the wisdom of not hardcoding white into their themes.

Library

2008-06-17T18:08:28Z

This evening I visited Rugby Library. Apparently I had not used my Warwickshire library card for 991 days - that was from when I lived in Leamington Spa. It is probably quite a while longer since I last borrowed books from Rugby.

To be honest, I was quite fond of the old Victorian library building. Unfortunately, that one closed in 1997 and was demolished. And I suppose the £5.5m new one looks nicer.