Hubert Chathi

Finally, after prodding the release managers, we've received the go ahead to start the GNUstep transition. GNUstep gui is still stuck in the NEW queue, after originally being REJECTED due to a silly licensing issue. So, hopefully the Debian ftp-masters will ACCEPT gnustep-gui soon, all the GNUstep packages will get rebuilt quickly, and maybe we'll have a GNUstep release in Lenny that's less than a year old. <crosses fingers> The freeze for libraries was supposed to happen already. I hope they'll hold off until GNUstep goes through.

Almost all the packages have been uploaded. Now we're just waiting...

P.S. We promise that this transition will be much less painful than the last GNUstep transition.

update: gnustep-gui has just been ACCEPTED.

No, I’m not talking about bra sizes. As of yesterday, I am now officially a Debian developer (DD), which means I am a full member of one of the largest free software projects out there. I officially applied to be a DD on September 1 of last year, which means that the entire process has taken me one year, one month, and 17 days, most of it waiting in one of the various queues. It’s a bit better than I expected — when I started out, my estimate was about a year and a half.

Thanks to all my sponsors who have uploaded my packages for me so far. Now I’ll be uploading my own packages, with my @debian.org account. So eventually this page should become more empty, and this page should become more full.

After six months waiting for an AM, I finally got an email from tbm this evening, saying that he has been assigned as my AM. According to average processing times, it’ll be about 8 – 9 months until I pass this step, and then I’ll get stuck in the next queue. Well, it may be slow, but at least I’m making progress. (Here’s my NM status page.)

My third package has entered Debian. I have been maintaining a Debian package for Asymptote, a script-based vector graphics language inspired by MetaPost, for a while. Asymptote was developed, in part, by my old calculus professor, who was also across the hall from me when I worked at PINTS. Thanks to Yann Dirson, who sponsored my package (since I am not (yet) an official Debian Developer).

I’ve (officially) started the process to becoming a Debian Developer. After reading all the necessary documents, and with two packages already in the archive, I’ve submitted my application. Here’s my status page. According to the average processing times, it will take about a year and a half before I get my shiny debian.org login. (About half a year before I get paired with an AM, and I can actually start doing the tests for the NM process.)

I just started trying out tla-buildpackage yesterday to build a new Debian package of Asymptote. It has a bit of a strange mode of operation (why do I have to be in the +packages/<package>/<package>-<version> directory to build packages?), but it works as advertised — I can use GNU Arch as revision control, for both upstream sources, and my own Debian-specific modifications, and it makes it easy to build clean packages that don’t contain Arch-specific junk. It keeps track of upstream’s original sources, so it can generate the .orig.tar.gz file automatically — I don’t have to keep copies of all that stuff, so my development directory is cleaner.

In other news, I’m now have another package in Debian: I’m co-maintaining AlsaPlayer with Paul Brossier, after the old maintainer orphaned the package. I’m also reading the Debian developer documentation, so in a little while, I’ll be ready to start the application process to become a full Debian developer.

Debian Sarge is released after almost 3 years since the last stable release of Debian (Woody). (/.) Congratulations to all the Debian Developers, and especially to the new release managers. This is the first release with the new installer (which is one reason the release took so long).

May Sarge be short-lived, and may we see Etch within 18 months.

Wow. I get back from Nova Scotia and find out that Sarge is frozen. Woody was released shortly after the PEI trip. Maybe I should head out to the Maritimes more often.

I’ve updated the structure of my Debian archive to one similar to the one that was used back in the Potato days. (Why Potato? Because that’s what debarchiver creates.) So anyone who uses my archive should go to my Debian page and get the new deb lines for their sources.list. This will new structure will allow me to support multiple architectures and multiple archives.

As implied by the parenthetical comment in the previous paragraph, I am using debarchiver to organize my Debian archive now. My workflow for creating Debian packages now looks like this: run debuild, copy the generated files to my incoming directory, and run the script that calls debarchiver with the appropriate options, which is a couple steps less than my previous workflow.

Eventually, I may want to set up some of the UW-DIG machines to do some auto-building, which will make it much easier to support multiple archives. After I figure out how to do auto-building...

I have created a new Debian package for Asymptote, a “script-based vector graphics language inspired by MetaPost.” Hopefully, this will become my second package to be included in Debian.

I haven’t used Asymptote much (because I’m not in the process of writing any documents right now), but it looks pretty interesting. I’m wondering if this could be the answer to the pain of drawing finite automata and graphs. Doing graphics with scripts seems a bit hard to wrap your head around, unless you have a very good visual memory. But drawing finite automata is already painful.

Besides, one of the authors taught me second-year calculus, and his office was across from my own when I worked at PINTS. And he helped our group a lot with our DEC Alpha machine.