So Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" is due to be released this weekend. I've been doing my part annoying the release team with various risky last minute changes for not-formally-RC bugs. The best of these was making kFreeBSD CD images be actually used by d-i. Which had been silently ignoring them (so nobody noticed), and then I "broke" it to at least complain that it couldn't use them, and is now entirely fixed.

Anyhow, there are these Debian release parties planned in 68 locations worldwide, this weekend. I have never been to a Debian release party. The timing is never right. The nearest one is 6 hours away, so I won't be making the trip. But yesterday I had a crazy idea, and I seem to have done enough that I can't back out now.

announcing the Debian Party Line

mumble.debian.net is a mumble server. Mumble is a nice system for doing group voice chats. I will be hosting a kind of virtual release party there, on February 5th and 6th. We'll follow the progress of the release, maybe have some scheduled events (if someone wants to do a talk or tutorial session). And at the end we'll hear what it sounds like when we all get Squeezed.

So, should be fun, assuming my servers don't melt down due to bandwidth use. Hope to chat with you there!

Please visit its page for details and to RSVP.

I spent a solid 12 hours hosting the Debian Party Line chat today thru the Debian Squeeze release process. That's much much more time than I usually spend on the phone or talking.

It went well. The mumble server peaked at 55 people connected, and 200 unique addresses connected to it over the course of the day. We had some good discussions, and a lot of lurkers too. And not too much bother with badly set up microphones.

I hope that Debian will find uses for mumble going forward, some ideas I've heard are to use it for team meetings, or for remote audience feedback at DebConf talks. I plan to leave the server up as long as it is not abused.

Git has lots of tools to map the history of a git repository. But, I have not been able to find tools to map networks of git repositories.

Possibly noone has done it because such networks tend to be pretty centralized really, with low levels of (visible) interconnection, and so not that interesting, like this network of all known branches of ikiwiki.

Soon after I started using git-annex, I realized the repositories using it would tend to be more interconnected, and less centralized, and generally a more complex, rich fabric than I'd seen in my use of git before.

So I've built "git annex map", which uses graphviz to spit out fun maps like this.

(Green nodes are trusted drives; red nodes are not currently available.)

Previously: git tube map

I just realized that the Debian Installer is ten years old! It actually got started ten years ago last summer, but now is also an apt anniversary -- ten years ago, I successfully booted d-i for the first time.

It's amazing that d-i has been around as long as Debian Developers who have "been with the project longer than most". (Many of whom have been long-time contributors to d-i themselves.) Astonishing that my basic design has held up and remains relevant. And every time I boot up the Debian kFreeBSD installer, or run the graphical installer, or hear someone raving about how easy Ubuntu was for them to install (and know d-i was underneath), I'm amazed at the places people have taken d-i.

The code has recently moved to git. As changes like ext4 by default start to flow in to d-i, with Wheezy development starting up, I hope to see more people enticed into working on d-i.

Anyone can do like Matthew Palmer has done with netcfg -- pick a component of d-i that interests you, check out its git repository, and take it from being reasonably well team-maintained to awesomely you-maintained. In five or ten years Matthew will be able to look back at all the people who have used d-i to install over IPv6, and on WPA wireless, and with his other netcfg improvements. Trust me, it's a great feeling.

Previously: d-i retrospective (better written than the above & well worth a re-read)

(Non-Debian readers can stop reading now, I'm talking about so-called "orphaned packages" and not anything of real-world importance.)

In 2008 I stopped maintaining non-native packages in Debian. At the time I maintained a fair amount of stuff. It's interesting to see what happened to it after I gave it up, partly because some of the results seem so random and partly because some of what has happened seems to point at weaknesses in Debian.

First, the success stories. More than half of my packages are now being maintained by others: xaos, longrun, fbreader, liblinebreak, analog, xgalaga, znc, sysnews, metastore, bsdgames, uqm, oneko, kobodeluxe, archivemail, unclutter I still use much of this stuff, some only occasionally, and other daily, and am glad it's being kept alive. (It's surprising that someone still care about longrun.)

I was unhappy to have to NMU procmeter3 just before the release of Debian 6.0 to fix a trivial to debug RC bug that almost got it removed from the release. I hope that was just a bump in its road.

Also, splitvt is now maintained again after being orphaned a long time. I'm not sure if it makes sense to keep it in Debian, since screen can do the same thing, and it has a security history, but someone wants to, so that's fine.

Two packages are left on life support. I'm surprised nobody wants to maintain grepmail, unless we're all using notmuch or mairix now? And dgen is the best Sega emulator I know of.

Several games were not picked up by the games team, despite them showing some interest originally, and were removed: xtris, xjewel, xemeraldia, xbl Of those, xemeraldia in particular is a lot of fun, I'm surprised nobody cared to keep it. Also, the nestra Nintendo emulator was shipped with squeeze, but now is removed as it never got a maintainer. I don't know if there is a better NES emulator in Debian.

The intercal programming language was removed. Surprising. Debian does at least still have clc-intercal for all our pressing Intercal needs.

Finally, sparkline-php was removed today despite never having had any bugs, needing no maintenance, and being a suggests of ikiwiki, which is now more buggy (broken relationships, outdated docs) and less featureful in Debian.

I'm surprised to be on the porch hearing rushing water. I tend to think of up here as high and mostly dry, but not this time of year. Yesterday was such a soaking rain, very annoying at the time as I did chores and drove out from town. Now there are two little creeks here. That's a sound I've missed..

Pity that all the water is going to waste. I discovered the reason the large cistern is not filling up is simply because the pipe into it is not connected to the feeder pipe in the spring. It seems like a complete shambles really, with layer upon layer of pipes, all broken. I will have to wait until the water is down to dig and find out what's going on, and fix it.

In the last of the evening light today I got the house's two battery banks finally combined into one bank. I had planned this out long ago, and bought one long cable I'd need, so was surprised to find I needed two long cables. Had to slide batteries around like a big sokoban puzzle, and swap several cables to make it work. While I was away I'd charged up the bank that had gone unused most of the winter. So they were near equalized and the combination seems to have gone ok. I got through the lean part of the year with only half the batteries; there never seemed to be a good time to combine them. It remains to be seen if the solar panels can keep my increased capacity filled.

I hope this was only an early taste of spring. Would be nice to have some more icy weather so I can put off dealing with refrigeration a little while longer. I have my eye on a 12v/propane fridge.