tags/ubuntuzack's home pagehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/tags/ubuntu/zack's home pageikiwiki2012-10-04T11:41:16Zput some Debian salt in the Ubuntu charity marathonhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/10/put_some_Debian_salt_in_the_Ubuntu_charity_marathon/2012-10-04T11:41:16Z2012-10-03T10:08:46Z
<p>Fellow geeks of the <a href=
"http://www.jonobacon.org/2012/09/26/get-ready-for-the-24-hour-horsemen-marathon/">
Canonical community team</a> will be doing something pretty weird
this week. They're fund-raising for charity, for causes ranging
from environment to autism, from homeless support to kids
education, from poverty fight to water supplies. But that's not
weird. What's weird is that the fund-raising will culminate in a
24-hour work <a href="http://marathon.ubuntuonair.com/">marathon
stream live</a>, which will kick off tomorrow (Thursday) at
<a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?year=2012&month=10&day=4&hour=10&min=0&sec=0">
10:00 UTC</a>.</p>
<p>As I like charity, and as I like contributing to Free Software,
I gladly accepted to rely here a <strong>challenge to the Debian
community</strong> by one of the marathon "horsemen", Michael
Hall:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>if Michael receives at least <strong>5 Debian-tagged
donations</strong> for the cause he has chosen to support (<a href=
"http://autismresearchtrust.org/">Autism Research Trust</a> -
<a href=
"http://www.justgiving.com/mhall119/Donate"><strong>donate</strong></a>),
he'll do his marathon day wearing a <strong>Debian t-shirt</strong>
(which apparently is also the first Free Software t-shirt he has
ever owned).</p>
<p>I've already donated, so that makes only 4 donations to go to
add some Debian promotion salt to an Ubuntu marathon <img src=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/smileys/smile.png" alt=":-)" /> . To "tag" your donation as
originating from the Debian community, just leave a message
containing the word "debian" at the end of the donation
process.</p>
<p>The work Michael will be doing tomorrow is not entirely
Debian-specific, but Michael is Canonical's responsible for
relationship with upstream. I've worked with him in the past on a
range of topics, and I can testify that part of his work is
generally useful to Debian.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Raising the stakes, Nick Skaggs has decided to propose a similar
challenge:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>for <strong>every 5 Debian-tagged donations</strong> to Nick's
cause (<a href="http://www.wateraid.org/">WaterAid</a> - <a href=
"http://www.justgiving.com/nicholasskaggs/Donate"><strong>donate</strong></a>),
Nick will <strong>write a manpage</strong> for a Debian <a href=
"http://qa.debian.org/man-pages.html">package that is in dire need
of one</a>.</p>
<p>As above, just mention "debian" in your post-donation message to
tag your donation as originating from the Debian community.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Wanna take the challenge?</p>
<p>And how about the other 4 horsemen? No challenges to the Debian
community? Feel free to leave a comment and I'll raise the stakes
even more, updating the list above.</p>
<p><strong>Update 4/10/2012, 13:35 +0200:</strong> Daniel Holbach
added his own challenge to the Debian community:</p>
<ul>
<li>for <strong>every Debian-tagged donation</strong> to Daniel's
cause (<a href=
"http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/2012/09/community-team-marathon-why-oxfam/">Oxfam</a>
- <a href=
"http://www.justgiving.com/dholbach/Donate"><strong>donate</strong></a>),
Daniel will <strong>(triage and) forward a patch</strong> from
Ubuntu to the Debian BTS.</li>
</ul>
not a catchy headlinehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/03/not_a_catchy_headline/2012-03-14T13:14:16Z2012-03-14T12:46:03Z
<p>As <a href="http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1072">we're
doing trends today</a>, I got curious about Debian. I don't
particularly care about popularity contests other than <a href=
"http://popcon.debian.org">popcon</a>, and Debian choices surely
aren't driven by them. But hey, curiosity is curiosity, right?</p>
<p>So, here are today's w3techs <a href=
"http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux">trends</a>
for websites using GNU/Linux, <strong>with all lines
shown</strong>:</p>
<div class="center"><a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/03/not_a_catchy_headline/trends.png"><img src="http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/03/not_a_catchy_headline/trends.png"
width="900" height="500" alt=
"Debian: 30%; CentOS: 28,9%; Ubuntu: 18,4%; Red Hat: 12,2%; Fedora: 5%; SuSE: 3%; Gentoo: 1,2%"
title=
"Debian: 30%; CentOS: 28,9%; Ubuntu: 18,4%; Red Hat: 12,2%; Fedora: 5%; SuSE: 3%; Gentoo: 1,2%"
class="img" /></a></div>
<p><small>(As thou shall always read methodologies before stats,
here is the <a href="http://w3techs.com/technologies">technologies
overview page</a>.)</small></p>
<p><strong>Debian is the top entrant with 30% of the
websites</strong> using GNU/Linux. What I find interesting is that
Debian has jumped at first place in January 2012, significantly
after the release of our current stable release, Squeeze, that
dates back to February 2011.</p>
<p>It is also interesting to see community distros (Debian and
CentOS) starkly ahead of commercially backed distros. That is what
I find most fascinating about our projects. Whether that will
remain the case or not is, for me, one of the big questions of the
decade for the <strong>self-determination of Free Software
communities</strong>.</p>
on the influence of Debian and derivativeshttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/03/on_the_influence_of_Debian_and_derivatives/2011-03-11T12:21:31Z2011-03-06T21:49:44Z
<h1>Counting derivatives</h1>
<p>In the news, there's an <a href=
"http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3926941/Linux-Leaders-Debian-and-Ubuntu-Derivative-Distros.htm">
article</a> by Bruce Byfield discussing the influence of Debian and
its (transitive) derivatives on the ecosystem of GNU/Linux
distributions: <em><a href=
"http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3926941/Linux-Leaders-Debian-and-Ubuntu-Derivative-Distros.htm">
Linux Leaders: Debian and Ubuntu Derivative Distros</a></em>.</p>
<p>The article is a sort of review of what you can find in the vast
ecosystem of distributions rooted at Debian: from embedded to
supercomputer distro, from netbook to scientific computing distros.
The articles cites the Debian <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DerivativesFrontDesk">derivatives front
desk</a> and is a study similar to what we might tackle with the
<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census">derivatives
census</a> by Paul Wise. (By the way: did you check if your
favorite Debian derivative is already in? No? Do it!)</p>
<p>With this article, Bruce has made me quite a favor in harvesting
<a href="http://www.distrowatch.com">distrowatch</a> to refresh the
figures about the number of derivatives that I often use in
speeches. The need of doing that has been polluting my LaTeX "%
TODO" comments for a while now… Here they are:</p>
<ul>
<li>324 active distributions</li>
<li>129 of them are (directly or transitively) based on Debian</li>
<li>75 of the latter class are (directly) based on Ubuntu, i.e.
transitively based on Debian</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: update figures that Bruce
misinterpreted; <a href=
"http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=All&origin=All&basedon=All&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=All&status=Active">
live data</a> are available, thanks to Loris (see comments) for
noticing</p>
Kuhn on Debian, Ubuntu, and the culture of freedomhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/01/kuhn_on_debian_ubuntu_and_the_culture_of_freedom/2010-01-17T10:23:27Z2010-01-16T16:46:17Z
<h1>The culture of freedom lies in the details</h1>
<p>Here is an <a href=
"http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/01/14/ubuntu-debian.html">interesting
blog post</a> by <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley%20Kuhn">Bradley Kuhn</a>
about Ubuntu, Debian, and (warning: my interpretation ahead) the
culture of freedom.</p>
<p>While reading it, I had kinda moment of truth, because just
yesterday I was musing with Mehdi and Lucas on the fact that Debian
is basically the only remaining distribution among the mainstream
ones (if that means something) that is <strong>free from the ground
up</strong>, including its infrastructure. We "just" seek hardware
via <a href="http://www.debian.org/donations">donations</a> and
then we run, thanks to the amazing work of <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DSA">DSA</a>, our own <strong>free
infrastructure</strong> on top of it.</p>
<p>Let's cherish this value!</p>
<p><small>Thanks to <a href="http://www.dicosmo.org">Roberto Di
Cosmo</a> for the pointer to Bradley's post.</small></p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: there's <a href=
"https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2010-January/029976.html">
a thread</a> on the ubuntu-devel mailing list about Bradley's
post.</p>
on mail addresses and upload rightshttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2009/11/on_mail_addresses_and_upload_rights/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2009-11-09T18:04:25Z
<h2>1</h2>
<p>I posted like 3 o 4 messages to an Ubuntu mailing list in my
life; it happened when they discussed <a href=
"http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/">DEP-3</a>, which I think can
help in syncing patches between the 2 distros (or, if you want, in
removing one more excuse for not doing that).</p>
<p>When I did that, I posted with my <code>@debian.org</code>
address.</p>
<p>If I have upload rights to Ubuntu, I would certainly use my
<code>@debian.org</code> address, to show to the Ubuntu community
where I come from.</p>
<p>Now, why then should a <code>@ubuntu.com</code> guy do anything
different when uploading to Debian, no matter which rights he has
earned in the (Debian) project? Or better, sure he can do it
differently, but why should we <em>ask</em> he to do that?</p>
<h2>2</h2>
<p>DDs have different "philosophies" about which address they use
in <code>Maintainer</code>/<code>Uploaders</code> fields: some of
them consistently use <code>@debian.org</code> address in every
package they (co-)maintain; some other use some of their non-Debian
addresses. Shouldn't the latter choice be completely orthogonal to
whether they have a <code>@ubuntu.com</code> address?</p>
<h2>3</h2>
<p>As Gaudenz has shown in his master thesis (there's <a href=
"https://penta.debconf.org/dc9_schedule/events/456.en.html">a very
nice DC9 talk</a> about that), Debian has surely lost a lot of
"contributors" (people that interact on lists, BTS, ...) in favor
of Ubuntu, but has not lost "uploaders" (Gaudenz' names were
actually different, but I can't remember them and the slides are in
German, which I can't read :-/). In fact, there is a flow of people
which become uploaders to Debian, that come from Ubuntu; that flow
most likely compensates the decrease in the number of Debian
contributors which become uploaders. So, let's face it, we will
have at least for a while people coming from Ubuntu uploading to
our archive, possibly/hopefully because they like more our free
ideals and democratic project management.</p>
<p>These are my <em>personal</em> reasons for finding <a href=
"http://sandrotosi.blogspot.com/2009/11/things-that-make-me-angry.html">
some rants</a> pointless.</p>
<p>(But still, that rant finally gave me the opportunity to mention
Gaudenz's work, which I've found pretty impressive!)</p>
debian in ubuntu storyhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/10/debian_in_ubuntu_story/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2007-10-24T17:42:38Z
<h1>Debian in Ubuntu story: bug fixed</h1>
<p><a href=
"https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/+bug/154274">The bug</a>
<a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/10/debian_on_ubuntu_com_just_a_bug/">I've
reported</a> <a href=
"http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/debian">has been
fixed</a>.</p>
<p>Thanks to Matthew East, Matthew Nuzum, and all the other
(constructive) collaborators who have followed up in the bug
log.</p>
debian on ubuntu com just a bughttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/10/debian_on_ubuntu_com_just_a_bug/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2007-10-19T09:40:20Z
<h1>No "debian" on ubuntu.com: undoubtfully a bug!</h1>
<p>The mention that <a href=
"http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=257">the word "Debian" does
not appear in the recent announce about Gutsy on the ubuntu.com
website</a> by <a href=
"http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog">Lucas</a> reminded me
something. Indeed, though <a href=
"http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2007/10/18#giving-credit">I'm yet
another DD that so far has never played the ubuntu bashing
game</a>, I remember having in the past tried to find the word
"debian" on the <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com">ubuntu
website</a>.</p>
<p>At the time of writing, using the site search on ubuntu.com,
results in <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/search/node/debian">just
a few hits</a>, all of them are marginal: OpenOffice.org
maintenance, the fact that Canonical employees are part of Debian,
and an announcement as old as Ubuntu 5.04. What I want to see there
is just a tiny teeny sentence that explain where a huge deal of
Ubuntu packages come from and a mention of all the wonderful
collaborative maintenance projects in which DDs and Canonical
employees (or even MOTUs) work together to build great
packages.</p>
<p>So I wondered that it was probably a fault of mine: I wasn't
looking in the right place of the website. Let's try with <a href=
"http://www.ubuntu.com/debian">http://www.ubuntu.com/debian</a>,
since the ubuntu website is CMS/Wiki based it seems like a good
attempt, doesn't it? But no luck: "Sorry, the page you are looking
for was not found".</p>
<p>But then, down in the page, I saw the root of the problem:
"please consider <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/+filebug">reporting this
problem as a bug</a>". It is obvious now: it's simply a bug in the
website! Let's point the maintainers to it ...</p>
<p>As a careful bug reporter I first searched to check whether the
bug was already reported, according to <a href=
"https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/+bugs?field.searchtext=debian&orderby=-importance&search=Search&field.status%253Alist=NEW&field.status%253Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITH_RESPONSE&field.status%253Alist=CONFIRMED&field.status%253Alist=TRIAGED&field.status%253Alist=INPROGRESS&field.status%253Alist=FIXCOMMITTED&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch=&field.has_no_package=">
this search</a> it hasn't (though now that you're clicking on it
you're probably seeing something, when I did I got "No results for
search debian").</p>
<p>So let's report the bug, the result is <a href=
"https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/+bug/154274">bug #154274
on launchpad</a>. Let's see what will happen to it.</p>
<p><em>Update</em>: the reply on launchpad was really fast.
<a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/+bug/154274/comments/2">
I've followed up</a> with what I think should be mentioned on the
ubuntu website regarding Debian. Feel free to help out with your
comments in <a href=
"https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/+bug/154274">the
launchpad entry</a>.</p>