RCBW - #22

With a mini-rush in the week-end, I'm now back on track to the weekly schedule of RCBW; here are this week's squashes:

Debian bug #565274 - tex4ht - test and close bug fixed by recent binNMU
Debian bug #553553 - phpsysinfo - fix dir-or-file-in-var-www, based on a patch by Mats Erik Andersson
Debian bug #553496 - doc-central - fix dir-or-file-in-var-www, sponsor NMU by Mats Erik Andersson
Debian bug #559821 - libtunepimp - fix libltdl CVE (bonus fix Debian bug #476378), patches by Yavor Doganov
Debian bug #568982 - sqldeveloper-package - port from dos2unix to fromdos, patch by Michael Musenbrock
Debian bug #534721 - libhpricot-ruby1.8 - error in printing tags to stdout (fixed upstream in a version already in Debian)
Debian bug #564680 - gnugk - rebuild against firebird 2.1, as requested by Damyan Ivanov (important bug blocking RC Debian bug #549062)

About this week highlights:

In his latest RC-bug statistics, Tolimar has pointed to the RCBW description as inspiring. That's good, I hope more and more people can find it inspiring (in fact, that's why I wrote it). A handful of people doing RCBW is pointless, unless as a side-effect we manage to change the culture of our project in order to be more collaborative on how we reach a release.
I've been amazed by how many RC bugs are "stuck" just because no one took care of establishing communication among the appropriate people. That of course happens when the maintainer of the bug has been unresponsive, but some investigations of the bug is usually enough to make the appropriate people (upstream, porters, related package maintainers, ...) aware of it ... and then the bug will "mature" all alone.
Josselin has announced the Debian/GNOME bug weekend for the next weekend (27-28/02/2010): an initiative to collaboratively triage GNOME-related bugs in Debian. For large-enough packages (and GNOME fits that definition for quite some different notions of "large"), such efforts are as badly needed as RC squashing: if you liked RCBW, you can't miss the GNOME bug weekend