Archive for the 'debian' Category

Many have commented on the event.

As I noted in a reply to Romain Beauxis's post, the only reason Google was the default search engine in Ubuntu, and is still in other distros is because Mozilla has a revenue deal with Google. Which means that actually, Mozilla might be getting money from Debian, Ubuntu and other distros' users actions on the Google search engine. (maybe not from Debian, though, because of the search url including iceweasel instead of firefox). Now, at least, Ubuntu will be the one getting the money.

One has to know that these revenue deals probably don't cost a dime to Google and Microsoft (through Yahoo), because they may be "transferring" revenue they get from the extra advertising revenue they can get from these users being using their search engine as default.

Anyways, much more interesting to know is how Google is going to react on other services: some core functionalities of Firefox (geolocation, safe browsing) are based on Google services. These are actually a possible problem for Debian, depending on the agreement between Mozilla and Google, and I have yet to address the RC bug I filed on my own package about these.

Now, since Google is going to get less advertising revenue from Ubuntu users in favour of one of its competitor, why should they provide the geolocation and safe browsing to these users ?

I've spent a few hours going through all the unclassified important bugs assigned to iceweasel. This resulted in

• 6 confirmed bugs,
• 16 where the reporter is asked for something,
• a few merged,
• another few reassigned to other packages,
• and around 50 bugs closed.

In the closed bugs, there were several kind of bugs:

• the bug log shows that the bug eventually disappeared or was not a bug, but the bug was still opened,
• the bug has been known to be fixed for a while,
• the reporter is unreachable and the bug is unreproducible,
• the bug has been spammed by several different and unrelated "me too"s, leading the bug to being a huge mess where you don't know what was the problem to begin with (there were 2 such bugs, if I recall correctly), in which case I closed the bug, copying everybody and inviting to file individual bugs after confirming with newer versions.
• not a bug at all.

It will feel good when it will be visible on the bug graph.

Still 500+ to go... *sigh*

Who wants to jump on the bandwagon ? ;)

Iceape 2.0 is going to hit unstable in a few days, and as such, the few packages that are only compatible with Iceape 1.x will stop working. I therefore asked for removal of cascades, checky and tabextensions, 3 packages I've been maintaining for a little while.

Actually, 2 of them are my two very first Debian packages: cascades and checky. A page is turned.

Some rant, others don't. I'm more with Zack, here, though there has been one @ubuntu maintainer that puzzled me: ubuntu-mozillateam@lists.ubuntu.com.

I'm still wondering how I should be taking it.

I finally started the xulrunner 1.9.1 transition in unstable, and uploaded Iceweasel 3.5.3 there.

One of the nice additions to the latest xulrunner (which has actually been in experimental for a couple weeks) is a dh_xulrunner script that adds the proper xulrunner package to shlibs:Depends, which means we are getting nearer to being able to handle xulrunner transitions with binNMUs only. We are still far from it, but it is a step closer. At least, transitions should get a bit easier. The way it works is very hackish, but it apparently works well enough for the packages that currently depend on xulrunner-dev. I also added a "xulrunner" dh sequence, for the dh users.

Anyways, as a side effect of the starting transition, I ended up fixing 4 RC bugs on a single package:

• Outdated dependencies: rebuilding is enough to get the proper dependencies
• A segmentation fault at startup that I guess happened because the package didn't depend on xulrunner-1.9. With the transition patch, it does depend on xulrunner-1.9.1, now.
• Missing build dependencies
• Oudated build dependencies

Another package with 3 RC bugs is impacted by this transition, but it looks like a good candidate for removal. That's 7 RC bugs adressed by this transition, while not directly related to xulrunner.

Hi lazyweb,

I'm wondering if there a lot of demand for such a feature, being to be able to install 2 (or more) major releases of iceweasel on the same computer. If there is a strong demand, I may consider allowing it. Please reply in the comments on this blog with your feelings, for or against the implementation of this co-installability.

Thanks.

PS: you may also forward this query to other sites and send people back here to leave their opinion.

Adnan, for some reason, your post that is present on planet debian doesn't appear on your blog at the moment (Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.). I would have commented there if that were possible. Anyways, I will give my opinion here, with different hats on.

(User hat on) The idea to have a similar start page on the different browsers is a nice idea.

(Web designed hat on) Some implementation details on your mockup are discussable, most notably the design in pixels (which doesn't help for the vision impaired needing big fonts), the list of fonts to be used, and the border being part of the background image. Also, considering the targetted browsers, SVG could be a nice addition.

(Iceweasel, Xulrunner and WebKit maintainer hat on) The content at the bottom suggests the page is intended to be put online somewhere. Browsers start page shouldn't require an internet connexion.
There should also be space for browser-specific icon and text. I'd really like to keep specific links, such as to bug reports and README.Debian (though the latter should really be htmlized). Speaking of these links, another one should be added some day in the future, to provide a link to a page explaining how users can help the maintainers (thanks to whoever came up with this idea during my BoF at DebConf).

I landed roughly an hour ago and am in a taxi on my way back home.

DebConf 9 has been an awesome experience for me. It was actually my very first attendance to a DebConf ever, and I have been please to meet all these people from all around the world (litterally). Putting more than a hackergotchi on so many names I have known for years was great, too. I hope to be able to meet you again in the future.

DebConf 9 has also been a quite productive week for me, being able to allocate some time to things I wanted to do for a long while. And to tackle some bugs, too. You can expect to see more coming in the next weeks, since some of this work is under progress and will need some more to be done to be released in the wild.

DebConf is not only the hacklabs, so I also attended quite a lot of various talks and BoFs, plus some extra activities, too.

We also got some interesting ideas from people attending our (Rene and I) BoF to hopefully get some more people involved in the Mozilla packaging, one of which is to keep the packages orphaned until the team gets enough people. So expect the packages to keep being orphaned, though still technically maintained, and some other things to come in Iceweasel.

Another great happening from DebConf 9 is that Anibal introduced me a venezuelian guy (hi Antonio) who is interested in helping out on Mozilla packages, so we now have a bigger team ! Welcome Antonio !

To conclude, I'd like to give many thanks to all the people I have met and whom I spent some great time with. See you soon, I hope.

Typing this text on a (non-openmoko-but-android) phone took so much time that I am now at home and finished to type on my laptop...

Oh, I forgot. This time, my luggage was in the same plane as me ;)

My luggage has arrived today (well, technically, yesterday), during the day trip. We are at Debconf day 4, I arrived on day 0, I'm leaving on day 8, that's what we can call effectiveness...

I won't have to wash my underwear everyday anymore, and you won't be seeing me in jeans and same teeshirts (the debconf one everybody got and the apt-get install anarchy I bought on arrival) !

I got to Cáceres for my first Debconf... without my luggage. Somehow, it wasn't in the plane I took to Madrid, so it is somewhere... not with me. According to Air Europe, it is now in Madrid and should be sent here tomorrow.

I already got a Debian T-shirt to alleviate part of the issue.

PS: damn it's hot in those rooms.

Update: that'll be arriving tomorrow morning, that is, the day after tomorrow from the original post