vendredi 27 octobre 2006

Drupal migration

I've just moved the whole website to Drupal. Just try it, you'll understant what I mean! ;-)

jeudi 3 août 2006

Debian packages upload

Yesterday, I uploaded libcommons-collection3-java to add the testframework jar (bug#268223). I investigate the security alert for tomcat5 (CVE2006-3835) as mentioned by Alec Berryman in bug#380361. Alec also filed this bug for tomcat5.5 but I was not able to reproduce the attack with the releases of tomcat in Debian. I filed a removal bug for libgnujaxp-java (bug#381014) which is in GNU-Classpath for a long time now. I uploaded a new upstream of libapache(2)-mod-jk (bug#338158).


Today, I uploaded libmsv-xsdlib-java (the package was prepared by Eric Lavarde, but it was refused by ftpmasters because of the license) to non-free and solved the FTBFS of libjaxp1.3-java reported by Andreas Jochens (bug#379530).


Except the security alert I closed because I think they were not affected releases of tomcat in Debian, I did not investigate more bugs of tomcat. But I'll need it for my day-time and extra jobs so I hope I'll be working on it after augustus 15.


Update:


I'm trying to fix argouml in Debian and that's a huge job (well, the whole afternoon!)!



  1. Update libtoolbar-java (new upstream + comment issue#6);

  2. Update libswidgets-java (new upstream + comment issue#1);

  3. Downgrade libgef-java to match ArgoUML development;

  4. Update ArgoUML from 0.19.6 to 0.22.beta3 (new upstream + open issue#4391 and issue#4392). The main developer of ArgoUML said in the mailing list that this release will not be that much different to the final release and the new upstream upload (plus some corrections in the package) will permit to close some bugs: bug#342200, bug#217878, bug#335294, bug#353464, bug#368244, bug#289241.


Even with all this work, argouml does not want to start on my laptop. It's a problem loading the 'models'. I suspect a problem with the new mdr-model that I do not build because of dependencies not documented and not DFSG free.


So I uploaded every package except argouml. I updated the subversion repository so the work is not lost and I'll review the problem as soon as possible. You can find a copy of the generated package at my Debian's webspace (click on the argouml directory).

mardi 1 août 2006

New upstreams...

I've just upload new upstream (new for Debian, not really brand new! ;-)) of libgnucrypto-java, libcommons-httpclient-java. The first upload will solve the libjessie-java FTBFS. I'll work on new upstream of libcommons-net-java, then, I'll track down Tomcat5 and Tomcat5.5 bugs.

jeudi 20 juillet 2006

Free Software in education

On July 10 my trainees started a project on Sourceforge called bibliotheque.


The training is about web development (Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, SQL) and the whole six month day time courses, they use Debian GNU/Linux (guess why ;-)) (well, some installed Ubuntu on their laptop).


The last big exercice is often a pain because they are looking for a job and they have a lot of interviews. So we decided the last project to be team oriented.


I have the idea to publish it on Sourceforge so they can learn all how to use Bug tracker, Subversion tools the way we do in Free Software. Also, it's amazing to see the enthousiasme of the trainees about a project that is published. Even those who are not 'so good coders' did a lot of things like documentation, logos, maintaining the MediaWiki website (french).


The web application they are doing is made with tools they'll use in companies: Struts, Hibernate; they also use patterns like DAO, MVC; and they'll try to integrate AJAX in the application. Congratulation to this group.

Everybody wants to open source...

It's strange to follow state of minds of big companies about open source (they rarely speak about Free Software but that's another story;-)). Dalibor Topic, Mark Wielaard and all friends from GNU Classpath spent a lot of time talking with Sun to try to open source Java (or even just be able to get the tools to make open source java virtual machines and API). They are some moves in that direction and people like Tom Marble is working hard to make Sun's JDK license DFSG compatible and integrate Sun's JDK in the Debian distribution. Robert Brewin, co-CTO of Sun Microsystems' software group, said: "I believe that we will have components of Java released into open source within the year," meaning by next June, Brewin said. "I think [release of] the whole thing will take a little bit longer." One more step.


Another amazing interview is the one of David Kaefer, director of Business Development, Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft who called the open source software movement a "very powerful force in the industry." He also wants us to believe that Microsoft will be more and more open... Wait and See ;-)

mardi 28 février 2006

FOSDEM 2006

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it's a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath's presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there.


Saturday (25th February 2006)


RMS


Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can't understand all the GPL3 changes but I'll try to read some more articles about it.


Putting 'Free' into JFreeChart


The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I'd like to find some charts to do just to use it!


Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development


Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the "Don't build automatically" hack. Everything should be on the Classpath's wiki.


Xen


A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn't know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing!


Sunday (26th February 2006)


I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I'm sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway.


Women in Free Software


I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing :-D. So maybe I'd better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help.


Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port


After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don't know *BSD... I'm sorry but I don't know more. And I still don't know the difference with Linux and don't know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port?


Debian-Java Meeting


After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom... and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM -- the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don't understant these thing :-D


During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian's talk.


Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)... I'll send an email about the meeting, don't worry ;-)


Future of Classpath


It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It's a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It's wonderful. Maybe it's the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the 'Classpath' (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect.


Then came the camera... A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny ;-) I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy ;-), nobody tells me 100 times I'm sexy ;-)). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works.


Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh


Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I'm not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses.


Back!


I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don't know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on... I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)... we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday.


I'll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I'll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

First Xen experience

After the Xen presentation at the FOSDEM, I did want to test this wonderful concept. I google around and found a very good page: http://julien.danjou.info/xen.html. I did not read all the document and install and start configuring everything. The first problem was network. It was hard to know exactly what was wrong because the machine is on a NAT, behind a firewall and it's a friend/co-worker who manage it and he really block everything! :-)


I went to OTFC#debian-xen trying to find some help and chatted with 'jd_'... the author of the link above. Some of the best mistake where not configuring /etc/fstab, bad MAC Address, and change the tty1 entry with 'console' in /etc/inittab. Julien also gave me another very good documentation in french: http://wiki.gcu.info/doku.php?id=linux:xen.


The Xen experience is smashing! You have two independant Debian system (with two different IP's) on the same box! Maybe the experienced admins will laugh reading these lines, but I'm very impressed by my Xen experience.


Julien also invited me for a dinner on a wendsday evening because he said "I'm a winner" :-D.


Many thanks Julien.

vendredi 10 février 2006

TopDev 2006

Yannick Boogaerts, un de mes collègues à l'Université de Liège et moi avons participé au concours de développement Top Dev One. Le concours a réuni 771 participants venant de 65 pays. Nous terminons à la première place.

mercredi 18 janvier 2006

Charva 1.1.1 in Debian... move to main!

Great news! I upgrade charva (a Java Windowing Toolkit for Text Terminals) to the latest 1.1.1 release and it compiles and runs with kaffe! Just apt-get install libcharva1-java (when it'll be available because the move to main can take some days) and you'll be able to compile the examples:



$ cd /usr/share/doc/libcharva1-java/

$ ecj-gcj -nowarn -classpath /usr/share/java/charva1.jar -d /tmp/ examples/charva/* examples/java/*

$ cd /tmp

$ kaffe -classpath .:/usr/share/java/charva1.jar example.java.AppFrame





And the same in terminal mode:

$ kaffe -classpath .:/usr/share/java/charva1.jar example.charva.AppFrame

dimanche 1 janvier 2006

Maven2 tutorial

I found this tutorial of Maven2 today. I'll read it and maybe change my point of view about Maven in Debian. Maven2 could be a very good application to build projects but at the moment, I'm not sure we should use it to build Debian package... Maybe I'll change my mind after the reading.

IBM to release Java6 (early release)

Sun is now going Open Source for their JDK and that's a very good thing. A lot of people participate in this and I enjoyed when Mark and Dalibor called me to share the news. I thank every people who worked on open sourcing Java but it's not the point here.

The first thing that makes me not so happy was that Sun has no plan for PowerPC (and I can understand, Apple does not use it no more and it's an IBM product!).

The second thing is IBM not announcing their SDK to be open source. IBM also does a lot of things in FLOOS, in Java, IBM is behind projects like Eclipse or Harmony. But there is nothing for Linux on PowerPC at Harmony: platforms; downloads.

IBM release Java 6 (I read it on developers.Slashdot.org) but IBM fails at open sourcing their Java. It's really strange (in my point of view) and I'm sure there is a lot of employee at IBM who are FLOOS advocate and Java devs and are also disapointed because they maybe feel like IBM does not recognize the excellent work they are doing.

I really hope IBM is going Open Source with their SDK... or they will help Harmony for Linux/PPC.