Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Frank Becker sucks. How dare he create such an addicting game like Critical Mass? Doesn't he know that I don't have the time to waste countless hours playing games? Whaaa...

I participated in my first Debian Bug Squashing Party (BSP) this weekend (August, 5th - 7th). The goal of such (real or virtual) "parties" is to reduce the number of release-critical bugs in Debian. For more details, see Squashing Release-Critical Bugs in Debian: A Primer.

I fixed a few simple FTBFS (Fails To Build From Source) bugs (mostly by applying existing patches from the BTS) in xlife, mmv, xcal, and dansguardian (I messed up a bit with dansguardian, sorry).

It was mostly a lot of fun, and I can now proudly proclaim that I helped to get out the next stable release faster ;-)

As of today, I have adopted the bfbtester Debian package (a tool to perform quick, proactive, security checks of binary programs). I have already blogged about bfbtester in the past, and used it recently to find a security-related bug in a setuid package (which is hard to exploit, though).

I have uploaded an updated bfbtester package to unstable a few minutes ago. It should reach your favorite mirror, soon.

A lot of people seem to like the idea of a Debian GNU/OpenSolaris project. Alvaro Lopez started the discussion, and lots of people responded (mostly positive). Among them are Tim Bray (Sun) and Ian Murdock (founder of Debian).

The problem is (as you would have expected) the license of OpenSolaris (the CDDL). According to another blog post by Alvaro Lopez, people on the debian-legal mailinglist seem to consider the license non-free.

Now, if Sun would choose a proper license or dual-license OpenSolaris (CDDL + GPL or something), things would look mighty different, I guess...

(via Ian Murdock)

The Drupal website has been down for two days now. They haven't received a response from support and hence cannot fix it (sounds familiar to me).

On the long run, Drupal will migrate to the Open Source Lab (OSL) which offers lots of services and already hosts many popular Open Source projects like Mozilla, Apache, and Debian.

To be able to do this, they need a new server (free rack space and bandwidth are provided by OSL) for which they are seeking donations now.
It's also planned to create a non-profit organization which will hold the funds, so the donations will be tax-deductible...