Backports and some moments of joy

Aug. 6, 2011

Good evening everybody.

A month after proposing the backport to Debian Squeeze of audacious 2.4.4, when I was starting to think it won’t be accepted in the backports, I received 3 mails from Kilian Krause, who wants to sponsor the packages (audacious, audacious-plugins and libmowgli).

I was very surprised and so happy because this backport is very different from the nginx backport I made some months ago (and I’m working with the maintainers to keep the backport up to date, and to synchronise work).

As some people know, I use nginx as a daily base, it’s installed on the server which serves this website, I used to make custom packages for my work (with adding some third party modules), so backporting nginx and contributing to it was barely normal.

But for audacious, it’s completely different. Mid June, on the backport mailing list, somebody (rent0n) requested a backport of audacious, I simply answered to the mail saying I’ve added the maintainers in CC and that I think we might wait until the 2.5.1 gets in unstable, to make the backport. Few days later, no answer from the maitainers, so I wanted to try to make the backport, in case it’s not possible. So it was possible, but, as a first try, I didn’t wanted to change the needed versions of the build dependencies, so it was a raw backport, but I had to recompile barely the whole world (it was about 10-15 packages). 2 days later, I cleaned the package, so I just needed to backport the libmowgli. Then, the requester tested it, was happy, and for me, that was all, I just asked for anybody to review it and upload. Actually, I was not thinking about official inclusion, and so I didn’t upload the package to mentors.debian.net. So then, I leaved for 10 days, to go on holidays, and I forgot about the package, but not rent0n, which was very enthousiast, and sent me a mail about upload the packages to mentors, so I did it, because I thought maybe somebody will be interested about this package.

One month later, the package was sponsored, and now it’s waiting the ultimate validation.

So it’s the second time I get a backport sponsored and uploaded. Strangely, it feels the same as if it was the first time. Some excitation about the next steps, then I will regularily check the buildd status, and I will be divised into 2 feelings. The first being the relief, this work is done, so all the moments passed working on it are just memories. The second being the joy, as people think my work is good enough to be included in the official backport repository.

Also, for every package I backport, I subscribe to the qa page, in order to receive notifications about bugs, updates, and everything related to the package.

Now, some news about the DDB.

Few days ago, I decided to remove all references to the chromium backport, as I was unable to maintain it, and it was not clean at all. Because of this, I may create a “dev” component for the DDB, but for the moment, it’s not decided.

Also, I updated the nginx backport to the version 1.1.0, it’s also uploaded to mentors, but will have to wait at least a week, to have it uploaded.

That’s all folks !