This Saturday we are celebrating Software Freedom Day, and those of us who participate in Debian Women are going to celebrate by holding 3 different IRC activities:

• Welcoming new people to the project. For this we are opening a new channel on irc.oftc.net: #debian-women-new, so if you or someone you know might be interested in Debian Women, this Saturday is the day to turn up. We will have a friendly atmosphere where you can get to know and participate in the project.
• Helping people out. This is aimed for people who have questions regarding technical stuff, like packaging, or any other issue regarding Debian. This will be done at #debian-women, also at irc.oftc.net
• Bug Squashing. Since bugs keep popping up, and BSPs are never enough, we will be celbrating by squashing yet some more bugs. This will be coordinated at #debian-bugs, like all the other BSPs.

Yesterday, I finally got Keybuck's attention on my diagrams, and on the bug that they document (that if postrm fails, the package state is still "Installed"). After he finally believed me, both he and Ian Jackson (and I believe even Wichert Ackerman) started to review the code and discovered that this bug had been present in dpkg since it started, and they fixed it!

Now I'm known as the girl who broke dpkg by looking at it too hard :) And yes, I'll need to redo the diagrams, once the fixed package is uploaded, and hopefully I'll take the opportunity to add some other diagram, like a Conflicts or Replaces one.

Some time ago, Lars had proposed throwing a pancake party himself, and I brought 5 kilos of dulce de leche with me, specially for that. Then he couldn't do it, but I had this inhuman amount of dulce de leche with me, so I decided to through the pancake party anyway.

With the help of those who brought wafflers, pans, mixers and all the other stuff, we managed to use 6 liters of milk, 35 eggs, 2 kilos of flour, and more than 1 kilo of dulce de leche.

It was quite a nice party, where not just us, but many others got to participate. I think we did have a lot of fun. Thanks to Aschwin, David, Mattias, Arto, Peter, Martin, Sebas and Maxy for making this happen and be so so cool.

However, it turns out that I didn't estimate the amount of dulce de leche to be used that well, and I still have inhuman amounts it, so I need to think up what to do with the rest of it. Ideas welcomed :)

Yesterday I spent about 3 hours assigning rooms for the people that will be attending Debconf5. It took me quite more than what I expected, but I'm happy with the results up to now

My main criteria is grouping people by country, because even though it's nice to be with people of all around the world during the conference, I guess that it's more comfortable to share the room with people that speak your same language. However, it's not the case for everyone, for example, there's a special room for the women of Debian-Women

I'll be publishing the first draft in the next days, if anyone has any special requests (like asking to be with someone, or asking not to be with someone), it's best if they send those requests to me now, before I finish this up.

The order in which maintainer scripts are called, and the parameters they receive is documented in the Policy, and yet it's really hard to follow the intrincate consequences of one of the scripts failing to execute correctly.

Aiming to understand all this better, I started playing with a dummy package whose maintainer scripts told me which script and with which paramaters was being called and allowed me to state if it was going to succeed or not.

The result of this tests is the pseudo-tutorial published at the Debian-Women site. The upgrade diagram is specially interesting, since it's really complicated and has lots of different outcomes.

As one of the last steps in my T&S application, I've made a new package of UISP (for which I had to first do a new upstream release). Version 20050207 of UISP is temporarily available here, and will hopefully be uploaded to Debian soon.

Continuing with my Evolution work, the number of bugs is now 295, almost 70 bugs less than a week ago (and it's only 260 if you exclude woody and merged bugs). This makes me happy :). I've finished pinging, now it's time for some fixing.

In an effort to make Debian a better distribution to the end user, I'm trying to clean Evolution of some bugs. The problem was that Evolution had 361 bugs, many of them already fixed in upgrades, many not even bugs, so it is difficult to find the real ones that need attention.

So, as a first step, I'm pinging all the old bugs in the BTS, asking if it's still reproduceable. The number of bugs has already gone down to 325, in 3 days.

When I'm finished pinging, the most difficult part comes: fixing and patching. Any help is appreciated, of course.

I've been going through my T&S questions and tasks. I'm done with the questions by now, and I'm dedicating almost all my spare time to the pending tasks.

The most interesting part, of course, is solving RC bugs. I spent almost the whole weekend working on a meld/libglade2 bug: 290811. The bug is due to the fact that the GTK toolbar does not allow the use of the old API and the new API at the same time; and while meld still uses the old API, libglade2-0 has updated to the new API, and thus the program does not work.

I've made a patch for libglade2, that regresses the changes regarding the gtk toolbar API. I'm hoping it will be applied and uploaded soon, but if you are affected by the bug and would like to have the patch, you can download the package from:

http://www.marga.com.ar/~marga/debian/libglade2/

Since Theodore Roth needed a break from all the great job he was doing regarding AVR free software I got to be project manager of uisp.

I'll be doing a new release really soon, adding the CVS patches, incorporating some extra documentation, and also changing many of the error messages to make them more user-friendly.

Yesterday, while I was trying to fix a really nasty bug, I got the first mail from my Application Manager (Martin Würtele), and after the intial contact, I got the P&P questions.

I had arranged to have a lot of spare time this weekend, to be able to fix some RC bugs, but I ended up spending most of Saturday and Sunday answering the P&P questions.

Overall, it was a really nice thing to do. For most of the questions I didn't even need to research the answers, since I had learned all that I needed to say from experience. It made me feel much more sure of myself.

The nasty bug I was working on and the installation of PyBlosxom, however, added a great amount of frustration to my weekend.