Once more, I'm not going to the Annual Debian Developers' Conference; I've wanted to go to previous editions, but I've always found excuses not to do it: too far away, bad dates, expensive if not going alone, ... and lately I'm too busy to do Debian related activities, mainly because I still have two jobs and my free time is devoted to my son (code named The Beast), that will be two and a half years old in four days.

Anyway, this time I'm a little bit sad, because this edition is closer to home and I could have taken my family with me and be away from a stressing period at work.

Oh, well, maybe next year I'll change my life and will be able to go. Let's hope so.

Next week I'll be once again at the Jornades de Programari Lliure organized by the UPC's Càtedra de Programari Lliure in Barcelona; this is the fifth edition of the Jornades and I've already been on the third and fourth editions.

This year I'll be doing a couple of things there: a two hour workshop about Building Debian Packages on Friday and a half an hour conference about Agile Documentation Tools on Saturday.

As always I've been busy with other things and I have not had the time to work on the workshop materials, but luckily the other day I saw on Planet Debian that Lars Wirzenius had prepared a Debian Packaging Tutorial and after looking at it I'm going to use it for my workshop probably as is, unless I find the time to do some small changes. There is room for 20 attendes and one week in advance there are already 13 people registered so I imagine that they will be quite interested. I'll blog about the results next week... ;)

The conference is about the importance of documentation on software related projects and the tools and systems that can help developers to be more productive when writting it. I'm giving it representing the ITI and I have to finish it this weekend, once it is ready I'll publish it and ask for comments.

After a message to debian-custom from Baruch Even I decided to apply as a mentor for Debian on Google's Summer of Code.

If someone is interested on working on the current CDDT code or even on a project related to the development of Custom Debian Distributions (or even derived distributions) I'll be happy to mentor you if your write a good proposal.

I'm not doing much for Debian lately, I'm busy at work and mentoring someone looks like a good way of helping a little; it requires less time than doing things myself and can be a good way of taking breaks of my real life duties during the summer, when I'm supposed to be working on my PhD Thesis.

After my last post about the tool I got some feedback and tonight I've uploaded to Debian the version 0.9.2 with better POSIX support (well, that's what I believe, I have not tested the tool on non Debian machines, but I followed some comments and also reviewed some Documentation), support for kdialog (I prefer zenity, but kdialog is installed with the base KDE packages and if it works, why not?) and, by request, default values support (when reading a string or showing a selection menu the developer can provide default values).

I was going to wait until the package leaves NEW before uploading the new version, but as I don't really know if uploading new versions implies any delay on the way to the archive and the previous package was only four days old I decided that I prefer a small wait and not have to care about uploading an updated version just after the package enters into the archive.

Well, today I've started to upload things related to the CDDT code to Debian. My first upload is a simple package that has been splitted from the current CDDT runtime code, as it is useful by itself. I've called it SSFT, the initials of Shell Scripts Frontend Tool.

It is a shell function library that includes functions to display messages and get data from the user; the functions use zenity, dialog or plain text to do their work, depending on the value of the SSFT_FRONTEND variable; the idea was inspired by the debconf frontends, but uses only shell code with standard utilities (with the exception of the optional zenity and dialog utilities and the use of gettext.sh from gettext to support L10N).

I've tested the current code against a lot of Bourne Shell compatible shells, including posh (that one made me remove the use of the local built in and rename the variables to _l_ as a prefix), so it should work more or less OK on any modern Unix.

I don't know if anybody but me will use the library, if anyone tries it and finds a bug please report it to the SSFT project or the BTS (well, that will need a little bit of waiting, but I suppose that no one will try the package until it gets into the archive).