Karsten Bräckelmann’s Open Thoughts

Consequently, I shouldn’t have mentioned that in public either. Well, I’m not going to talk about fight club (even though it is a great movie, and I finally got the book)…

But myself, my involvement in Free Software and maybe some random thoughts and rants. I’ll try to keep rants low, though. Re-introducing myself, since I have neglected my blog for way too long, here are some quick facts in a nutshell:

I’ve been an active Community guy for a long time, dating back to the old Helix-Code / Ximian days. Bugsquad volunteer, lurker and occasional triager, have been a heavy load triager in the past. Maintainer of GARNOME, the build utility for the GNOME Desktop, member of the GNOME Release Team, and of course GNOME Foundation member.

And recently hired by Openismus as maemo.org bugmaster, together with Andre, to support the community around Maemo. An awesome opportunity, and working with the friendly maemo.org community already has been quite some fun. I’ll add more colorful bits soon while I go along. I promise.

GNOME 2.20.0 has been released. See it. Build it.

My pleasure, Srini, you’re most welcome.

We are particularly proud of all the hacking and smoke-testing that has been going on during the GNOME 2.19.3 and .4¹ releases². New tarballs have been built and tested by various GARNOMEies almost in real time, as fast as they have been uploaded and as fast as we could update SVN.

Once again, this early testing revealed a number of serious issues with some of the GNOME applications. A bunch of bug reports where filed, resulting in new, fixed tarballs being rolled as quickly as possible — before the official release deadline. Of course, thanks to the developers too, who have been highly responsive.

Our contribution to make even unstable development releases a somewhat sane place to live. Thank you, #garnome!

1. Which, coincidentally, still has not been released due to one particular severe issue, spotted by the GARNOMEies. Bug 449318, immediately worked around by the GARNOME Team, so we could roll 2.19.4 in time. [↩]
2. Yes, Luis, I too love footnotes. [↩]

Just a friendly reminder – 2.19.3 is due to be released before midnight UTC, today.   (Come on, this is supposed to be fun for volunteers, isn’t it? You know I love you guys.)

On a related note, GARNOME 2.19.3 has just been rolled and is available at a mirror near you.

So I have been staying away from Bugzilla for a whole week apparently. Didn’t really realize, but I dropped off of the weekly stats entirely.

Almost felt like vacation. A constant rate of a thousand bugs per week for a couple of weeks really burned me out. But I feel like I should get back to Bugzilla again. Already started by processing that huge pile of backlogged Bugzilla spam. There’s a lot work awaiting me…

On another note, the GARNOME Team already is planning a new release, 2.16.2.1, which probably will be out later this week. Dot two already included a lot of serious crash, leak and security fixes. Some more have been released the days after the official GNOME release — and we always try to provide the best vanilla flavored distribution.