<link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/</link>
+ <item>
+ <title>Some of my 2024 free software activities</title>
+ <link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Some_of_my_2024_free_software_activities.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Some_of_my_2024_free_software_activities.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It is a while since I posted a summary of the free software and
+open culture activities and projects I have worked on. Here is a
+quick summary of the major ones from last year.</p>
+
+<p>I guess the biggest project of the year has been migrating orphaned
+packages in Debian without a version control system to have a git
+repository on salsa.debian.org. When I started in April around 450
+the orphaned packages needed git. I've since migrated around 250 of
+the packages to a salsa git repository, and around 40 packages were
+left when I took a break. Not sure who did the around 160 conversions
+I was not involved in, but I am very glad I got some help on the
+project. I stopped partly because some of the remaining packages
+needed more disk space to build than I have available on my
+development machine, and partly because some had a strange build setup
+I could not figure out. I had a time budget of 20 minutes per
+package, if the package proved problematic and likely to take longer,
+I moved to another package. Might continue later, if I manage to free
+up some disk space.</p>
+
+<p>Another rather big project was the translation to Norwegian Bokmål
+and publishing of the first book ever published by a Sámi woman, the
+«<a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/publisher/#infoerlifellerdoed2024">Møter
+vi liv eller død?</a>» book by Elsa Laua, with a PD0 and CC-BY
+license. I released it during the summer, and to my surprise it has
+already sold several copies. As I suck at marketing, I did not expect
+to sell any.</p>
+
+<p>A smaller, but more long term project (for more than 10 years now),
+and related to orphaned packages in Debian, is my project to ensure a
+simple way to install hardware related packages in Debian when the
+relevant hardware is present in a machine. It made a fairly big
+advance forward last year, partly because I have been poking and
+begging package maintainers and upstream developers to include
+AppStream metadata XML in their packages. I've also released a few
+new versions of the isenkram system with some robustness improvements.
+Today 127 packages in Debian provide such information, allowing
+<tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> to propose them. Will keep pushing until the
+around 35 package names currently hard coded in the isenkram package
+are down to zero, so only information provided by individual packages
+are used for this feature.</p>
+
+<p>As part of the work on AppStream, I have sponsored several packages
+into Debian where the maintainer wanted to fix the issue but lacked
+direct upload rights. I've also sponsored a few other packages, when
+approached by the maintainer.</p>
+
+<p>I would also like to mention two hardware related packages in
+particular where I have been involved, the megactl and mfi-util
+packages. Both work with the hardware RAID systems in several Dell
+PowerEdge servers, and the first one is already available in Debian
+(and of course, proposed by isenkram when used on the appropriate Dell
+server), the other is waiting for NEW processing since this autumn. I
+manage several such Dell servers and would like the tools needed to
+monitor and configure these RAID controllers to be available from
+within Debian out of the box.</p>
+
+<p>Vaguely related to hardware support in Debian, I have also been
+trying to find ways to help out the Debian ROCm team, to improve the
+support in Debian for my artificial idiocy (AI) compute node. So far
+only uploaded one package, helped test the initial packaging of
+llama.cpp and tried to figure out how to get good speech recognition
+like Whisper into Debian.<p>
+
+<p>I am still involved in the LinuxCNC project, and organised a
+developer gathering in Norway last summer. A new one is planned the
+summer of 2025. I've also helped evaluate patches and uploaded new
+versions of LinuxCNC into Debian.</p>
+
+<p>After a 10 years long break, we managed to get a new and improved
+upstream version of <tt>lsdvd</tt> released just before Christmas. As
+I use it regularly to maintain my DVD archive, I was very happy to
+finally get out a version supporting DVDDiscID useful for uniquely
+identifying DVDs. I am dreaming of a Internet service mapping DVD IDs
+to IMDB movie IDs, to make life as a DVD collector easier.</p>
+
+<p>My involvement in Norwegian archive standardisation and the free
+software implementation of the vendor neutral Noark 5 API continued
+for the entire year. I've been pushing patches into both the API and
+the test code for the API, participated in several editorial meetings
+regarding the Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt specification, submitted
+several proposals for improvements for the same. We also organised a
+small seminar for Noark 5 interested people, and is organising a new
+seminar in a month.</p>
+
+<p>Part of the year was spent working on and coordinating a Norwegian
+Bokmål translation of the marvellous children's book
+«<a href="https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann/">Ada and
+Zangemann<a>», which focus on the right to repair and control your own
+property, and the value of controlling the software on the devices you
+own. The translation is mostly complete, and is now waiting for a
+transformation of the project and manuscript to use Docbook XML
+instead of a home made semi-text based format. Great progress is
+being made and the new book build process is almost complete.</p>
+
+<p>I have also been looking at how to companies in Norway can use free
+software to report their accounting summaries to the Norwegian
+government. Several new regulations make it very hard for companies
+to do use free software for accounting, and I would like to change
+this. Found a few drafts for opening up the reporting process, and
+have read up on some of the specifications, but nothing much is
+working yet.</p>
+
+<p>These were just the top of the iceberg, but I guess this blog post
+is long enough now. If you would like to help with any of these
+projects, please get in touch, either directly on the project mailing
+lists and forums, or with me via email, IRC or Signal. :)</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>New oggz release 1.1.2 after 15 years</title>
<link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/New_oggz_release_1_1_2_after_15_years.html</link>
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