Hello to my new blog, which will be about my work as a Debian Developer and other things, which cross my mind. The focus will be on Debian work though.

This blog won't have comments and that is intentional as I prefer not to receive any unfriendly mails from lawyers. If you want to give feedback, just send me an e-mail.

As one of the Co-Maintainers of KVIrc, I'd like to give you a short outlook on what is planned for KVIrc in Debian in the near future or at least in the Wheezy release cycle.

• Upload of a 4.0.3 bug fix release to stable-proposed-updates as soon as upstream releases it.
• Packaging a new 4.1.1 snapshot every ten days (that is always after the previous one migrated to Testing) and make ready for 4.1.1 (maybe even 4.2?) in Wheezy.
• Rework the CMake build script of KVIrc to ensure minimal linking. At the moment KVIrc has CMake gather all B-Ds in the global CMakeLists.txt and adds those to all compiler/linker invocations. By pushing the include_directories() calls down to the respective modules and adding just the required variables to the target_link_libraries() invocations, we can improve the situation significantly.
• KVIrc uses a lot of reinvented-the-wheel code, some of this is due to its age (I think KVIrc is around since Qt2 and a lot of stuff wasn't available as an easy-to-use library then). But to be maintainable, KVIrc must move to leaner code base, which can be achieved by replacing such fragments of code with library calls. This is a big task and might not be completed in time for Wheezy, but the effort should be taken nonetheless.

Apart from what is listed above, we, the Debian Maintainers of KVIrc, strive to improve its packaging constantly.

I've been building unofficial wine-unstable packages for some time now and the amount of people apparently using them has become noticable (not only traffic-wise). Thus the amount of questions send to me has also risen quite a bit. In this post I try to address most of the questions in the hope it'll help people understand my motives for building these packages and potential pit falls for users.

First of all: I'll stop building those packages as soon as Debian has a – for my purposes – recent enough version in the archives. This is expected to happen soon as most/all of the blocking issues should be sorted out now/soon. See e.g. #557783 for some insight into the problems. It might happen after updated packages are in Debian, that I'll build one version or the other occasionally to test a certain patch or version. The bottom line of this is: don't rely on me to provide always the latest packages. (This, by the way, is also explanation enough to the question, whether I'm going to build the "official" (I consider only those entering Debian's archives official) Debian packages for upstream (WineHQ).)

Another question, which is seen every now and then in my inbox, is, whether I could add patch xyz to the packages. The answer is no. I maintain those packages for myself and if you want to use them, you're welcome. If you need another patch applied, just download the source package and add the patch with quilt to the series.

When a certain version/build doesn't work for you, you can ask me for help, but please don't expect me to handle "doesn't work" reports like I would handle bug reports for my packages. The wine-unstable packages are for myself and if they work for me, that's all I aim for.

Before spreading the word about my packages, make sure, you and those who read your post/message/whatever about my packages understand, that it is generally a very bad idea to install third-party packages, even though I'm a Debian Developer. Make also sure everybody understands that only the source package is signed with my key.

Please don't download all packages (binary and source), unless you really need all of them. Please pick the ones, you need and just download them.

Even though this might sound like begging, which I'm not, it'd be nice, if you could consider donating (via PayPal) something, to help cover the traffic costs. The traffic for just the wine-unstable packages has risen dramatically in the last few months. Thanks!

Now, I hope I've answered most questions, if not, feel free to contact me.