Maybe this is not new for Debian people, but it is the first time I heard about the Debian External Health System.

From: Debian External Health System
To: dstat a-t packages dot qa dot debian dot org
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:47:12 +0000
Subject: dstat: New upstream version available

Hello,

The Debian External Health System (a.k.a. DEHS) has found a new upstream version
of the package dstat in the unstable distribution.
The current package version is 0.6.7-1 and latest by upstream is 0.6.8.

I just released a new Dstat. I finally spend some time doing the boring release-dance:

• Verifying all changes since 0.6.7
• Backporting changes to python 1.5 version
• Creating the release archive without all pending patches and experimental stuff
• Verifying ChangeLog and documentation
• Testing on all Red Hat and CentOS/RHEL versions

Finally FrOSCon made available the video of my first dstat presentation, which was also my first presentation at an Open Source conference *ever* !

I am a bit disappointed that I did not have access to it before doing the same presentation at 3 different other venues, as I could have learned much from it. It shows that I had not slept that night because of the stress and sleepless nights turn me hyperactive :-)

RHEL 5.2 beta is released and many interesting features and software updates are expected.

It is very unusual for software to be updated (instead of bugfix backports) in a Red Hat Enterprise distribution (or CentOS for that matter) but there are exceptional cases where this makes more sense than the alternative.

Red Hat has decided that for desktop applications they can make that exception, meaning Red Hat and CentOS desktop users (me!) will soon be able to use a recent Firefox, Thunderbird or OpenOffice.

I was surprised of the enthusiasm and feedback I got during and after my Dstat presentation at FOSDEM 2008. Even though I revisited my older slides and made the presentation shorter, I was not as prepared as I was with previous presentations but apparently that did not affect audience participation :-)

The aim of doing a set of Dstat presentations was not just to promote Dstat, but also to hear people's impressions and ideas. And lots of ideas were shared and ended up in the TODO list.

But one of the questions that I did not quite understand initially, turned out to be an interesting and useful idea. And after the presentation we sat together to show how simple it was to bring an idea into practice.

This weekend T-DOSE takes place in Eindhoven, NL. This will be my first T-DOSE, but I expect it to be much like FOSDEM and FrOSCon, although maybe smaller and less developer-oriented than FOSDEM and probably more English-oriented than FrOSCon.