RSS 
So you may have noticed a few days ago a link to an article on teaching to program in a newish language called Shoes. Its a cute language on top of Ruby for whipping up fun cute little GUI apps, event oriented and good for introductions to programming. So I wanted to play with it but Ubuntu and Debian ship the old version 1 and version 2 has been out since December 2008. So I checked Ubuntu's bugzilla and sure enough, there was a bug from April asking for a version bump with no response. So I figured it might be time to step up to the plate. So I brought up the Ubuntu Packaging Guide and gave it a read. Turns out Shoes wasn't trivial to package but with the old version 1 Deb package as a starting point I was able to get version 2 packaged! It's now sitting in Ubuntu's bugzilla at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shoes/+bug/359031 and if you just want the Shoes 2 i386 deb, its at http://launchpadlibrarian.net/30491206/shoes_0.r1134-1_i386.deb. So yeah, check it out, give it a whirl, have fun.
As a side note, I've found Ubuntu's bugzilla to be sporadically responsive which sucks a bit, but does encourage one to step up some... But looking at Debian, where this package actually originated from is even worse. They have no web interface for entering bugs, they only accept them via email or a command line tool. It does seems like a epic usability fail. So here's hoping that now that Shoes 2 has been packaged as a .deb we'll see it in Ubuntu sooner rather than later. Maybe I should just make a new bug for it?
(I hate to say it, but I still have found the Gentoo bugzilla to be blazingly responsive and have fond memories of it. I wish other communities could learn from it, what ever it is they are doing right.)
