I’m at London now, staying with my friend Progga who has been working with us for the AnkurBangla project for the past five years. It’s the first time that we are meeting in person, and it really feels wonderful :-).

OK… not really, but we do have a deployment/administrator’s BoF tomorrow (21st July), where we’ll try to figure out interesting ways to appeal to desktop deployers and administrators all over the world. Everyone who’s interested should probably attend - apologies about this shameless promotion :-).

Simos and myself had a great buffet dinner at a local Chinese place tonight - here are the pictures (I am supposed to upload a few other pictures too… I’ll do them as soon as I get some proper bandwidth, promise).

Finally arrived at GUADEC after a 13 hour flight from Kolkata (excluding a 3 hour break at the Dubai airport). I don’t know if it will help, but here are the directions I followed to go from the airport (BHX) to the Etap hotel.

• Get the connecting Rail Link to the rail station near the airport (it’s a free service)
• Buy a ticket to the New Street Station and ask for the platform number
• Get down at New Street Station and get out via the main exits
• Follow the taxi line (I didn’t get a taxi though)
• Once you reach the intersection, turn right
• Keep walking till you reach a roundabout with a Chinese looking structure in the middle
• Turn left
• You’ll be able to see the Etap Hotel on the other side of the road after walking for a few minutes - use the subway to cross the street

If you get lost, ask for the Etap hotel - people did not seem to know Great Colmore Street - and apparently there’s a Colmore Row somewhere in the other end of the city, as Shreyas found out the hard way.

This applies to my Indian readers only, apologies to everyone else.

ECNR stands for “Emigration Check Not Required”, a stamp that you need to have in your passport if you want to leave the country (even temporarily). However, if you apply for your passport before you pass your higher secondary examinations (I hear that the new regulations have lowered the limit to the secondary, ie class 10 level), your passport will have a stamp saying “Emigration Check Required”. From what I could understand, it is a ministry of labour requirement which says that all who do not meet certain criteria and want to go abroad should first obtain an “Emigration Clearance” from the office of Protector of Emigrants (a list of offices is available at this web site). However, this clearance is temporary, and valid for one journey only.

In order to get a proper ECNR stamp, (assuming that you meet the criteria), here are the steps that I followed:

• Got a visa
• Went to the regional passport office at the city (Kolkata). It was crowded like anything, with a long queue (around 200 people) in front of the main gate. However, I told the police officer at the gate that I needed an ECNR stamp, and he let me through.
• Managed to wriggle through the crowd (studying at a school which once held the world record for having the highest number of students has its own advantages, it seems) and found out where counter number 8 was. It was a special counter, marked “Miscellaneous Services”, with only three people standing in front of it.
• I gave the gentleman behind the counter a filled out copy of Form number 2, along with photocopies (attested) of my Higher Secondary marksheet and certificate and Rupees 300 (in cash). I also mentioned that the passport had a valid visa
• In return he gave me a receipt and told me to come back on the next day, at 5:00 PM
• I went to the office again on the next day, at around 4:30PM. The passports were being issued from counter number 3. I sat down for a while and after around 20 minutes they called my name. I had to sign some documents, and they gave me back my passport, with the Emigration Check Required stamp cancelled, and a new ECNR stamp in one of the visa pages.

..and if you are wondering, the reason I posted this in my blog was, there’s absolutely no clear instructions anywhere on how to get an ECNR stamp, and it actually took 3 trips for me to the passport office before I could figure things out. And another word of advice - do not pay any attention to the touts/agents standing in front of the passport office, willing to do a same day service for Rs 1000 and above. They might say that it will take 12 days for the passport to be processed in the normal way - do not believe them. However, I did hear from some people that if in case you do not have a valid visa, the process does take around seven days, and the passport office may actually send back the passport by speed post in such a situation. Hope this helps someone from extra trouble :-).

Yesterday night, I upgraded to Gutsy since it makes it easier for me to run GNOME 2.19 stuff off subversion. The upgrade went smoothly, and I didn’t notice any major borkages. Also noticed that there’s a package for Exaile in the Universe repository, don’t know how I managed to miss it earlier. :-).

..and a big thanks to all to all who responded to my Subversion question post. I have started a discussion in the Sabayon list on possible ways to go forward, and svn2svn seems to be what I was looking for, but I’m not sure whether slurping GNOME SVN for all the revisions under Pessulus would be such a good idea.

It was good to read about Sun Patch Day. Last time I checked, there were quite a few interesting patches from Sun on defining a restricted set of applications which may be launched from within GNOME. I’m sure many deployers from all over the world would like to see those included within the official GNOME tree. If the patches do go in, I’ll definitely help add a tool within Sabayon to manage the allowed applications.

Dear Lazyweb,
Is there any method or way where a set of files hosted in a given subversion repository can be “imported” into another repository (inside a directory in the target repository) with all the change and other information intact ? Ideally this should not involve filesystem access to the SVN server.

The reason I ask for this is, it has been planned that the source of Pessulus be integrated into the Sabayon tree, and I’m not sure how to do the transfer inside SVN. Any kind of information on how to do this would be highly appreciated here. More information is available in Sabayon’s wiki page.