Hi Andreas, Andreas Tille <ti...@debian.org> writes:
... > I have some specific questions to the Debian Boot team. > > - Do you feel good when doing your work in Debian Boot team? I'm currently rather peripheral to the team, so tend to potter around doing my own thing. This is mostly because I found that I wasn't able to devote the time required to test things to my satisfaction when my first daughter came along, as I'd be distracted before I completed my tests, so I decided to do something about automating testing, and I've been down that rabbit hole ever since. When I'm working on that, I'm pretty happy. I'd say that that work is now bearing some fruit, finally. I had originally hoped that I'd then be able to put more effort into D-I itself, but I suspect that maintaining openQA and the Salsa pipeline stuff may continue to eat a fair amount of my time. > - Do you consider the workload of your team equally shared amongst its > members and who actually is considered a team member? (I added some > persons in CC who have recently answered to questions on the mailing > list.) My contributions are pretty-much background noise recently, so I guess that means that the load is very unequal if you were including me in the stats. Cyril has been responsible for keeping D-I viable in recent times, and Holger also does _loads_ of (mostly translation related) work too. > - Do you have some strategy to gather new contributors for your team? One of my intentions with the salsa/openQA work is that I'm trying to make it possible for people to make simple changes to bits of D-I and have them receive feedback about whether the result is an improvement. Hopefully that will lower the bar to new people contributing. > - Can you give some individual estimation how many hours per week you > are working on your tasks in youre team? Does this fit the amount of > time you can really afford for this task? My work on D-I is pretty sporadic, because I generally pick some small thing in D-I to use as a test of the current salsa/openqa setup, and then spend significantly more time sorting out some new wrinkle that's revealed in the salsa and/or openqa setup by this new example. Often this means that by the time I've finished, someone else has already dealt with the original bug/patch in D-I. I'm not sure to what extent that counts as D-I work, but I'm happy with the time I spend on it. > - I recently had some discussion on Chemnitzer Linuxtage what might > be the reason for derivatives to write their own installers. While > I'm personally perfectly happy with the way I can install Debian I'm > somehow wondering why others are spending time into a problem we > are considering "solved" and whether we can learn something from this, I quite like it as it is, but I'm sure many would not find the installer particularly pretty, and it is quite hard to work on (being in busybox shell, and lacking popular things like python), and I personally have no idea how easy/possible it is to e.g. change its branding (if a downstream wanted to do that). If one doesn't care about installing on our minority architectures, then it's possible to do something that's much easier to work on by booting a live image. One can then have something that'll ask all the questions up-front (especially if one is opinionated about what should be on the resulting system), and then apply that to the system without further interaction. > - I once had a amr64 based laptop (Pinebook) and had to learn that I > can't use the Debian installer which was frustrating. I was told > that this is the case for hardware that is not featuring some BIOS-like > boot system. Do you see any chance to let the installer work for > non-Intel architectures (or should I rather ask this question on > Debian CD (sorry for my ignorance if I miss responsibility here.) Some arm64 things certainly can be installed with D-I, because I have openQA workers running on altra.debian.net testing D-I installs, but I don't know that much about the details. > - Can I do anything for you? I'm currently looking into the options that might be worth exploring for getting more openqa-workers running. I suppose at some point that might involve asking for funds to be spent, but I'm not at that stage yet. It probably wouldn't harm to offer some funding to osuosl, because they let us use their systems for various things and making sure that they are sustainable would be wise. (that's who host most of what I'm running openqa on at present, and they also host jenkins and reproducible things AFAIK) Cheers, Phil. -- Philip Hands -- https://hands.com/~phil
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