Re: Question for all candidates: Release process
Hello Bernhard and everybody, I think that the ‘RPM hell’ that you used to comment my propositions is more related to a situation when independant distributions are using the same package format, than when a distribution offers multiple repositories that obey to a policy that keeps the whole system functional. We actually enter in the era of the ‘DEB hell’ since the success of Ubuntu, with users asking support for cross-distribution package installation. In the end, it is more a communication problem than a technical problem. We should make it clearer that it is not because the packages do not carry the distribution name that they are not specific to a distribution. Perhaps a page about ‘our packaging system’ for end-users on our website? Regarding my proposal, that is internal to Debian, I do not think that it is impossible. What I propose is a way for package maintainers to signal that their package is peripheral in the Debian system, in an opt-in manner. Debian is running out of manpower, and I think that it will be useful to let know that a given package can be given a low priority for tasks. In my experience, trivial RC bugs on not-so important packages attract volunteers because it is very rewarding to close RC bugs. Also, I learnt a lot by participating to the ‘bug sprint’ organised by Josselin for Lenny, that we should not be discouraged to challenge a bug that is far beyond our technical capacities, because help like triaging and pinging the reporters is very useful and frees skilled hands that are much more useful at other tasks. So in my opinion, not all RC bugs are equal, and a better priority system would be useful to help volunteers to chose their focus. Our current priority system does not fit that task. Because of the rules about conflicts, important packages like postfix are of priority extra. By refactoring our priority system, we could make a much better usage of a priority level that really means ‘extra’ in the sense of ‘do not bother if you have more important things to do’. With a priority system improved along this direction, I think it opens the possibility to let some architectures release without the least important packages. Once I reported upstream that his scientific software was not working on Sparc. ‘I know‘, was the answer. This software, I want to bring it to the scientific communauty, and like the upstream author, I know that no researcher is seriously considering running it on Sparc for work. Why not distributing it only on amd64 until a user requests it on another architecture? Even on the other platforms where it builds, I have no clue if it works. And in my experience, the more regression tests I enable in my packages, the more I realise that they do not work on the platforms that neither upstream nor the users are using. I am very tempted to go even further and would like to distribute some packages for the stable distribution only through official backports for instance. Also, in my field, while people usually want to have the latest version to start with, they also do not want to change in the course of their analysis. I hope that the future package snapshot system will help us to satisfy this need. In conjunction with system image builders, Debian pure blends and ‘cloud computing’, it will be very powerful. Will it make the release easier? I think so, even if it is definitely not a magical wand. It transfers some responsabilities, and the work load that comes with, from the release team and the porters to the maintainers of leaf packages of low priority. I would like the Debian project to trust more its maintainers, and allow this transfer. Have a nice week-end, -- Charles -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100327061703.ga28...@kunpuu.plessy.org
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 04:52:19AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 05:19:20PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > > Bearing in mind: > > * www.debian.org/social_contract says Debian's "priorities are our > > users and free software", > > * popcon.debian.org currently reports 91,523 submissions, > > * popcon.ubuntu.com currently reports 1,493,440 submissions, and > > * that this is something of a trick question, > > What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users? [..] > On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:49:47PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > > Then we can look at the official mirrors logs > > (for distinct IPs regularly downloading package indexes in a given time > > window), and at the same index downloads for security.d.o (which is > > enabled by default and most likely not accessed via mirrors). > > I actually thought I'd done that at some point just for kicks, but I > don't seem to be able to find what the results might have been. (Note > security.d.o resolves to different IPs in different countries these > days; It gives 1.5 million unique IPs (with only 45k IPv6) over all mirrors behind security.d.o (as of February 2010, only from HTTP logs, some more hits with FTP). > and both those measures are affected by undercounting due to proxies > and overcounting due to dynamic IPs among other things) Integrate a unique ID in the apt user-agent string ? :p -- Simon Paillard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100327013314.ga29...@dedibox.ebzao.info
Re: Question about membership.
> * Did you or do you plan to talk to DAM/Frontdesk about membership changes? Discussion must be public from the start. DAM/Frontdesk is contribution essential. Your position will be first in the discussion's summary. > * Do you need to come up with a GR to change membership procedures, or is > there > a different way? I will cast a GR if I think it is needed. If I am wrong, the result will be NOTA, and I will resign as DPL. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100327010209.ga24...@kunpuu.plessy.org
Re: Question about membership.
Hi Charles, thanks for you long answer. But unfortunately I feel like a journalist now, instead of getting a short *answer* to my questions, I got a looong talk around them. So here are they again, in a very simplified form: * Did you or do you plan to talk to DAM/Frontdesk about membership changes? * Do you need to come up with a GR to change membership procedures, or is there a different way? Thanks, Bernd -- Bernd ZeimetzDebian GNU/Linux Developer http://bzed.dehttp://www.debian.org GPG Fingerprints: 06C8 C9A2 EAAD E37E 5B2C BE93 067A AD04 C93B FF79 ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4bad2a3c.5070...@bzed.de
Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
On Thu, 25 Mar 2010, Joey Hess wrote: > The exciting potential of dpkg source v3 to me is that it potentially > opens an area that had stifled most innopvation, by allowing subtypes of > the source format to be developed. But this area is still relatively > closed to innovation; dpkg's maintainers still need to sign off on new > formats, and the v3 source handling in dak is AIUI unneccessarily > limited/hardcoded to only supporting certian subtypes. I am not opposed on merging code improvements concerning alternative source formats and I'm not opposed to adding support for new source formats either. While dak needs some modification for each alternative source format to allow, the code has been modified in ways that make it easy to add support of supplementary source formats. That said my personal opinion is however that we should be very cautious before deciding to allow those alternatives formats on ftp-master. I strongly believe that we should not have many source formats in Debian and that the right long term approach for VCS based maintainance is not to have the VCS in the source package but rather to generate the source package out of the VCS. And I would rather encourage people to work in that direction; I would like dpkg-dev to provide tools to do precisely this but it's still far from being at the top of my TODO list currently. Any help welcome as usual. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Like what I do? Sponsor me: http://ouaza.com/wp/2010/01/05/5-years-of-freexian/ My Debian goals: http://ouaza.com/wp/2010/01/09/debian-related-goals-for-2010/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100326200913.ga10...@rivendell
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 04:52:19AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > I note Steve points out: > > On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 03:06:37PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > > http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/123481/index.html > > which cites estimates of 6-8 million Ubuntu users, for a factor of > between 4 and 5.3 compared to Ubuntu's popcon reports. If you assumed > a similar factor for Debian's popcon reports, that would give an > estimate of between 350,000 and 500,000 users. I tend to think Ubuntu > users are more likely to run popcon than Debian users, and thus that > those numbers are low, but I don't have any data to back that up or to > estimate how low. And obviously I don't have any idea where the 6-8M > estimates were pulled from, or how realistic they are. FWIW, a rough estimate of iceweasel 3.5.8 users (which means testing, unstable and backports), based on access logs for the page that gets displayed after version upgrades, is somewhere around 100,000 users, as of today. While popcon can't tell us how many of the popcon users are using iceweasel 3.5.8 vs. 3.0.x, we can have an upper bound of that from the number of xulrunner-1.9.1 installations. Surely, galeon, conkeror, kazehakase,etc. also depend on xulrunner-1.9.1, but they don't account for so many popcon users (it's also impossible to tell apart which ones are using xulrunner-1.9 and which ones are using xulrunner-1.9.1). So there would be less than 13062 popcon users with iceweasel 3.5.x installed, but not much less. Also, the number of xulrunner-1.9.1 users accounted by popcon went dramatically up recently, in two waves, the first one from the migration to testing and the second one from the update of backports. I see the same waves on the access logs used to estimate the actual number of iceweasel users above. The factor for testing, unstable and backport desktop users would thus be somewhere around 7.7. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100326134221.ga21...@glandium.org
Re: Question about membership.
Le Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 02:06:44PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz a écrit : > Charles Plessy wrote: > > > If I am elected DPL, I will re-open the discussion and lead them in a way > > that > > maximises everybody's contribution, for instance by making pauses if > > necessary, > > and by posting neutral summaries. After the discussion reaches conclusion, I > > will initiate a GR. > > When did you talk with DAM and the NM FrontDesk people about such things? Do > you > think it is the DPL's job to initiate GRs to change such procedures? Is a GR > necessary at all or how are such things decided in Debian? When would you > need a GR? Hi Bernd, I think that discussions on membership have to be held in public. If a pre-packed propsal is perpared behind the scenes and proposed to the DDs as a fait accompli, I think that it will face a strong opposition. I do not think that a DPL has the role of defining the content of a GR in such a debate. However, our constitution gives to the DPL the role of leading discussions, and to propose draft GRs. In my understanding of the constitution, the content of the GR matches the result of the discussion, not the personal opinion of the DPL. This is what I propose and nothing else. Here is the content of my platform about membership: ‘Becoming a member gives motivation, responsibility and reward. Currently one has to prove a lot to become become a DD, and I think that the level we require for new members is nearly to be able to do distribution-wide quality control and participate release operations. While it is exactly that manpower that we are critically needing, I do not think that it is in the interest of the project to be so restrictive on membership. I liked a lot an earlier proposition that any DD can nominate a new member in the project. This resembles how the DM status is working, and it is working well. Importantly, to make it easier to enter the project also makes it easier to leave it for a while. With a more appealing emeritus system, we can give motivations to DDs who are lacking time to take a break officially instead of simply becoming inactive for a long interval. And if lost membership can be recovered more easily, I think that we can also ease the conditions for cancelling inactive memberships. I will restart discussions on membership, with a vote as a goal.’ In the question I sent to the other candidates, to fuel the debate I reminded a proposition that was made and that I find interesting. I tried to make a bit of prospective, speculating that it would not be very popular, and wondering what would make it feel more secure. Taking the recent Bits from the NM process as an inspiration, which specifies that an account must be 6 month old to qualify for becoming Application Managers, I wondered if that requirement for seniority should be kept or not in a new system. Obviously, opinions about this differ. I do not have a premade conclusion about Debian's membership process, and I am not seeking to be elected for pushing one solution or the other. However, I am campaining for having the membership issue solved in the next DPL's term, and will put this priority high in my list if I am elected. Other candidates have suggested that what Debian needs is a polished version of Joerg's proposal. If as a result of my election, I lead a debate that results in a GR that does this, I will consider it as an accomplishment, whatever my personal opinon is. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100326133832.ga21...@kunpuu.plessy.org
Re: Question about membership.
Charles Plessy wrote: > If I am elected DPL, I will re-open the discussion and lead them in a way that > maximises everybody's contribution, for instance by making pauses if > necessary, > and by posting neutral summaries. After the discussion reaches conclusion, I > will initiate a GR. When did you talk with DAM and the NM FrontDesk people about such things? Do you think it is the DPL's job to initiate GRs to change such procedures? Is a GR necessary at all or how are such things decided in Debian? When would you need a GR? -- Bernd ZeimetzDebian GNU/Linux Developer http://bzed.dehttp://www.debian.org GPG Fingerprints: 06C8 C9A2 EAAD E37E 5B2C BE93 067A AD04 C93B FF79 ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4bacb164.5010...@bzed.de
Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 04:52:19AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:49:47PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > > Then we can look at the official mirrors logs > > (for distinct IPs regularly downloading package indexes in a given time > > window), and at the same index downloads for security.d.o (which is > > enabled by default and most likely not accessed via mirrors). > I actually thought I'd done that at some point just for kicks, but I > don't seem to be able to find what the results might have been. (Note You did do this - it was during a meeting at DebConf7 and you were reporting everything verbally as you went along so I rather suspect that the results never got written down. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100326123702.gg27...@sirena.org.uk