Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Andrei Popescu]

On Jo, 22 iul 10, 16:45:33, Raphael Geissert wrote:
> 
> This one is very interesting, as it is the main contact point from our 
> users. The number of subscribers did not drop, but the traffic did (non 
> surprisingly, the number of subscribers increases when the traffic 
> decreases, and vice-versa.)

Ah, the OT threads of the past...

Regards,
Andrei
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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Andrei Popescu]

On Vi, 23 iul 10, 02:51:36, brian m. carlson wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 10:26:47AM +1000, Brian May wrote:
> > On 23 July 2010 10:03, brian m. carlson  
> > wrote:
> > > You can use "smtphost reportbug.debian.org" in the configuration file.
> > > As for blocking direct outgoing SMTP connections:
> > 
> > This is news for me. Is there any thoughts on making this the default?
> 
> It's enabled if stupidmode is set.  To do that, say that "no" when
> asked if you have an MTA configured and just hit enter when it asks for
> your smarthost.  You can always edit the config file as well.  It will
> print the same lines regardless, except that they're commented out when
> stupidmode is off.

How about not asking at all if the user chooses 'novice', or even 
'standard'.

Regards,
Andrei
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Re: constantly usable testing

[Andrei Popescu]

On Jo, 22 iul 10, 22:51:32, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 03:10:16PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> > I've noticed that linking to this page seems to kill threads, which is
> > not my intent, but: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/debian/cut/
> > 
> > The idea still seems reasonable to me, and the work required, beyond
> > what is already done, not too much. Shame that nobody has tried to do it
> > yet.
> 
> I've always found CUT to be an interesting (thought) experiment.
> 
> A particular nice feature of how you present it, is that it's modular
> enough to be tried with little impact on the rest of Debian; as you
> observe: « most of which [needed ingredients] are already being done on
> a best-effort basis ».  So, in principle, nothing stops you or anyone
> else to actually form a CUT team and experiment with the idea.  That's
> probably the only way forward from CUT-is-a-thread-killer to have data
> that support the feasibility / user appreciation of the idea.

For me it's quite obvious that CUT would happen if the relevant teams: 
(Security, Release, d-i, ...) would have enough manpower.

One possible approach would be asking through d-i if the user wants 
"plain" testing or a CUT snapshot, and then set the apropiate pinning. 
Security updates would not be possible via unstable migrations (as it is 
for testing), but I already mentioned the security team needs more 
people for this.

And there's no need to call CUT differently, just call it beta1, beta2 
and rc1, rc2, ... as soon as testing is frozen. With a proper 
announcement/press release users will jump to using it ;)

Regards,
Andrei
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Bug#590037: ITP: python-pyth -- Python library to convert marked-up text between different formats

[Daniele Tricoli]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Daniele Tricoli 

* Package name: python-pyth
  Version : 0.5.5
  Upstream Author : Brendon Hogger 
* URL : http://github.com/brendonh/pyth
* License : MIT
  Programming Lang: Python
  Description : Python library to convert marked-up text between different 
formats

Pyth is a library used to manipulate different formats of marked-up text.

The following list of document formats are currently available:

  * XHTML (fully supported: read, write)
  * RTF (fully supported: read, write)
  * PDF (only output)

It also can generate documents from Python markup a la Nevow's stan and has
limited experimental support for latex.



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Re: constantly usable testing

[Joerg Jaspert]

>> Have you ever actually tried to call people to arms and *form* the CUT
>> team?
> No. But it's been 3 years, so please don't wait for me to do it. ;)

JFTR, with the great new machine ftpmaster got, we actually have the
resources to run such a thing (archive wise, manpower is
different). That is, we can (easy enough) provide you with an archive
section to "play" in and see if the idea works out.
If there is someone interested in doing the main work on it (ftpmaster
only wants the archive side of it), you know where we are.

-- 
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I think there's a world market for about five computers.
 -- attr. Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board, IBM), 1943


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[brian m. carlson]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 10:26:47AM +1000, Brian May wrote:
> On 23 July 2010 10:03, brian m. carlson  wrote:
> > You can use "smtphost reportbug.debian.org" in the configuration file.
> > As for blocking direct outgoing SMTP connections:
> 
> This is news for me. Is there any thoughts on making this the default?

It's enabled if stupidmode is set.  To do that, say that "no" when
asked if you have an MTA configured and just hit enter when it asks for
your smarthost.  You can always edit the config file as well.  It will
print the same lines regardless, except that they're commented out when
stupidmode is off.

> Based on what you say, it seems to use port 587 by default; is this correct?

It works on both 25 and 587, TTBOMK.  I believe 25 is the default.  My
example was because I just figured that 25 is a lot more likely to be
blocked.  You can use "smtphost reportbug.debian.org:587" for port 587.

> > All you really need is a working email address to put in the From line
> > and an Internet connection. That's it.
> 
> Yes, need to make sure that the From address is valid... To be fair,
> it does print it out, but sometimes I get it wrong all the same.

Nothing I can do about that. ;-)

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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Don Armstrong]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2010, Brian May wrote:
> On 23 July 2010 10:03, brian m. carlson  wrote:
> > You can use "smtphost reportbug.debian.org" in the configuration file.
> > As for blocking direct outgoing SMTP connections:
> 
> This is news for me. Is there any thoughts on making this the default?

It is the default, though it'll ask you some questions to try to find
a better host, iirc.
 
> Based on what you say, it seems to use port 587 by default; is this
> correct?

Yes, because outgoing 587 is less likely to be blocked than 25.


Don Armstrong

-- 
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended
up where I needed to be.
 -- Douglas Adams _The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul_

http://www.donarmstrong.com  http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Don Armstrong]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2010, Jesús M. Navarro wrote:
> On Thursday 22 July 2010 23:51:10 Don Armstrong wrote:
> > Testing's primary purpose is as a staging ground for the next
> > release; while it'd be nice to try to keep it working as a fully
> > installable version all of the time, progress to the next release
> > is more important than that.
> 
> And that's exactly my point while such valuable people as Russ
> Allbery wants to challenge that notion.

I have no argument against extending testing using CUT or similar, but
it cannot come at the expense of preparation for the next stable
release. [And indeed, while CUT proposes to provide a constantly
installable version of Debian, it specifically allows dropping buggy
packages from testing, precisely as we are doing now.]

All of that said, I think there are enough people who are interested
in extending testing to organize themselves and make it happen. [I for
one don't have the time to do so myself, but I certainly have no
problem making whatever changes to the BTS are necessary to make it
all work.]


Don Armstrong

-- 
[On a trip back from collecting grass seeds in tropical bird stomachs
and being thought by the customs agents to be transporting Marijuana.]
"Anyone so square as to tell you they are transporting grass seeds is
bound to be ok"
 -- Peter K. Klopfer _Seeds of Doubt_ Science 134:177 10 April 2009

http://www.donarmstrong.com  http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Steffen Möller]

Hello,
On 07/23/2010 02:03 AM, Jesús M. Navarro wrote:
> On Thursday 22 July 2010 23:51:10 Don Armstrong wrote:
> [...]
>> Testing's primary purpose is as a staging ground for the next release;
>> while it'd be nice to try to keep it working as a fully installable
>> version all of the time, progress to the next release is more
>> important than that.
> 
> And that's exactly my point while such valuable people as Russ Allbery wants 
> to challenge that notion.

Not necessarily challenge but extend it. We only get testing tested or
unstable unstabled when people are actually running those and are working
with these. And the testing should not start in testing but in unstable,
otherwise we'd not need unstable in the first place.

The paradox is that the more a package is away from essential, the fewer
accidental users it is likely to have, but this means that we need more users
to have problems with those packages identified. So, with our increase of 
packages,
we need more users to test those new uploads, i.e. more users working with
unstable.

I have not been around when unstable was designed. I do not want to
contradict that it probably was an acceptable concept to have it break
often 10 years ago. But it is not today IMVHO. And from my experience,
it does not break too often, indeed.

I very much like the idea of CUT, possibly somehow merged with snapshot.d.o.
I feel that the blends should help with their respective experiences for
some subsets of Debian. And we could think of asking popcon for the
number of eyeballs a software has seen for the package's acceptance.
I have not thought through what this might mean for the release
management or Don's implicit concerns that it may hamper the release
of the next stable version. Nothing overly obvious strikes me, though.

Steffen (from his stable unstable laptop)


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Work-needing packages report for Jul 23, 2010

[wnpp]

The following is a listing of packages for which help has been requested
through the WNPP (Work-Needing and Prospective Packages) system in the
last week.

Total number of orphaned packages: 608 (new: 0)
Total number of packages offered up for adoption: 143 (new: 7)
Total number of packages requested help for: 67 (new: 1)

Please refer to http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/ for more information.



No new packages have been orphaned, but a total of 608 packages are
orphaned.  See http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
for a complete list.



The following packages have been given up for adoption:

   aafigure (#589967), offered today
 Description: ASCII art to image converter
 Installations reported by Popcon: 22

   cflow (#589959), offered today
 Description: Analyze control flow in C source files
 Installations reported by Popcon: 575

   hg-git (#589961), offered today
 Description: Git plugin for Mercurial
 Installations reported by Popcon: 159

   jabber-muc (#589307), offered 6 days ago
 Description: Multi User Conference component for the Jabber IM
   server
 Installations reported by Popcon: 108

   jabberd2 (#589304), offered 6 days ago
 Description: Jabber instant messenger server
 Installations reported by Popcon: 30

   keynav (#589944), offered today
 Description: a keyboard-driven mouse cursor mover
 Installations reported by Popcon: 52

   kst (#589685), offered 3 days ago
 Reverse Depends: kst kst-bin kst-plugins libkst1-dev
 Installations reported by Popcon: 301

136 older packages have been omitted from this listing, see
http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa_bypackage for a complete list.



For the following packages help is requested:

[NEW] ppp (#589632), requested 3 days ago
 Description: Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) - daemon
 Reverse Depends: fso-frameworkd gpppon kppp portslave pppconfig
   pppdcapiplugin pppoe pppoeconf pptp-linux pptpd (7 more omitted)
 Installations reported by Popcon: 23595

   apt-cross (#540341), requested 349 days ago
 Description: retrieve, build and install libraries for
   cross-compiling
 Reverse Depends: apt-cross emdebian-crush
   mlton-target-alpha-linux-gnu mlton-target-arm-linux-gnueabi
   mlton-target-hppa-linux-gnu mlton-target-i486-linux-gnu
   mlton-target-ia64-linux-gnu mlton-target-mips-linux-gnu
   mlton-target-mipsel-linux-gnu mlton-target-powerpc-linux-gnu (3 more
   omitted)
 Installations reported by Popcon: 338

   apt-xapian-index (#567955), requested 171 days ago
 Description: maintenance tools for a Xapian index of Debian packages
 Reverse Depends: adept ept-cache fuss-launcher packagesearch
 Installations reported by Popcon: 12306

   ara (#450876), requested 984 days ago
 Description: utility for searching the Debian package database
 Installations reported by Popcon: 103

   asymptote (#517342), requested 510 days ago
 Description: script-based vector graphics language inspired by
   MetaPost
 Installations reported by Popcon: 1276

   athcool (#278442), requested 2095 days ago
 Description: Enable powersaving mode for Athlon/Duron processors
 Installations reported by Popcon: 132

   boinc (#511243), requested 560 days ago
 Description: BOINC distributed computing
 Reverse Depends: boinc boinc-app-milkyway boinc-app-seti boinc-dbg
 Installations reported by Popcon: 1538

   chromium-browser (#583826), requested 53 days ago
 Description: Chromium browser
 Reverse Depends: chromium-browser chromium-browser-dbg
   chromium-browser-l10n gecko-mediaplayer sun-java6-plugin
 Installations reported by Popcon: 1508

   cvs (#354176), requested 1610 days ago
 Description: Concurrent Versions System
 Reverse Depends: crossvc cvs-autoreleasedeb cvs-buildpackage cvs2cl
   cvs2html cvschangelogbuilder cvsconnect cvsd cvsps cvsservice (10
   more omitted)
 Installations reported by Popcon: 23779

   dctrl-tools (#448284), requested 999 days ago
 Description: Command-line tools to process Debian package
   information
 Reverse Depends: aptfs debian-goodies debtree dlocate
   haskell-devscripts javahelper libsbuild-perl linux-patch-debianlogo
   simple-cdd ubuntu-dev-tools
 Installations reported by Popcon: 12680

   debtags (#567954), requested 171 days ago
 Description: Enables support for package tags
 Reverse Depends: goplay packagesearch
 Installations reported by Popcon: 2517

   dietlibc (#544060), requested 328 days ago
 Description: diet libc - a libc optimized for small size
 Reverse Depends: libowfat-dev
 Installations reported by Popcon: 236

   doc-central (#566364), requested 1

Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Brian May]

On 23 July 2010 10:03, brian m. carlson  wrote:
> You can use "smtphost reportbug.debian.org" in the configuration file.
> As for blocking direct outgoing SMTP connections:

This is news for me. Is there any thoughts on making this the default?

Based on what you say, it seems to use port 587 by default; is this correct?

(curiously port 587 is blocked on some networks at work - might see if
I can get that changed)

> All you really need is a working email address to put in the From line
> and an Internet connection. That's it.

Yes, need to make sure that the From address is valid... To be fair,
it does print it out, but sometimes I get it wrong all the same.
-- 
Brian May 


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[brian m. carlson]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 09:31:46AM +1000, Brian May wrote:
> The days where every Linux computer has to have a working MTA are
> gone, and typically tends to be very painful especially for
> portable/laptop computers which may not have no single way to send
> outgoing mail that is guaranteed to always work (e.g. networks often
> block direct outgoing SMTP connections).

You can use "smtphost reportbug.debian.org" in the configuration file.
As for blocking direct outgoing SMTP connections:

  lakeview ok % sudo nmap -sS -p587 reportbug.debian.org
  [sudo] password for bmc: 
  
  Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-07-22 23:58 UTC
  Interesting ports on busoni.debian.org (140.211.15.34):
  PORTSTATE SERVICE
  587/tcp open  submission
  
  Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.81 seconds

> It is annoying to have to setup a working MTA just in order to be able
> to report a bug.

All you really need is a working email address to put in the From line
and an Internet connection. That's it.

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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Jesús M. Navarro]

Hi, Don:

On Thursday 22 July 2010 23:51:10 Don Armstrong wrote:
[...]
> Testing's primary purpose is as a staging ground for the next release;
> while it'd be nice to try to keep it working as a fully installable
> version all of the time, progress to the next release is more
> important than that.

And that's exactly my point while such valuable people as Russ Allbery wants 
to challenge that notion.

Cheers.


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Re: constantly usable testing

[Joey Hess]

Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> Have you ever actually tried to call people to arms and *form* the CUT
> team?

No. But it's been 3 years, so please don't wait for me to do it. ;)

-- 
see shy jo


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Jesús M. Navarro]

Hi, Neil:

On Thursday 22 July 2010 20:28:49 Neil Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:53:53 -0700
[..]

> Removing packages from testing does not remove them from any existing
> installation, so it's hard to see how the removal of packages which are
> plainly not suitable for release in stable supports an assertion that
> testing is somehow not intended for real users.

Having a system with packages "which are plainly not suitable for release in 
stable" doesn't ring a bell in your book?

> There are no "internal release master reasons" - there are Release
> Critical bugs

How do you think a bug gains "Critical" status?  Is that the kind of software 
you'd want installed in your system?

> and if anyone in Debian feels that the RC bug which 
> caused the removal of the package was invalid or not as bad as
> reported, then that person needs to get involved and disprove the bug
> or explain why the severity should be downgraded. If users don't do
> that, there can hardly be complaints if those publicly discussed issues
> cause the removal of the package from Debian mirrors.

And once a package is removed from Debian mirrors because it is in so bad 
state even Debian Developers can't stand allowing it being installed on third 
party systems, how exactly does it become uninstalled from all those systems 
that unawaringly did installed it?

Cheers.


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Don Armstrong]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2010, Brian May wrote:
> On 23 July 2010 00:05, Stefano Zacchiroli  wrote:
> > 1) I've been teaching him how to use reportbug [...]
> 
> Recently I have found reportbug and other bts tools rather annoying
> because of their requirement to to get a working email setup[1] on
> the computer first.

All reportbug requires is that you can connect to bugs.debian.org:587.
You don't need anything else to be working at all.


Don Armstrong

-- 
N: Why should I believe that?"
B: Because it's a fact."
N: Fact?"
B: F, A, C, T... fact"
N: So you're saying that I should believe it because it's true. 
   That's your argument?
B: It IS true.
-- "Ploy" http://www.mediacampaign.org/multimedia/Ploy.MPG

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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Jesús M. Navarro]

Hi again, Russ:

On Thursday 22 July 2010 14:21:09 Russ Allbery wrote:
> "Jesús M. Navarro"  writes:
[...]

> I don't agree; I think it's very hard to say the same thing about testing.

I already told you that's about perceptions and that each one has his own so 
I'll try this once more, after that I'll leave.

> Yes, sid sometimes breaks hard,

It's more than that: Sid is *intended* to break hard; it's not a undesired 
side effect.

> although I think if you've been running 
> Linux for a few years the degree to which sid really breaks is somewhat
> exaggerated.

Just currently: it won't boot on some archs (the lilo/grub/grub2 issue).  Even 
if it boots, it won't start X on some systems (the Nvidia problems).  Even if 
it runs and it's able to run X you'll find it cumbersome on your desktop 
environment (the KDE problems).

> I've never had something happen in sid that risked real data 
> loss, for instance; I know we've had cases, but I think they've been
> really rare.  I've had an unbootable system where I needed to boot from a
> rescue CD I think once, and a few cases where X didn't start until I
> rolled back some package upgrades.  For breakage, that's not bad.

Not.  For *Sid* that's not bad.  For a "bleeding edge end user usable ala 
Fedora" that's awful.

> But on testing, it's been rock-solid for me for years.

Again, Testing has been rock solid... considering it is Testing, nothing more, 
nothing else.

> It's not just 
> somewhat less breakage.  I think it's almost no breakage.  Occasionally
> packages get stranded for a long time at back revs because of various
> migration problems, and once or twice I've had to pin something (usually
> because of non-free drivers like fglrx or nvidia that aren't really part
> of Debian), but it's an experience that I can comfortably recommend.

If that's your recommend for an "end user usable quite bleeding edge 
distribution", sorry I can't support your opinion.

> > If anything Sid/Testing could be compared to a "rolling release"
> > distribution ala Gentoo or Arch but not to any "fast releasing" like
> > Fedora or Ubuntu.
>
> No, having run both, I honestly think Debian testing is a superior
> experience to Ubuntu

No, having run both, I honestly think Debian Testing is not superior for a 
plain end user to Ubuntu.  I have about 75 end users that support my opinion 
with facts.

> Packages in Ubuntu
> universe break all the time, and worse, they release broken, and it can be
> harder with Ubuntu to temporarily install just that package from a newer
> release than it usually is with testing to temporarily install something
> from sid.

I sorrily have to say that if that's really your opinion you live in a 
different Universe than myself.

> *boggle*.  Something breaking almost daily is *completely* alien to my
> experience even with running Debian unstable.

*boggle* Something potentially or even in fact breaking on Debian Unstable 
daily is my very day to day experience with Sid as it seems to be that of 
members of debian-users and debian-devel lists.  The fact that I'm able to 
workaround the worst breakages (i.e.: by avoiding upgrading package groups I 
know by the devel list that are in active development) or manage them (by 
forcing upgrades, pinning, reinstalls, etc.) doesn't make any less true that 
Sid is breaking daily -and I wouldn't expect anything else.

Cheers.


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Brian May]

On 23 July 2010 00:05, Stefano Zacchiroli  wrote:
> 1) I've been teaching him how to use reportbug [...]

Recently I have found reportbug and other bts tools rather annoying
because of their requirement to to get a working email setup[1] on the
computer first. It is not uncommon for me to send a bug report that
gets lost and/or is sent from an invalid email address (e.g.
r...@myhost) because the MTA setup was broken[2].

The days where every Linux computer has to have a working MTA are
gone, and typically tends to be very painful especially for
portable/laptop computers which may not have no single way to send
outgoing mail that is guaranteed to always work (e.g. networks often
block direct outgoing SMTP connections).

It is annoying to have to setup a working MTA just in order to be able
to report a bug.

Not to mention, the nature of the bug being reported may make it
impossible to have a working email setup. Or that it is just more
convenient to be able to report the bug from a different computer to
the one that is showing the symptoms.

So often I end up entering bug reports by hand, hardly a selling point
for Debian.

Notes:
[1] through what ever means, e.g. I think reportbug can be configured
to talk directly to a smtp server now, although I don't have an
installation handy to check.

[2] for servers for example it is quite possible to have them send
cron job messages, etc, using an internal only address to another
internal only address, so such a setup may not really be broken.
-- 
Brian May 


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Michael Gilbert]
> That's a great start.  However, Patrick is advocating images that
> autodetect and install drivers/packages for non-free hardware as
> well (not just firmware).  That could probably be solved
> straightforwardly if someone were to just go ahead implement it;
> perhaps by someone already expressing interest in it???

I've implemented installation of hardware specific packages in
debian-installer using discover-pkginstall, which uses the
hardware->package mapping provided in the discover-data package.
I guess it can also be used to install drivers and packages for
non-free hardware, but suspect it would need to be extended to add the
non-free section to sources.list for this to give a good user
experience.

I welcome help with this.  Please test discover-pkginstall and provide
discover-data patches to install the hardware specific packages you
know about. :)

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Michael Hanke]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 03:10:16PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> I've noticed that linking to this page seems to kill threads, which is
> not my intent, but: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/debian/cut/
> 
> The idea still seems reasonable to me, and the work required, beyond
> what is already done, not too much. Shame that nobody has tried to do it
> yet.

A list of the things that have to be done would probably help people to
assess if there is anything they can do to help. Personally, I (almost)
always use testing. I'm very happy with the stability, whenever I
attempted an install it was successful. The only things that makes me
(temporarily) avoid testing in favor of unstable is when a pre-release
freeze causes updates to pile up in unstable.

A constantly available "running stable" release (what testing basically
is most of the time) would be lovely. Would be good to know if there is
anything that can be done by people like me to make it happen.

Michael

-- 
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Re: Moving ACL utilities to /bin?

[Maximiliano Curia]

Hola Christoph Anton Mitterer!

El 22/07/2010 a las 23:13 escribiste:
> Should we then perhaps do the same with nfs4-acl-tools?

Isn't nfs4-acl-tools a set of transition tools to deal with nfsacl until the
linux nfs client implements a posix acl translation?

Anyway, I fail to see a useful example were nfs4-acl-tools would be needed at
boot time.

-- 
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Saludos /\/\ /\ >< `/


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Don Armstrong]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Mike Bird wrote:
> We actually have a few Testing packages (e.g. WordPress) in our
> mostly-Stable servers and we backup copies of those Testing packages
> both on-site and off-site against the vagaries of the Testing
> masters.

This is why snapshot.debian.org exists. If a package disappears from
testing, you can now retrieve it from there.

Testing's primary purpose is as a staging ground for the next release;
while it'd be nice to try to keep it working as a fully installable
version all of the time, progress to the next release is more
important than that.
 

Don Armstrong

-- 
You think to yourself, hey, it's a test tube, for God's sake. Pretty
soon, though, the rush from a test tube isn't enough. You want to
experiment more and more. Then before you know it, you're laying in
the corner of a lab somewhere with a Soxhlet apparatus in one hand,
a three neck flask in the other, strung out and begging for grant
money.
 -- Tim Mitchell, 1994 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize Speech

http://www.donarmstrong.com  http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Raphael Geissert]

Russ Allbery wrote:

> Raphael Geissert  writes:
> 
>> Something similar can be seen from
>> http://lists.debian.org/stats/debian-news.png
> 
>> But it still can't be compared to:
>> http://lists.debian.org/stats/debian-announce.png
> 
> Those graphs look suspiciously like we weren't purging bouncing addresses
> from the mailing lists and then started doing so.  The sudden drop at the
> start of the flattening of the curve in particular looks a lot like a
> one-time address purge followed by ongoing application of a stricter
> bounce policy.

Yes, the exponential growth is suspicious.

> That doesn't explain all of the change, but it does make it seem less
> dire.

I've been trying to find a relationship with other lists, but it is rather 
difficult (without proper statistical analysis and some adjustments to the 
POV.)

The only other announcements lists I think I missed are:
http://lists.debian.org/stats/debian-devel-announce.png
http://lists.debian.org/stats/debian-security-announce.png

They could in fact demonstrate that it was just a cleanup (actually, it 
would be easier if somebody from the listsmasters team shed some light 
here.) It is common for moderated, announce-only, lists to accumulate 
bouncing addresses because often those sending the announcements are only 
those who receive the bounces.

: http://lists.debian.org/stats/debian-devel.png

Number of subscribers didn't drop, much, but the traffic _did_ drop (less 
flamewars? :)

: http://lists.debian.org/stats/debian-security.png

Except for the two big events, the traffic and subscribers did drop; but the 
number of subscribers increased again.

: http://lists.debian.org/stats/debian-user.png

This one is very interesting, as it is the main contact point from our 
users. The number of subscribers did not drop, but the traffic did (non 
surprisingly, the number of subscribers increases when the traffic 
decreases, and vice-versa.)

I'm not drawing a conclusion, that's left to the reader.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Mike Bird]

On Thu July 22 2010 13:43:16 Andrei Popescu wrote:
> On Jo, 22 iul 10, 12:13:41, Mike Bird wrote:
> > We actually have a few Testing packages (e.g. WordPress) in our
> > mostly-Stable servers and we backup copies of those Testing packages
> > both on-site and off-site against the vagaries of the Testing masters.
>
> Now you can use snapshot.debian.org ;)

That is indeed an excellent resource for most people.

We already have our backup system in place to include packages
from other sources such as webmin.

--Mike Bird


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Re: Moving ACL utilities to /bin?

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Hey


Should we then perhaps do the same with nfs4-acl-tools?

Cheers,
Chris.


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Steve McIntyre]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 04:13:15PM -0400, Michael Gilbert wrote:
>On Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:30:36 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>> Yes. We have parallel versions of the netinst images that include
>> firmware packages.
>
>That's a great start.  However, Patrick is advocating images that
>autodetect and install drivers/packages for non-free hardware as well
>(not just firmware).  That could probably be solved straightforwardly
>if someone were to just go ahead implement it; perhaps by someone
>already expressing interest in it???
>
>BTW, where are the non-free images at?  They don't appear to be
>available from cdimage.debian.org [0] or from the debian-installer page.
>
>[0] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_alpha1/i386/iso-cd/

They've only been added as an option after alpha 1. See

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/sid_d-i/arch-latest/i386/iso-cd/

but I'll be moving them to a different location on cdimage.d.o some
time before release.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.st...@einval.com
< sladen> I actually stayed in a hotel and arrived to find a post-it
  note stuck to the mini-bar saying "Paul: This fridge and
  fittings are the correct way around and do not need altering"


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constantly usable testing

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 03:10:16PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> I've noticed that linking to this page seems to kill threads, which is
> not my intent, but: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/debian/cut/
> 
> The idea still seems reasonable to me, and the work required, beyond
> what is already done, not too much. Shame that nobody has tried to do it
> yet.

I've always found CUT to be an interesting (thought) experiment.

A particular nice feature of how you present it, is that it's modular
enough to be tried with little impact on the rest of Debian; as you
observe: « most of which [needed ingredients] are already being done on
a best-effort basis ».  So, in principle, nothing stops you or anyone
else to actually form a CUT team and experiment with the idea.  That's
probably the only way forward from CUT-is-a-thread-killer to have data
that support the feasibility / user appreciation of the idea.

Have you ever actually tried to call people to arms and *form* the CUT
team?  (Or maybe that was exactly the point of your mail …)

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Andrei Popescu]

On Jo, 22 iul 10, 12:13:41, Mike Bird wrote:
> 
> We actually have a few Testing packages (e.g. WordPress) in our
> mostly-Stable servers and we backup copies of those Testing packages
> both on-site and off-site against the vagaries of the Testing masters.

Now you can use snapshot.debian.org ;)

Regards,
Andrei
-- 
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http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Russ Allbery]

Joey Hess  writes:
> Russ Allbery wrote:

>> I don't agree; I think it's very hard to say the same thing about testing.

> I've noticed that linking to this page seems to kill threads, which is
> not my intent, but: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/debian/cut/

> The idea still seems reasonable to me, and the work required, beyond
> what is already done, not too much. Shame that nobody has tried to do it
> yet.

I'm wholeheartedly in favor of this.  I just don't have time to help,
given what I'm already doing in Debian.  :/

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Michael Gilbert]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:30:36 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 04:25:34PM +0200, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl wrote:
> >Hi!
> >
> >Am 22.07.2010 09:21, schrieb Josselin Mouette:
> >
> >>> I think with our next release, we will have got less users. Why?
> >>> We stripped out all binary only firmware images from Linux and put them
> >>> mostly into the non-free linux-firmware image.
> >> If you think this is a problem, you could help with providing non-free
> >> enabled installation images instead of whining.
> >
> >I might remember incorrectly, but isn't that already implemented?
> 
> Yes. We have parallel versions of the netinst images that include
> firmware packages.

That's a great start.  However, Patrick is advocating images that
autodetect and install drivers/packages for non-free hardware as well
(not just firmware).  That could probably be solved straightforwardly
if someone were to just go ahead implement it; perhaps by someone
already expressing interest in it???

BTW, where are the non-free images at?  They don't appear to be
available from cdimage.debian.org [0] or from the debian-installer page.

Best wishes,
Mike

[0] http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_di_alpha1/i386/iso-cd/


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Bjørn Mork]

Ron Johnson  writes:
> On 07/22/2010 11:42 AM, Bjørn Mork wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>> But this is not a problem you can solve.  You cannot avoid requiring
>> some effort from users wanting to report a bug.
>>
>
> For some value of "some effort".
>
> MS Windows has a bug-reporting pop-up window that with the click of a
> button sends traceback info to MS.  GNOME also has such a tool, I
> think.

OK. 

One of your Windows applications prints "foo" on the screen when you
expected it to print "bar".  What do you do?

Reporting bugs requires some effort.  Sending crash dumps does maybe
not.  But then again, Debian has already several apps which will do that
for you.  It is still not bug reporting.


Bjørn


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Re: removal of packages from testing.

[Mike Bird]

On Thu July 22 2010 12:44:39 Neil Williams wrote:
> > We used to use Testing for desktops and laptops, but the hassle
> > of disappearing packages was not worth it.
>
> Any stats on that? Just how many packages were affected? Before or
> after a release freeze was announced?

Real users have to be able to clone or recreate systems
at any time.  Not merely at the most auspicious moments
of the release cycle.

Check our Joey's post for why Continuously Usable Testing
would be a good idea:
http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/debian/cut/

It does seem that Debian is wasting an awful amount of
effort by not making Testing as useful as it could be.

--Mike Bird


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Re: removal of packages from testing.

[Neil Williams]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:13:41 -0700
Mike Bird  wrote:

> On Thu July 22 2010 11:28:49 Neil Williams wrote:
> > Removing packages from testing does not remove them from any
> > existing installation, so it's hard to see how the removal of
> > packages which are plainly not suitable for release in stable
> > supports an assertion that testing is somehow not intended for real
> > users.
> 
> Real users have to be able to recreate a dead system or install
> new systems at any time.

Really?? That seems far beyond the requirements of most "ordinary"
users. Exceptional users could always arrange a local mirror, which
doesn't have to remove packages.

> We actually have a few Testing packages (e.g. WordPress) in our
> mostly-Stable servers and we backup copies of those Testing packages
> both on-site and off-site against the vagaries of the Testing masters.

These are not vagaries - packages are only removed from testing for
essential reasons.
 
> We used to use Testing for desktops and laptops, but the hassle
> of disappearing packages was not worth it. 

Any stats on that? Just how many packages were affected? Before or
after a release freeze was announced?

-- 


Neil Williams
=
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/



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Re: Anyone collected historical data for popcons of derivative(s)?

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
> > share.  I will also inquire webmas...@u.c and will CC you for the
> > reference.  Thanks again
> They are available on http://ubuntu-popcon.43-1.org/data/.

That is great -- please keep piling them up ;)  I hope it is ok if I
mirror it entirely

N.B. I have not got any reply from webmas...@u.c yet
-- 
  .-.
=--   /v\  =
Keep in touch// \\ (yoh@|www.)onerussian.com
Yaroslav Halchenko  /(   )\   ICQ#: 60653192
   Linux User^^-^^[17]



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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Joey Hess]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> I don't agree; I think it's very hard to say the same thing about testing.

I've noticed that linking to this page seems to kill threads, which is
not my intent, but: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/debian/cut/

The idea still seems reasonable to me, and the work required, beyond
what is already done, not too much. Shame that nobody has tried to do it
yet.

-- 
see shy jo


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Mike Bird]

On Thu July 22 2010 11:28:49 Neil Williams wrote:
> Removing packages from testing does not remove them from any existing
> installation, so it's hard to see how the removal of packages which are
> plainly not suitable for release in stable supports an assertion that
> testing is somehow not intended for real users.

Real users have to be able to recreate a dead system or install
new systems at any time.

We actually have a few Testing packages (e.g. WordPress) in our
mostly-Stable servers and we backup copies of those Testing packages
both on-site and off-site against the vagaries of the Testing masters.

We used to use Testing for desktops and laptops, but the hassle
of disappearing packages was not worth it.  In practice this means we
cannot use Debian on most desktops and laptops until the hardware is
about a year old.  There's seldom any point in changing distros then
although I'm actually using Mostly-Stable on my own laptop so that it
matches our servers.

Mostly-Stable is great for (most) servers though.

--Mike Bird


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Neil Williams]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:53:53 -0700
Mike Bird  wrote:

> On Thu July 22 2010 05:21:09 Russ Allbery wrote:
> > But on testing, it's been rock-solid for me for years.  It's not
> > just somewhat less breakage.  I think it's almost no breakage.
> > Occasionally packages get stranded for a long time at back revs
> > because of various migration problems, and once or twice I've had
> > to pin something (usually because of non-free drivers like fglrx or
> > nvidia that aren't really part of Debian), but it's an experience
> > that I can comfortably recommend.
> 
> I've been bitten too many times by the "We removed X from Testing for
> internal release master reasons - please don't imagine Testing is
> intended for real users" syndrome.

Removing packages from testing does not remove them from any existing
installation, so it's hard to see how the removal of packages which are
plainly not suitable for release in stable supports an assertion that
testing is somehow not intended for real users.

There are no "internal release master reasons" - there are Release
Critical bugs and if anyone in Debian feels that the RC bug which
caused the removal of the package was invalid or not as bad as
reported, then that person needs to get involved and disprove the bug
or explain why the severity should be downgraded. If users don't do
that, there can hardly be complaints if those publicly discussed issues
cause the removal of the package from Debian mirrors.

-- 


Neil Williams
=
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http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/



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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Russ Allbery]

Mike Bird  writes:
> On Thu July 22 2010 05:21:09 Russ Allbery wrote:

>> But on testing, it's been rock-solid for me for years.  It's not just
>> somewhat less breakage.  I think it's almost no breakage.  Occasionally
>> packages get stranded for a long time at back revs because of various
>> migration problems, and once or twice I've had to pin something
>> (usually because of non-free drivers like fglrx or nvidia that aren't
>> really part of Debian), but it's an experience that I can comfortably
>> recommend.

> I've been bitten too many times by the "We removed X from Testing for
> internal release master reasons - please don't imagine Testing is
> intended for real users" syndrome.

Why do you care if they temporarily removed X?  I mean, yes, that's a real
pain if that happens during the window when you're trying to install a new
system, and I suppose that could happen, but you have to get pretty
unlucky.  Nearly all of the time, you have X already installed, so what
difference does it make if it's not available from the repository for a
little bit?  It doesn't break the packages already on your system.  (In
fact, this is usually done to ensure that things sequence such that
upgrades *won't* break the packages already on your system.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Mike Bird]

On Thu July 22 2010 05:21:09 Russ Allbery wrote:
> But on testing, it's been rock-solid for me for years.  It's not just
> somewhat less breakage.  I think it's almost no breakage.  Occasionally
> packages get stranded for a long time at back revs because of various
> migration problems, and once or twice I've had to pin something (usually
> because of non-free drivers like fglrx or nvidia that aren't really part
> of Debian), but it's an experience that I can comfortably recommend.

I've been bitten too many times by the "We removed X from Testing for
internal release master reasons - please don't imagine Testing is intended
for real users" syndrome.

I would certainly like to see the kind of Testing you describe.

--Mike Bird


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[David Claughton]

On 22/07/10 09:44, Jesús M. Navarro wrote:
> Hi, Manoj:
> 
> On Thursday 22 July 2010 07:17:15 Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 21 2010, Will wrote:
>> > Also I imagine that it helps that they have some kind of commercial
>> > support behind their projects, whereas Debian has little/none of that.
>>
>> One of the  issues I have faced in trying to get Debian
>>  introduced in big companies is the percieved lack of a coherent
>>  copyright; and company lawyers being uncomfortable with the concept
>>  that most licesnse pass the dfsg, but we can't guarantee that, please
>>  go read several thoudand individual license docs to figure out what you
>>  are getting.
> 
> That's again about perception.  Debian has exactly the same copyright 
> coherence (or lack of it) than SUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu or even proprietary 
> Unices.
> 

It might be just my cynical viewpoint - but I've always suspected that
part of the attraction of a commercial distro to a big company is the
perception that there's always someone to sue if you feel you've been
left open to liability.

If your supplier has millions in the bank for potential settlements,
maybe you're more comfortable accepting all those licenses without quite
as much scrutiny?

Cheers,

David.







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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Vincent Bernat]

OoO  En ce début  d'après-midi nuageux  du jeudi  22 juillet  2010, vers
14:26, Russ Allbery  disait :

> In Launchpad, for anything in universe, the typical experience is that
> your bug goes into a black hole until a month or two later someone sends
> you some form letter about it.

By form letter, you mean automatic closing of the bug on the base that a
new  Ubuntu has  been released?  This  is why  I think  that Ubuntu  bug
reports are usually not helpful at  all when you try to solve a problem:
nobody takes care of the bug and it is automatically closed.

However, the automatic backtrace with the help of debug repository would
be useful to have in Debian. We need the debug repository first.
-- 
Avoid temporary variables.
- The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plauger)


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Don Armstrong]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Russell Coker wrote:
> The ability to have reportbug write it's output to a text file that
> can be copied elsewhere is a good thing. It would be nice if
> reportbug on a system with email access could then create an email
> based on that file instead of requiring copy/paste (which is time
> consuming and error prone).

If a machine has network access, you don't even need e-mail configured.
 
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?ordering=normal;archive=0;src=linux-2.6;repeatmerged=0
> 
> Also bugs.debian.org could do with some performance improvements
> (not sure if it's hardware or software). The above URL takes 55
> seconds, getting a faster response would make it easier to report
> bugs.

That's something which is on my todo list, and I'm about halfway
through fixing the load times of packages like this. Probably will be
finished some time in the middle of debcamp.
 

Don Armstrong

-- 
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but
won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
 -- Bill Vaughan

http://www.donarmstrong.com  http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Don Armstrong]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Ian Jackson wrote:
> 2nd, related, fallacy: Everyone has a useful contribution to make to
> Debian. This is not the case.

Even though not everyone may have a useful contribution, we need the
contributions of people who actually can contribute usefully.

Discouraging useless contributions is fine to a point, but done
improperly, it can also alienate those who contribute usefully (or
want to contribute usefully.)

> Often empowering our users means _avoiding_ encouraging them to
> communicate with us, because we can't do our work if they all do.

The best thing we can do is to try to empower our users to provide
useful contributions in a manner that scales without requiring linear
increases in developer time.


Don Armstrong

-- 
If god is always watching over us
who's driving?
 -- a softer world #487
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=487

http://www.donarmstrong.com  http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Don Armstrong]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> So, point 2: are we *advertising* reportbug enough to our users?

Perhaps not, but it's literally the very first thing listed on

http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

which is linked from http://www.debian.org and the first result for
reporting bugs in debian, and the second for debian bug.

What would probably be useful is if people like your friend who didn't
know about reportbug first were asked what steps they'd take (or
actually did take) to try to report bugs in the first place.


Don Armstrong

-- 
She was alot like starbucks.
IE, generic and expensive.
 -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch3.htm

http://www.donarmstrong.com  http://rzlab.ucr.edu


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Ron Johnson]

On 07/22/2010 11:42 AM, Bjørn Mork wrote:
[snip]


But this is not a problem you can solve.  You cannot avoid requiring
some effort from users wanting to report a bug.



For some value of "some effort".

MS Windows has a bug-reporting pop-up window that with the click of 
a button sends traceback info to MS.  GNOME also has such a tool, I 
think.


Windows, however, is a closed GUI-only environment which makes it 
easy for them to integrate such a feature into the OS and MSVC.


--
Seek truth from facts.


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Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Didier 'OdyX' Raboud]

(CC'ing debian-derivatives)

Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:

> The number of submissions to the Debian popularity-contest collector
> is falling, and has done so for some time now.  This can be easily
> seen on http://popcon.debian.org/stat/sub-i386.png >.
> 
> This is mostly caused by a fall in the number of Lenny installations,
> as can be seen from
> http://popcon.debian.org/stat/release-1year.png >.
> 
> Anyone got any idea how to can get more machines to report to
> popcon.debian.org?  Or can there be some other problem causing the
> fall in the number of submissions?
> 
> Happy hacking,

Hi, 

(I'm not a native speaker and my writing style might feel paternalist or 
lesson-teaching: that's not the intention - add a "IMHO" in front of every 
sentence.)

... The facts ...

The measurement tools we have⁰ are now somehow showing a decrease of 
Debian's direct userbase: less popcon reporters, less debian-news 
subscribers, etc.

As for popcon, many have explained their reasons for not enabling popcon on 
their machines. Some other temptatively explained what could increase the 
popcon reporters ratio within our userbase. But I chosed the word "ratio" 
carefully: we can try hard to increase the ratio of Debian users with popcon 
enabled (by enforcing it on the new installs, by making the reporting easier 
or less verbose): this will only get us a more precise measurement of our 
userbase: this doesn't make it bigger.

I think we should now face the facts: what we long feared is now probably 
beginning to happen: our direct userbase is shrinking.

... Widening our view ...

But again: words. Our _direct_ userbase is shrinking. Our biggest 
derivatives — Ubuntu — sees a constant growing in popcon reporters (more 
than one order of magnitude both in absolute and in growth). And it has been 
established that around 70% of Ubuntu packages are shipped unmodified: all 
those users are using directly our packages!

Recently a bunch of Ubuntu-derived distributions decided to base their work 
on Debian instead of Ubuntu (gNewSense, Linux Mint, OpenGeu, Crunchbang, …). 
Those distributions now get closer to us: there will be a step less between 
our packages and theirs.

All those distributions carry their own set of users and developers. Those 
developers know the Debian packaging techniques (not always up to Debian's 
quality, but still…); their users are using most of our packages unmodified.

I feel that many of the recent new DDs had grown their skills on children 
distros before looking up (or down if that matters) to Debian; to finally 
become DDs: we would be seeing a flow back of developers from children 
distros to Debian?

All in all, although our direct userbase might be shrinking, it might be 
good to be reminded that our wider userbase is not: more and more people are 
using our packages. Sure they are not Debian users nor Debian popcon 
reporters, but they still use (and sometimes enjoy) our work. And that's 
good.

Based on that, we might feel that we are only giving without getting back 
(in form of bugs, quality, users, developers): that's where we have a word 
to say and it's our turn to play.

... The future ...

Although we might have always thought Debian as an distribution "made for 
real users", it has always had derivatives. Debian now has the most 
successful ever distribution as derivative! Ubuntu is not an users sink 
only: it is a chance we must handle! We certainly lost tons of users in 
favor of Ubuntu, but they still use our work, our packages: for most of 
them, unmodified!

Debian has no parent distribution: it is the sane root on which many others 
base their work in order to achieve different goals than Debian's: wide 
adoption for a commercial success¹ (Ubuntu), more ease to get non-free 
software (Mint), Enlightenment-based (Opengeu), live-cd for easy boot 
(Knoppix), education (Skolelinux), phone (Hackable:1), … [There are many 
more examples]. Each derivative is basing itself on the rock-solid base of 
Debian and enhances (in its view) one particular aspect of it in order to 
achieve a more specific goal. That's free software and it's very good.

This very special position of Debian within the distributions ecosystem is a 
great chance: a great part (not to say the majority) of GNU/Linux users are 
direct _or_indirect_ users of Debian.

We can't anymore consider our direct users as our only users: all those 
derivatives are also special Debian users and their users are indirect users 
of Debian: our direct+inderct userbase is growing!

We must now teach all those derivatives how easy our processes and tools 
are, how kind we are with informed bugreporters and with patch providers, 
how open we are to integrate all sorts of improvements (even distribution-
specific²), how both universal and flexible Debian (as distro and as humans) 
can be. At the top of all that: we must teach to all our derivatives that 
contributing to Debian directly :

1) doesn't forbid to keep a difference/spe

Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Bastien ROUCARIES]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 6:11 PM, Norbert Preining  wrote:
> On Do, 22 Jul 2010, Bjørn Mork wrote:
>> If you are still unable to find and use reportbug, then I doubt that you
>> are able to identify a bug and much less provide the information
>> required to actually fix it.
>
> Agreed upon that. Typical example are Ubuntu bugs. I am subscribed to
> the bug reports of my packages in Ubuntu, and it is a long time that
> I stopped reading these completely useless "It does not work" bug
> reports ... sad as it is.

Yes ia gree for some kind of bug, but for coredump and signal abort
bug, unbuntu is really really useful.

Bastien


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Bastien ROUCARIES]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Andreas Tille  wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 04:05:17PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>>    So, point 2: are we *advertising* reportbug enough to our users?
>>    In particular, I'm thinking about advertising in "push mode" rather
>>    then in "pull mode".
>
> No, we obviosely do not.  When staffing bothes in the past I regularly
> asked people to report their problem and they had no idea how to do
> (because they did not know reportbug) even if long term Debian users.  I
> think I suggested in the past (shame on my provided no patch) to
> advertise reportbug in the installation process somehow.
>
> Kind regards

Why not a tool a la kerneloops for debian ? If a process coredump,
save the dump (core pipe is in the kernel) popup something in the
taskbar and ask user if to run reportbug ng ?

Bastien

>


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Bjørn Mork]

Stefano Zacchiroli  writes:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 06:00:44PM +0200, Bjørn Mork wrote:
>> > No, we obviosely do not.  When staffing bothes in the past I regularly
>> > asked people to report their problem and they had no idea how to do
>> > (because they did not know reportbug) even if long term Debian users. 
>> I believe it's extremely unlikely that you have anything valuable to
>> report if you are unable to find reportbug.
>
> That is just not the attitude we should have, IMVHO.
>
> Basically, this reasoning has an underlying argument which goes like:
> "there's an entry barrier that we are willfully imposing to our users,
> either you're good enough to discover the tool, or we're not interested
> in your bug reports". 

No, not at all.  The reasoning is based on the observation that 
a) finding reportbug requires an obvious google search and reading two
   short lines of text, and
b) describing any problem, whether bug or not, is way more complicated
   than a)

If you can do b) then you almost certainly can do a).  If you cannot do
b) then you have no reason to try a).  It has nothing to do with being
"good enough".

> Now, it *might* be that the net result of that is
> that you get higher quality bug reports, but I'm more inclined to
> believe that it is just wishful thinking.
>
> For instance, the story I reported involved a skilled programmer, which
> was just too lazy to look for the good tool.

Sure.  I can understand that.  Reporting bugs do require some work, and
I am also among those who have refrained from doing so because I didn't
want to spend any time on it.

But this is not a problem you can solve.  You cannot avoid requiring
some effort from users wanting to report a bug.



Bjørn


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 06:00:44PM +0200, Bjørn Mork wrote:
> > No, we obviosely do not.  When staffing bothes in the past I regularly
> > asked people to report their problem and they had no idea how to do
> > (because they did not know reportbug) even if long term Debian users. 
> I believe it's extremely unlikely that you have anything valuable to
> report if you are unable to find reportbug.

That is just not the attitude we should have, IMVHO.

Basically, this reasoning has an underlying argument which goes like:
"there's an entry barrier that we are willfully imposing to our users,
either you're good enough to discover the tool, or we're not interested
in your bug reports".  Now, it *might* be that the net result of that is
that you get higher quality bug reports, but I'm more inclined to
believe that it is just wishful thinking.

For instance, the story I reported involved a skilled programmer, which
was just too lazy to look for the good tool. Frankly speaking, I can
understand the stance. For most of us Debian is *the* most important
FOSS project out there, so we take the time to do things "properly". But
I can't personally claim that I'm putting the same amount effort in all
other FOSS projects I use as a user, e.g. to register to their upstream
BTS and behave as a conscientious FOSS user. I simply can't do that with
*all* of them. Hence, as a user, I'm happy when upstream offers some
simplified way to give feedback to them, e.g. integrated in the
application itself.

Now, looking at it from the side of Debian, I feel guilty in discovering
that I'm not doing enough in advertising how Debian wants his users to
behave in reporting bugs. I also consider a significant loss that of bug
reports that we don't receive due to this. From this discussion it's
clear that not all of us think it's a loss unless we are able to fix
currently reported bugs (see e.g. Ian or Joss replies), but I personally
disagree---although I concede that things might look very different when
seen from the POV of maintainers of vastly popular packages :-).

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Josselin Mouette]

Le jeudi 22 juillet 2010 à 17:11 +0200, Bastien ROUCARIES a écrit :
> Automated backtrace ala unbuntu will really ease the debian maintener job.

Since you don’t seem to be aware of it: full support for ddebs is mostly
waiting for a patch to dak.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.
: :' :  “Fuck you sir, don’t be suprised when you die if
`. `'   you burn in Hell, because I am a solid Christian
  `-and I am praying for you.”   --  Mike


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Norbert Preining]

On Do, 22 Jul 2010, Bjørn Mork wrote:
> If you are still unable to find and use reportbug, then I doubt that you
> are able to identify a bug and much less provide the information
> required to actually fix it.

Agreed upon that. Typical example are Ubuntu bugs. I am subscribed to 
the bug reports of my packages in Ubuntu, and it is a long time that
I stopped reading these completely useless "It does not work" bug
reports ... sad as it is.

Best wishes

Norbert

Norbert Preiningprein...@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan TeX Live & Debian Developer
DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094

Trillian did a little research in the ship's copy of
THHGTTG. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness.
and good luck.'
It was cross-referenced to the entry concerning the size of
the Universe and ways of coping with that.
 --- One of the more preferable pieces of advice contained in
 --- the Guide.
 --- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Bjørn Mork]

Andreas Tille  writes:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 04:05:17PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>>So, point 2: are we *advertising* reportbug enough to our users?
>>In particular, I'm thinking about advertising in "push mode" rather
>>then in "pull mode".
>
> No, we obviosely do not.  When staffing bothes in the past I regularly
> asked people to report their problem and they had no idea how to do
> (because they did not know reportbug) even if long term Debian users. 

I believe it's extremely unlikely that you have anything valuable to
report if you are unable to find reportbug.

Googling for "Debian bug" or similar (actually even when I misspelled
Debian), lists http://www.debian.org/Bugs/ as the first hit.  The second
heading on that page says "How to report a bug in Debian".  It is a
single line linking to http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting which starts
with "We strongly recommend that you report bugs in Debian using the
reportbug program." and continues with further instructions on how to do
that.

If you are still unable to find and use reportbug, then I doubt that you
are able to identify a bug and much less provide the information
required to actually fix it.


Bjørn


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Bjørn Mork]

Russ Allbery  writes:

> Having followed the Ubuntu bugs for many of my packages for several years
> now, I think Debian's bug system is considerably more user-friendly than
> Launchpad.  It may not be as *pretty*, and it's not as easy to submit a
> bug, but when you submit a bug to Debian, the chances are fairly good that
> someone will look at it and reply with a detailed understanding of both
> your bug and the package (at least unless you're reporting a bug to one of
> the packages that notoriously gets more bugs than anyone could ever deal
> with, usually about other software, like the kernel or the desktop
> metapackages).  Debian's BTS is more friendly in that old-fashioned sense
> that involves interacting with people.  :)

Yes.  Absolutely.  When googling for some problem, I usually avoid any
link into Launchpad because my experience is that it consists of a vague
problem description, a number of "me 2"'s, some unrelated problems, and
maybe a suggested horrendous workaround.  I don't think I've ever seen a
real solution there.

The Debian BTS is the opposite.  There you can expect bug reports to be
followed up with an intelligent discussion, and often a patch or other
good solution to the problem.  If not, you will at least find enough
information to know that you are not alone with your problem.

BTW, I must also add that the kernel is no exception in Debian, even
though it of course fits the description "gets more bugs than anyone
could ever deal with".  The kernel team does an extremely good job
dealing with them.

IMHO, the Debian BTS and the users and developers making it what it is,
is one of the main advantages Debian has over other distributions.


Bjørn


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Ian Jackson]

Bastien ROUCARIES writes ("Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, 
was: Re: The number  of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling"):
> The problem is joe simple user find one package that does not work,
> it seatrch on the web how to report bug, does not find, does not
> report it, and switch to unbuntu. [...]

Why is this a problem ?  Very likely their "bug" isn't a bug at all,
and even if it is it will be a lot of work to try find out that it is
and identify the bug.

It seems to me that Debian will be better served if we spend our
effort working on other bugs that are more likely to be real.  In the
end the user in question, and people like them, will be better off,
too, because Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, so when we are working to
improve Debian we are often working to improve Ubuntu as well.

Or is it just a problem because you don't like a downward graph in
distrowatch or google trends ?  Are we managing by targets here ?

Ian.


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Ian Jackson]

Bastien ROUCARIES writes ("Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, 
was: Re: The number  of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling"):
>   For isntance the bug sytem could be made simplier for joe
> simpler user, using an http interface than reportbug-ng [...]

I think what's really underlying many of the complaints about the
difficulty of reporting bugs in Debian is this:

People think it is unfair that naive users find it difficult to report
bugs in Debian and that they're not encouraged to do so.  People feel
that those users are being disenfranchised, or ignored.

I want to tackle this head-on, because while it has some emotional
appeal if you don't think about it too hard, it's criticial to
understand the fallacies it's based on if you're going to try to
understand how a software development effort like Debian has to work.


Firstly, we need to understand the context, and why it is that
socioeconomics of software development so magically allow everyone to
share, for free, in hugely sophisticated high-quality systems.  This
works because reproducing the software has negligible cost to the
people who develop it.  Free software works because one person's
afternoon's hacking can improve the lives of many millions of people,
by a very small amount each, without the programmer having to think
about each of those users.  But you knew that.

The corrolary is that anything which _does_ involves a per-user
interaction with the developers is extremely difficult to deal with.
If my afternoon's hacking session is going to be sent to ten million
people, one in a thousand of whom send me a message which takes me ten
seconds to deal with, that's a further 27 hours of of my time.  It
doesn't scale.  


So, what's wrong with the feeling that it's unfair not to want bug
reports from certain users ?

1st fallacy: The point of bug reports is to listen to users or solve
their problems.  This is not the case.  The point of bug reports is to
help developers improve software.  If a particular user's bug report
is unlikely to help developers improve the software then to encourage
the user to report bugs is useless, and is therefore a waste of both
the developers' and the user's time.  It's dishonest to the user,
even.


2nd, related, fallacy: Everyone has a useful contribution to make to
Debian.  This is not the case.

We have limited resources for communicating with, educating, and
reviewing the contributions from our users.  Very limited, compared to
the number of users.  Some users are already able or nearly able to
directly improve the software or documentation, or already have the
skills necessary for diagnosing and investigating problems.  But for
other users the small positive effect of their contribution will be
far outweighed by the need to nursemaid them, undo their mistakes,
etc.  Once again, to encourage such users to try to "help" is a waste
both of their time and ours.  

I'm reminded of my sister's 3-year-old child "helping" with the
cooking: good for the kid's development, but not necessarily for the
dish and certainly not less effort for the parent.  We don't have the
time to play parent to all our users and we shouldn't try.

Incidentally, Ubuntu have written the contrary statement into their
Code of Conduct.  It may be doctrinally very encouraging to have a
policy saying that everyone can make a valuable contribution, but that
doesn't make it true.


3rd fallacy: Free Software is free and good because users can join and
contribute to the projects that produce it.

No.  Free Software is Free because it allows users to modify the
software _for themselves_, _downstream_, and to share their changes.
It is no less free if it is produced by an opaque cabal.  There is no
inherent need for users to be able to participate in its production;
indeed, for the reasons I've explained such participation can be
counterproductive.

Of course the quality of the software benefits from open and public
development, and the quality of our own interactions benefit from
doing things in public.  I'm not suggesting that we should close down
our public BTS or move everything from -devel to -private.  But, users
do not need to be "enfranchised" or empowered by us inviting them to
become "involved".  

The way we empower our users is by providing them with high quality
and sophisticated software which does what they want, and by making
sure that they have the freedom to share and modify it.


Often empowering our users means _avoiding_ encouraging them to
communicate with us, because we can't do our work if they all do.

Ian.


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Benjamin Drung]

Am Donnerstag, den 22.07.2010, 23:14 +0800 schrieb Paul Wise:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Giacomo A. Catenazzi  wrote:
> 
> > I think it is bugous to ask such question.
> >
> > IMHO we should care about improving Debian, going toward the perfection, not
> > about increasing the number of users (which should
> > be a nice secondary effect).
> >
> > I don't think increasing the number of Debian user is per se
> > a nice things, after looking Ubuntu.
> ...
> > So, let see how to improve Debian, not how to increase
> > our userbase!
> 
> The two are not entirely unrelated. I was a user of Debian before I
> was a Debian contributor. All developers come from a pool of users and
> with more developers we can make a better distro. Figuring out how to
> convert users into developers is the hard part though.

Debian contributors don't have to be Debian users at the beginning. They
can come from Debian-derived distributions and contribute directly to
Debian to avoid work duplication.

-- 
Benjamin Drung
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Maintainer (www.debian.org)


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 04:05:17PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>So, point 2: are we *advertising* reportbug enough to our users?
>In particular, I'm thinking about advertising in "push mode" rather
>then in "pull mode".

No, we obviosely do not.  When staffing bothes in the past I regularly
asked people to report their problem and they had no idea how to do
(because they did not know reportbug) even if long term Debian users.  I
think I suggested in the past (shame on my provided no patch) to
advertise reportbug in the installation process somehow.

Kind regards

 Andreas.

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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Josef Spillner]

In data giovedì, 22. di luglio 2010 17:24:43, Nicholas Bamber ha scritto:
> Okay so that's what I learnt in school today. Could we have a link to it
> on the from page? There is room in that red menu bar. Actually I tried
> to look for it under "support" and various other places, but I could not
> find it.

Bonus teaching for today: There are more, even bigger Debian forums on the 
web, in several languages. Therefore, a link to an overview page with some 
explanation of the target groups would be a refined suggestion based on yours. 
The right page would probably be http://wiki.debian.org/DebianResources, 
although I don't think that specific commercial product advertisement (for 
Google services) belongs into it.

Josef


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Bastien ROUCARIES]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Ian Jackson
 wrote:
> Stefano Zacchiroli writes ("teaching users how to submit good bug reports"):
>>    So, point 2: are we *advertising* reportbug enough to our users?
>>    In particular, I'm thinking about advertising in "push mode" rather
>>    then in "pull mode".
>
> This approach, trying to make it easier to report bugs, supposes that
> most (or even a substantial fraction) of the bugs in deployed Debian
> systems, as experienced by users, are there because no-one has yet
> reported that bug.
>
> I don't think that's true at all.  Looking at the bugs which are
> outstanding in Debian in general, and my own experience, it seems to
> me that the main reason for the presence of most bugs is lack of
> available effort for fixing them.  The obvious conclusion is that if
> we increase the number of bugs submitted we will divert effort from
> bug fixing to triage.
>
> I think that people who want Debian to deal better with bug reports
> from a wider audience should work on improving the available triage
> effort (both in quantity and quality!), and the available fixing
> effort.
>
> When popular and high-profile end-user-oriented packages have low
> numbers of outstanding bugs, it will be time to think about how we can
> get more reports so that we can further improve the quality.
>
Automated backtrace ala unbuntu will really ease the debian maintener job.

bastien


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Paul Wise]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:24 PM, Nicholas Bamber
 wrote:

> Okay so that's what I learnt in school today. Could we have a link to it on
> the from page? There is room in that red menu bar. Actually I tried to look
> for it under "support" and various other places, but I could not find it.

Please file a bug on the www.debian.org pseudo-package.

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pabs

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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Charles Plessy]

Le Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:54:16AM +0300, Teemu Likonen a écrit :
> 
> Debian's attractiveness (or perhaps the lack of it) is probably a sum of
> several different things. I think one of those things is the front page
> . The page may implicitly suggest that there is
> nothing happening in the project. It looks almost always the same,
> almost like one of those abandoned projects.
> 
> I understand the "patched are welcome" nature of the project but there
> has already been an example implementations for the front page. A couple
> of years back there was lengthy discussion which even made me feel that
> now it's really happening, the front page will change soon, but still
> nothing. Were do those suggestions go?

Hi all,

in my opinion, it is not only a question of design, but of infrastructure.  For
me, the combination of CVS and WML finally eroded all my motivation over the
years for keeping some life in the pages under /devel/debian-med. I would
welcome any change of VCS and language, even if it means losing the history or
rewriting the pages from scratch.

Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Bastien ROUCARIES]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Russell Coker  wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Russ Allbery  wrote:
>> In Launchpad, for anything in universe, the typical experience is that
>> your bug goes into a black hole until a month or two later someone sends
>> you some form letter about it.
>
> That's why I stopped reporting bugs against Fedora years ago, they kept being
> automatically closed a couple of releases later.  I would report a bug in RHEL
> and have it not deemed suitable for an update to the current release (which
> was fair), I would report it against Fedora and then it would be closed
> automatically.
>
> The Red Hat bug tracking system is less efficient for me than the Debian one.
> The ratio of bug reports that they receive to the number of bugs that they can
> fix is obviously worse than that of Debian.  So the end result is that people
> like me are deterred from filing bug reports and people with less ability to
> correctly diagnose problems find it easier.

> It seems to me that the Debian bug tracking system is better than that of Red
> Hat.  I don't recall anything about the Ubuntu bug tracker so I can't comment
> on that.
>
> In recent times I haven't bothered trying to report bugs against other
> distributions.  When I find a bug in some other distribution I develop a work-
> around for it there and then try to reproduce it in Debian.  If I can
> reproduce it in Debian then I file a Debian bug report.
>
> --
I agree it will be nice also like forwarded to cross reference bug in
other distro bugzilla and automatically detect whan other distro have
cooked a patch instead to found it manually.

Bastien


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Nicholas Bamber]

Okay so that's what I learnt in school today. Could we have a link to it 
on the from page? There is room in that red menu bar. Actually I tried 
to look for it under "support" and various other places, but I could not 
find it.



Paul Wise wrote:

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Nicholas Bamber  wrote:

  

I reckon a forum would be much easier to finance (even with moderators) than
a phone line. It could probably be integrated with one of the mailing lists
which would go a long way to make it look friendlier.



forums.debian.net has existed for years.

  



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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Bastien ROUCARIES]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Russ Allbery  wrote:
> Bastien ROUCARIES  writes:
>
>> Support of debian is excellent but we are less user friendly than
>> ubuntu. For isntance the bug sytem could be made simplier for joe
>> simpler user, using an http interface than reportbug-ng (what should be
>> installed by default for your desktop user) or even mail. I think having
>> a simple bug report form and wizard will really help your user.
>
> Having followed the Ubuntu bugs for many of my packages for several years
> now, I think Debian's bug system is considerably more user-friendly than
> Launchpad.  It may not be as *pretty*, and it's not as easy to submit a
> bug, but when you submit a bug to Debian, the chances are fairly good that
> someone will look at it and reply with a detailed understanding of both
> your bug and the package (at least unless you're reporting a bug to one of
> the packages that notoriously gets more bugs than anyone could ever deal
> with, usually about other software, like the kernel or the desktop
> metapackages).  Debian's BTS is more friendly in that old-fashioned sense
> that involves interacting with people.  :)

Yes for expert not for joe simple user. I do not argue to change your
bug report system by mail that is wonderfull but add an http klayer
will be really nice (think also to entreprise user behind proxy with
only webmail available)


> In Launchpad, for anything in universe, the typical experience is that
> your bug goes into a black hole until a month or two later someone sends
> you some form letter about it.

Not for my package imagemagick autogerated coredump with backtrace are
really really help full and allow to see for instance that bugs in not
in my package but in libtiff or in srvg
>
>> Increasing your quality also, will improve your user base.
>
> I don't think doing what Launchpad does would improve Debian's quality.  I
> suspect it would actually make it worse by hiding issues under piles of
> semi-autogenerated bug reports with no information and consuming developer
> time with triage that isn't improving packages.

Mark bug report gerated by web user using a special tag and allow only
maintener like me that optin to get automated bug report. In my case
it will increase the quality.

Bastien


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Bastien ROUCARIES]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Josselin Mouette  wrote:
> Le jeudi 22 juillet 2010 à 11:08 +0200, Bastien ROUCARIES a écrit :
>> Support of debian is excellent but we are less user friendly than
>> ubuntu. For isntance the bug sytem could be made simplier for joe
>> simpler user, using an http interface than reportbug-ng (what should
>> be installed by default for your desktop user) or even mail. I think
>> having a simple bug report form and wizard  will really help your
>> user.
>
> We already have too many bug reports. What good would it do to have
> more?

The problem is joe simple user find one package that does not work,
it seatrch on the web how to report bug, does not find, does not
report it, and switch to unbuntu. BTW I check unbuntu bug number and
even if the quality is lower they are often really helpful.
Particularly, the core dump automatic generated bug report, with
backtrace automacally created from debug repositionnery that really
help maintener even is joe simple user is clueless (and for medium
level user it improve the bug reporting and allow to trace hard to
reproduce bug)

Bastien


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Paul Wise]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Giacomo A. Catenazzi  wrote:

> I think it is bugous to ask such question.
>
> IMHO we should care about improving Debian, going toward the perfection, not
> about increasing the number of users (which should
> be a nice secondary effect).
>
> I don't think increasing the number of Debian user is per se
> a nice things, after looking Ubuntu.
...
> So, let see how to improve Debian, not how to increase
> our userbase!

The two are not entirely unrelated. I was a user of Debian before I
was a Debian contributor. All developers come from a pool of users and
with more developers we can make a better distro. Figuring out how to
convert users into developers is the hard part though.

-- 
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pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Paul Wise]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Nicholas Bamber  wrote:

> I reckon a forum would be much easier to finance (even with moderators) than
> a phone line. It could probably be integrated with one of the mailing lists
> which would go a long way to make it look friendlier.

forums.debian.net has existed for years.

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pabs

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Re: Moving diversions between packages

[Ian Jackson]

Russ Allbery writes ("Moving diversions between packages"):
> 4. Do something else to move the diversions that I haven't thought of and
>that would wonderfully solve all of our problems.

Why not have the new package ship libGL.so.1 to a more specific
filename and create a symlink named libGL.so.1 by hand in its 
postinst ?  That way you can defer doing the diversion until that part
of the postinst, by which time the old package and its diversion are
gone.

IWBNI dpkg handled diversions much more internally than it does, but
it's a complicated problem.

Ian.


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Steve McIntyre]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 04:25:34PM +0200, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl wrote:
>Hi!
>
>Am 22.07.2010 09:21, schrieb Josselin Mouette:
>
>>> I think with our next release, we will have got less users. Why?
>>> We stripped out all binary only firmware images from Linux and put them
>>> mostly into the non-free linux-firmware image.
>> If you think this is a problem, you could help with providing non-free
>> enabled installation images instead of whining.
>
>I might remember incorrectly, but isn't that already implemented?

Yes. We have parallel versions of the netinst images that include
firmware packages.

-- 
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Google-bait:   http://www.debian.org/CD/free-linux-cd
  Debian does NOT ship free CDs. Please do NOT contact the mailing
  lists asking us to send them to you.


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 04:25:34PM +0200, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Am 22.07.2010 09:21, schrieb Josselin Mouette:
> 
> >> I think with our next release, we will have got less users. Why?
> >> We stripped out all binary only firmware images from Linux and put them
> >> mostly into the non-free linux-firmware image.
> > If you think this is a problem, you could help with providing non-free
> > enabled installation images instead of whining.
> 
> I might remember incorrectly, but isn't that already implemented?

But the default (installer, live) blessed images aren't.

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tzaf...@debian.org|| friend


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Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Ian Jackson]

Stefano Zacchiroli writes ("teaching users how to submit good bug reports"):
>So, point 2: are we *advertising* reportbug enough to our users?
>In particular, I'm thinking about advertising in "push mode" rather
>then in "pull mode".

This approach, trying to make it easier to report bugs, supposes that
most (or even a substantial fraction) of the bugs in deployed Debian
systems, as experienced by users, are there because no-one has yet
reported that bug.

I don't think that's true at all.  Looking at the bugs which are
outstanding in Debian in general, and my own experience, it seems to
me that the main reason for the presence of most bugs is lack of
available effort for fixing them.  The obvious conclusion is that if
we increase the number of bugs submitted we will divert effort from
bug fixing to triage.

I think that people who want Debian to deal better with bug reports
from a wider audience should work on improving the available triage
effort (both in quantity and quality!), and the available fixing
effort.

When popular and high-profile end-user-oriented packages have low
numbers of outstanding bugs, it will be time to think about how we can
get more reports so that we can further improve the quality.

Ian.


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Alexander Reichle-Schmehl]

Hi!

Am 22.07.2010 09:21, schrieb Josselin Mouette:

>> I think with our next release, we will have got less users. Why?
>> We stripped out all binary only firmware images from Linux and put them
>> mostly into the non-free linux-firmware image.
> If you think this is a problem, you could help with providing non-free
> enabled installation images instead of whining.

I might remember incorrectly, but isn't that already implemented?


Best regards,
  Alexander


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teaching users how to submit good bug reports

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 05:26:52AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Having followed the Ubuntu bugs for many of my packages for several years
> now, I think Debian's bug system is considerably more user-friendly than
> Launchpad.  It may not be as *pretty*, and it's not as easy to submit a
> bug, but when you submit a bug to Debian, the chances are fairly good that
> someone will look at it and reply with a detailed understanding of both
> your bug and the package (at least unless you're reporting a bug to one of
> the packages that notoriously gets more bugs than anyone could ever deal
> with, usually about other software, like the kernel or the desktop
> metapackages).

I mostly agree with this and I've an interesting recent experience to
share. I've been taking with a long time Debian user (10 years) which
has never used the Debian BTS and didn't know about reportbug.
There are at least two important observations about that:

1) I've been teaching him how to use reportbug and he found it
   impressively easy and well-designed. All in all, even though my
   friend was not a n00b, I found reportbug quite n00b friendly.
   TBH I've used the console version of reportbug, hence assuming a n00b
   level which is at least aware of the existence of a console; but I've
   no reason to believe that the graphical reportbug front-end is any
   worse.

   So, point 1: reportbug rocks.

2) I've been impressed by the fact that that friend of mine didn't
   *know* about reportbug and I'm talking about a person which knows
   pretty well free software principles and the Debian community too. He
   simply didn't know what was the appropriate tool to report bugs in
   Debian as a user.

   So, point 2: are we *advertising* reportbug enough to our users?
   In particular, I'm thinking about advertising in "push mode" rather
   then in "pull mode".

   reportbug is priority standard, sure, but have we have ever
   considered other avenues to teach our users about it? (Don't know:
   having it in desktop tooltips that show up at the first login
   post-installation, having a launcher icon by default together with a
   mini bug reporting guide, etc.)

Maybe all this stuff is there already, but then we should ask ourselves
what is not working. After all, quality in FOSS starts from bug reports,
if we are not good enough in teaching our users how to report bugs, our
quality will suffer.

Cheers.

-- 
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z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
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Moving diversions between packages

[Russ Allbery]

Hello everyone,

We just ran into a hairy problem with diversions, and I want to get the
general advice of the project on how to handle it.  (This is a reason why
there's not yet been a new upload of the non-free NVIDIA legacy drivers,
although mostly it's because I've been juggling too many balls.)

Background for those who aren't familiar with how the proprietary NVIDIA
drivers work: using the NVIDIA X driver requires both having loaded a
kernel module and replacing your libGL library used by running GL
applications.  The normal libgl1-mesa will not work with the NVIDIA
driver.  Currently, this is handled by having the nvidia-glx package
install the X driver, divert libGL.so.1 and install its own copy, and
depend on either the appropriate kernel module package or on the DKMS
package.

We have a long-standing request (#369316) to allow installation of the
NVIDIA libGL library without depending on the kernel module or installing
the X driver.  A common example is running GL programs from a chroot
(possibly because it's an older or newer version of Debian than the base
system or a different architecture).  It doesn't make sense to install all
of nvidia-glx in the chroot because the X driver and the corresponding
kernel module dependency are only needed in the main system where the X
server is running.

We're attempting to solve this problem by splitting out just the libGL
library into a separate package (libgl1-nvidia) that can be independently
installed.  However, that means the diversions of libGL have to move from
nvidia-glx to this new package.  And that's where we ran into problems.

The problem is this: the new libgl1-nvidia package needs to take over the
diversions from the nvidia-glx package in its preinst so that its files
will be unpacked in the correct places.  It also needs to conflict with
the old version of nvidia-glx since they're both providing the same
diversions and the same files.  But the sequence of actions when
installing a new package that conflicts with another is:

old-package prerm deconfigure
old-package prerm remove
new-package preinst install


old-package postrm remove
new-package postinst configure

This means that libgl1-nvidia takes over the diversions, and then the old
nvidia-glx package's postrm remove attempts to remove the diversions and
fails.  Because this is removal of a conflicting package, not an upgrade
case, we can't catch the maintainer script failure and dpkg terminates the
installation with an error.

You only see this behavior when using dpkg to install the new
libgl1-nvidia package directly with dpkg.  If you use a package manager
such as apt-get or aptitude, they will prefer upgrading nvidia-glx to the
new package version (which knows it doesn't own the diversions) over
removing nvidia-glx due to the conflict, and this sequence works fine.
You also of course don't see this problem if you upgrade nvidia-glx before
installing libgl1-nvidia.

So, the question is: what should we do about this?  I think we have the
following options:

1. Ignore the problem.  apt-get and aptitude both do the right thing, so
   most users are never going to see the problem.  If we do take this
   route (which is what is in Subversion right now), we'll have the
   libgl1-nvidia preinst script exit with an error telling the user to
   upgrade nvidia-glx first so that the installation fails cleanly early
   on with an error.

2. Add a temporary circular dependency by making libgl1-nvidia depend on
   the new version of nvidia-glx as well as conflict with the old version.
   This means the package won't immediately address the problem we're
   trying to solve, but it might help with this scenario.  Breaking the
   dependency loop by installing libgl1-nvidia first would violate both a
   Depends and a Conflicts, whereas breaking the loop by upgrading
   nvidia-glx first would only violate a Depends, so presumably there's
   enough information there to figure out how to break the loop in the way
   we want.  But I don't know if dpkg would actually do that reliably, and
   I'm not sure when it would then be safe to remove that dependency.

3. Stop using diversions entirely and just have libgl1-nvidia Provide and
   Conflict with libgl1.  I'd love to do this, since it would make the
   packages much simpler, but this runs into a serious problem: this means
   that nvidia-glx would effectively conflit with libgl1-mesa-dev, which
   means one could not build GL packages for Debian on a system using the
   proprietary drivers.  Right now, we take special care to point the *.so
   link at the diverted libgl1-mesa package if it is installed so that
   this will work correctly.  I'm an "always build in a chroot" person,
   but we know that we have people who want to build Debian packages that
   use GL even though the NVIDIA drivers are installed.

4. Do something else to move the diversions that I haven't thought of and
   that would wonderfully solve all of our prob

Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Steffen Möller]

On 07/22/2010 03:21 PM, Nicholas Bamber wrote:
> I reckon a forum would be much easier to finance (even with
> moderators) than a phone line. It could probably be integrated with
> one of the mailing lists which would go a long way to make it look
> friendlier.
+1   there are various Debian support forums already, but I agree that
to have one closer to us would be helpful.   Actually I very much like
your notion of a Moderator.  The disadvantage of a forum is that
everything is public and I could imagine that someone would like to call
or email in without that call to be reported somewhere publicly (like:
"we have this IT staff, they could have told that", or "uh, they use
GENtle, we should email them so they use our commercial alternative"). I
still think the (team of) moderator(s) should have a phone with a
publicly known number.

Steffen


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Bjørn Mork]

"Jesús M. Navarro"  writes:

>  "so good that *I* will prefer it over others".

The problem with this is that we all(?) already prefer Debian.

In my eyes, there is no question about which distro to choose.  I prefer
Debian for so many reasons that I'm not sure I'm able to list them all.
But some of them are
 - active mailing lists
 - bug tracker with actual content
 - reliability and managebility 
 - responsive developers
 - large package base
 - a per package choice between stability and bleeding egde

The only downside I can think of is the extremist "free" definition, but
I can live with that.

But I don't think my reasons for choosing Debian can be applied to the
masses.  They probably don't care much about how easy bug fixing is, and
a large number of packages is not important if the version of package X
is "too old". I believe they only care about:
 business user: "can I buy a Linux OS from someone, inluding support?"
 home user: "what do my friends use?"

And the answers to those two questions are currenly "RHEL" and "Ubuntu".


Bjørn


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Nicholas Bamber]

I reckon a forum would be much easier to finance (even with moderators) 
than a phone line. It could probably be integrated with one of the 
mailing lists which would go a long way to make it look friendlier.



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Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Russ Allbery]

Goswin von Brederlow  writes:
> Russ Allbery  writes:

>> Maybe with some tagging as to the origin derivative, so that we can
>> handle cases where that data isn't useful?  There's no guarantee that
>> the Ubuntu package has much of anything to do with the Debian package
>> of the same name; it might not even be the same software.  They're
>> *normally* the same, but we could get some weird artifacts.

> Well, ubuntu is quite good with tagging the version. So anything
> reported from popularity-contest 1.48ubuntu1 is from ubuntu. :)

This is true for packages that Ubuntu has imported from Debian and then
updated, but I don't believe this is true for packages that are introduced
directly into Ubuntu and then separately introduced directly into Debian
later.

-- 
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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Steffen Möller]

Hello,

after reading through this long thread, I find many somewhat diverging
opinions, but not a single posting I could not at least partially agree
to. This includes Lucas with "we should not include Debian money", while
I hope we could somehow have him agreeing to a separate account from
which any "Debian phone number and/or friendlier face" could possibly be
financed, with the community voting on what to do with profits (if any).
The problem I see with any Debian-independent solution is that we as a
community would have less of a control over it, and there is again the
problem of additional insecurity on the users' side if the number dialed
was the correct one. Maybe this analogon helps: I have one number on my
mobile called "Taxi" which will get me to the closest Taxi company,
wherever I happen to travel. A Debian number should ask for more than
GPS coordinates but also try to figure out what company is closest with
its spectrum of services/products,  etc. I can imagine that many
smaller companies are also afraid of doing contracts or so in a foreign
language, i.e. there is a lot to which a central contact point may
contribute.

>From Cate

On 07/22/2010 11:55 AM, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> On 22.07.2010 10:38, Andreas Tille wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:28:36AM +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
>> [..]
>
>>
>>> So, let see how to improve Debian, not how to increase
>>> our userbase!
>>
>> I do not think that we succeed in improving Debian if the userbase is
>> decreasing.  IMHO this would mean we are trapped in an ivory tower.  So
>> both parameters "quality of distribution" and "number of users" are
>> somehow connected and you can not ignore this relation.
>
> Yes, my point is that we should think how to improve Debian (from
> our selfish point of view: an happy hacker programs more), and
> then users will follow us.
+1 we should always do that. And we are doing so at the very moment, I
think.
>
> But the thread seems like: what we could steal from other distributions
Ooops, no, I definitely don't want to take users from other distros
away. When
pointers are made to others then because they may seem to do something
better
than us and this should make us think more.

I am after the many Linux users that are still isolated from us
distribution makers
for various reasons. I want to make them happier with us. This happiness
will
then shine over to other Linux distributions (sorry for that) but more
so I hope
to improve our product and get fewer people migrate to the Mac or come to us
from closed source OSes.
> to gain some market share. But I think all distribution are different
> and should try to be different, so ok to copy if we improve ourself,
> but not copying only to attract users.
We have so far mentioned the distributed-community-ness of Debian as a
disadvantage.
And it certainly is when one thinks about making deals of various sorts.
But it is
a plus when a vendor wants to feel a part of a Linux distro. How can you
feel part of
SuSE? Well, you could buy some Novell stock, but this does not get you
in. You can
contribute to OpenSuSE, but this is not SuSE, still. Hence, I think we need
a phone number and the confidence of the community
that when that phone number is called that they would contacted as a member
of our community when the caller actually meant to call them but just
did not
know about their prior existance.
> IMHO the priorities are:
> 1- enjoy us (thus indirectly also to be proud of our product, so
> enjoying users)
> 2- quality and freedom
> 3- increase GNU/Linux (and other free kernels) users
> 4- increase our users
+1
>
> IMHO most of this thread discusses only to the last point, without
> thinking some negative effects on the other points
This thread is about the observed _decrease_ of users (ok, probably some
contribution
is just from people on vacation having switched their machine off) and
we wonder
why this happens and what we should possibly change. The phone number(s)
shall
help to weaken what separates "us" from "them", but I am otherwise fully
with you.


Many greetings

Steffen


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Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Goswin von Brederlow]

Russ Allbery  writes:

> Goswin von Brederlow  writes:
>
>> Earlier someone mentioned that popcon can report to more than one
>> tracker. So maybe we should talk to Debian based distributions and
>> encourage them to report to both their own (if they have one) and
>> popcon.d.o.
>
> Maybe with some tagging as to the origin derivative, so that we can handle
> cases where that data isn't useful?  There's no guarantee that the Ubuntu
> package has much of anything to do with the Debian package of the same
> name; it might not even be the same software.  They're *normally* the
> same, but we could get some weird artifacts.

Well, ubuntu is quite good with tagging the version. So anything
reported from popularity-contest 1.48ubuntu1 is from ubuntu. :)

Bug I agree with you. Including the ORIGIN in the popcon report would be
usefull, esspecially when a distribution does not patch (and therefore
reversion) popcon.

MfG
Goswin


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Nicholas Bamber]

I would have thought that would be really confusing. It sounds like 
"what is the purpose of this machine" question you get during 
installation. Better would be


stable => solid,

testing => edgy,

unstable => bleeding_edge

That said I think there is noting wrong with the current terms.

Hans-J. Ullrich wrote:
Hi all, 

and there is another point, I would like to mention. 

The naming of the repository is not well chosen, as it let new and 
unexperienced people to debian feel a wrong way. The names "stable" "testing" 
and "unstable" let the poeople think, debian is using crippled software, which 
is unstable, not well tested. In fact, even software from "unstable" is often 
running better, than other (including closed source) software.


I suggest for this, to thinlk about other names, for example 


- stable = server

- testing = desktop

- unstable = super_modern

Just an example. 


Have fun!

Hans-J. Ullrich

Just an example


  



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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Hans-J. Ullrich]

Hi all, 

and there is another point, I would like to mention. 

The naming of the repository is not well chosen, as it let new and 
unexperienced people to debian feel a wrong way. The names "stable" "testing" 
and "unstable" let the poeople think, debian is using crippled software, which 
is unstable, not well tested. In fact, even software from "unstable" is often 
running better, than other (including closed source) software.

I suggest for this, to thinlk about other names, for example 

- stable = server

- testing = desktop

- unstable = super_modern

Just an example. 

Have fun!

Hans-J. Ullrich

Just an example


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Russell Coker]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Russ Allbery  wrote:
> In Launchpad, for anything in universe, the typical experience is that
> your bug goes into a black hole until a month or two later someone sends
> you some form letter about it.

That's why I stopped reporting bugs against Fedora years ago, they kept being 
automatically closed a couple of releases later.  I would report a bug in RHEL 
and have it not deemed suitable for an update to the current release (which 
was fair), I would report it against Fedora and then it would be closed 
automatically.

The Red Hat bug tracking system is less efficient for me than the Debian one.  
The ratio of bug reports that they receive to the number of bugs that they can 
fix is obviously worse than that of Debian.  So the end result is that people 
like me are deterred from filing bug reports and people with less ability to 
correctly diagnose problems find it easier.

It seems to me that the Debian bug tracking system is better than that of Red 
Hat.  I don't recall anything about the Ubuntu bug tracker so I can't comment 
on that.

In recent times I haven't bothered trying to report bugs against other 
distributions.  When I find a bug in some other distribution I develop a work-
around for it there and then try to reproduce it in Debian.  If I can 
reproduce it in Debian then I file a Debian bug report.

-- 
russ...@coker.com.au
http://etbe.coker.com.au/  My Main Blog
http://doc.coker.com.au/   My Documents Blog


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Re: Moving ACL utilities to /bin?

[Martín Ferrari]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 12:30, Julien BLACHE  wrote:
> Are there any reasons or objections against moving the ACL utilities to
> /bin, alongside their traditional UNIX counterparts? Note that libacl is
> already installed in /lib.

Makes sense to me.


-- 
Martín Ferrari


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Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Russ Allbery]

Goswin von Brederlow  writes:

> Earlier someone mentioned that popcon can report to more than one
> tracker. So maybe we should talk to Debian based distributions and
> encourage them to report to both their own (if they have one) and
> popcon.d.o.

Maybe with some tagging as to the origin derivative, so that we can handle
cases where that data isn't useful?  There's no guarantee that the Ubuntu
package has much of anything to do with the Debian package of the same
name; it might not even be the same software.  They're *normally* the
same, but we could get some weird artifacts.

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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Russ Allbery]

Bastien ROUCARIES  writes:

> Support of debian is excellent but we are less user friendly than
> ubuntu. For isntance the bug sytem could be made simplier for joe
> simpler user, using an http interface than reportbug-ng (what should be
> installed by default for your desktop user) or even mail. I think having
> a simple bug report form and wizard will really help your user.

Having followed the Ubuntu bugs for many of my packages for several years
now, I think Debian's bug system is considerably more user-friendly than
Launchpad.  It may not be as *pretty*, and it's not as easy to submit a
bug, but when you submit a bug to Debian, the chances are fairly good that
someone will look at it and reply with a detailed understanding of both
your bug and the package (at least unless you're reporting a bug to one of
the packages that notoriously gets more bugs than anyone could ever deal
with, usually about other software, like the kernel or the desktop
metapackages).  Debian's BTS is more friendly in that old-fashioned sense
that involves interacting with people.  :)

In Launchpad, for anything in universe, the typical experience is that
your bug goes into a black hole until a month or two later someone sends
you some form letter about it.

> Increasing your quality also, will improve your user base.

I don't think doing what Launchpad does would improve Debian's quality.  I
suspect it would actually make it worse by hiding issues under piles of
semi-autogenerated bug reports with no information and consuming developer
time with triage that isn't improving packages.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Russ Allbery]

"Jesús M. Navarro"  writes:

> But once you forget your expectancies and put yourself under the skin of
> a newcomer, Sid breaks and sometimes breaks hard (no other thing should
> be expected -in fact, I feel sometimes that Sid breaks "too little"
> because due to the fact that so many people use it for practical
> purposes package upgrades tend to be not as much aggressive as it could
> be otherwise).  A bit to a lessen extent the same can be said about
> Testing.

I don't agree; I think it's very hard to say the same thing about testing.

Yes, sid sometimes breaks hard, although I think if you've been running
Linux for a few years the degree to which sid really breaks is somewhat
exaggerated.  I've never had something happen in sid that risked real data
loss, for instance; I know we've had cases, but I think they've been
really rare.  I've had an unbootable system where I needed to boot from a
rescue CD I think once, and a few cases where X didn't start until I
rolled back some package upgrades.  For breakage, that's not bad.

But on testing, it's been rock-solid for me for years.  It's not just
somewhat less breakage.  I think it's almost no breakage.  Occasionally
packages get stranded for a long time at back revs because of various
migration problems, and once or twice I've had to pin something (usually
because of non-free drivers like fglrx or nvidia that aren't really part
of Debian), but it's an experience that I can comfortably recommend.

I do think that it's hard to run Debian testing unless you have someone
around who knows Linux enough to figure out what's going on with a package
upgrade occasionally, but I think the same thing is true of running
Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.  That's more a problem with Linux on the desktop in
general, and I don't think Debian is any worse off than others.  (I'm also
dubious it's really worse off than Windows either; it's just that more
people know how to unwedge broken Windows systems enough to get them to
limp along than know how to fix Linux systems.)

> If anything Sid/Testing could be compared to a "rolling release"
> distribution ala Gentoo or Arch but not to any "fast releasing" like
> Fedora or Ubuntu.

No, having run both, I honestly think Debian testing is a superior
experience to Ubuntu.  It gets packages roughly as fast, with some
advantages both directions, but it's more reliable.  Packages in Ubuntu
universe break all the time, and worse, they release broken, and it can be
harder with Ubuntu to temporarily install just that package from a newer
release than it usually is with testing to temporarily install something
from sid.

> And even then their goals are different and as such the expectancies to
> be created: Ubuntu, Fedora or Arch are *products* by themselves while
> Sid/Testing are *tools* aimed to produce a product, which is Stable.

Eh, sort of.  I think you'll find that many package maintainers, such as
myself, are pursuing both of those goals at the same time.

> Forget that and you'll fastly find yourself in nasty places (i.e.: start
> "selling" Sid as a "Fedora/Ubuntu, only better" and be ready to put on
> your asbestos suit because users will start to yell each time it breaks
> something -as it happens almost daily, and asking yourself "well, since
> we can't risk Sid to be heavily broken sometimes, where do we develop
> integration for Stable?").

*boggle*.  Something breaking almost daily is *completely* alien to my
experience even with running Debian unstable.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Russ Allbery]

Josselin Mouette  writes:
> Le jeudi 22 juillet 2010 à 16:09 +1000, Ben Finney a écrit :
>> Russ Allbery  writes:

>>> This one [claim of Debian's libraries being out-of-date] always
>>> boggles me and makes me wonder if we should present Debian unstable or
>>> testing as the "typical" installation. Debian testing (and often
>>> Debian unstable) is more stable than the distributions with equivalent
>>> up-to-date libraries, and those distributions generally never offer
>>> anything remotely like Debian stable. (RHEL is considerably more
>>> unstable than Debian stable *and* has even older software, for
>>> example.)

>> Which of the above uses of “stable” refers to stability (“slow rate of
>> change”), and which refers to reliability (“high likelihood of working
>> when needed”)? Too many conversations conflate the two, and in this
>> case I think the distinction is important.

> Having already seen a major postfix upgrade which broke all existing
> installations in a RHEL update, I think we can talk of both stability
> and reliability in both contexts.

Amen.  The experience for us with RHEL was kernel updates, but similar
principle.

Also, I think you can't have one without the other, really.  It's very,
very hard to do reliable change of software, particularly when you're not
the institution writing the software or doing comprehensive QA (not that
there's much in the way of comprehensive QA in the free software world
other than lots of people running it and reporting bugs -- traditional QA
is usually too expensive for the benefit).  I'm dubious that we'd ever
achieve the stability that Debian stable offers without the update policy
we use.

-- 
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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Ben Hutchings]

On Thu, 2010-07-22 at 10:44 +0200, Jesús M. Navarro wrote:
> Hi, Manoj:
> 
> On Thursday 22 July 2010 07:17:15 Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 21 2010, Will wrote:
> > > Also I imagine that it helps that they have some kind of commercial
> > > support behind their projects, whereas Debian has little/none of that.
> >
> > One of the  issues I have faced in trying to get Debian
> >  introduced in big companies is the percieved lack of a coherent
> >  copyright; and company lawyers being uncomfortable with the concept
> >  that most licesnse pass the dfsg, but we can't guarantee that, please
> >  go read several thoudand individual license docs to figure out what you
> >  are getting.
> 
> That's again about perception.  Debian has exactly the same copyright 
> coherence (or lack of it) than SUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu or even proprietary 
> Unices.

I would say we are even more careful about licence issues than the
commercial distributions.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Neil Williams]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:08:28 +0200
Bastien ROUCARIES  wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Steffen Möller  
> wrote:
> > This should probably then move to Debian-Project?
> >
> > On 07/21/2010 11:31 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:
> >> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 05:34:27PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> I think that what we need is Debian Blends that include official 
> >>> backports.
> >>> This, no other distribution proposes yet.
> >>>
> >> IMHO this is worth another thread how to make Debian more attractive for
> >> users ...
> >>
> > The computing world have become such complex, that we are all mere users
> > somewhere. So yes, we should think more about our users.
> >
> 
> Support of debian is excellent but we are less user friendly than
> ubuntu. For isntance the bug sytem could be made simplier for joe
> simpler user, using an http interface than reportbug-ng (what should
> be installed by default for your desktop user) or even mail. I think
> having a simple bug report form and wizard  will really help your
> user.

Unfortunately, the lower barrier of entry in Launchpad bugs merely
results in lower quality bug reports and an even more noticeable lack
of feedback when developers request more information. Unless the same
issue has already been reported in the Debian BTS, I habitually ignore
or invalidate Ubuntu bugs because there is little point in wasting time
on them.

I don't hide this "policy":

https://launchpad.net/~codehelp

It's not just launchpad, other www bug trackers suffer the same problems
- FIXING bugs is a lot more important than making it easier to report
bugs and bug reporters need to help get their bugs fixed by responding
to queries from developers and providing useful information from the
start. That is one thing that reportbug does quite well. It isn't easy
for a WWW interface to query your installed packages and list the
versions of dependencies which are installed. This kind of information
is vital to being able to fix many bugs.

> Last but not least improving the unbuntu to debian package transfert
> and therefore the project http://wiki.debian.org/Utnubu

*If* the package in Ubuntu is worth having in Debian.

-- 


Neil Williams
=
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Moving ACL utilities to /bin?

[Julien BLACHE]

Hi,

The ACL utilities ({getf,setf,ch}acl) from the acl package currently
reside in /usr/bin.

This makes it impossible to use them during the early boot sequence
before /usr is mounted, so they're unusable in udev rules for instance.

Are there any reasons or objections against moving the ACL utilities to
/bin, alongside their traditional UNIX counterparts? Note that libacl is
already installed in /lib.

If not, I'll file a bug against the acl package asking for the utilities
to be moved to /bin.

Thanks,

JB.

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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Ben Finney]

"Jesús M. Navarro"  writes:

> Hi, Ben:
>
> On Thursday 22 July 2010 08:09:44 Ben Finney wrote:
> > Which of the above uses of “stable” refers to stability (“slow rate
> > of change”), and which refers to reliability (“high likelihood of
> > working when needed”)? Too many conversations conflate the two, and
> > in this case I think the distinction is important.
>
> Why?

Because they are quite separate descriptors, and unless we keep them
distinct in conversation we'll have to re-hash the “system Foo is
unstable because it frequently doesn't work”, “no, it's stable because
it changes slowly” misunderstandings.

> With my user hat on the only stability I care of is "it ain't break".

By that description, then, you are seeking reliability. Debian's testing
process is, at least in part, designed to address reliability by giving
a chance for bugs in programs and in integration of packages to be
shaken out.

I was asking whether Russ meant this connotation, or whether he's
actually talking about rate of change (which is closer to the proper
meaning of “stable”). Debian's “stable” suite is quite famously stable:
it changes only a few times a year.

There are indeed a great many users of Debian who want stability, even
if it means a loss of reliability. They choose Debian precisely because
they can deploy it, set it to receive updates, and know it will change
only rarely and in very specific circumstances; not even for most bug
fixes.

Stability and reliability are partly correlated, but only partly. Hence
it's good to keep the two distinct when discussing how to please users.

-- 
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  `\   view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and |
_o__)   opposite view.” —Douglas Adams |
Ben Finney


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Russell Coker]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Josselin Mouette  wrote:
> Le jeudi 22 juillet 2010 à 11:08 +0200, Bastien ROUCARIES a écrit :
> > Support of debian is excellent but we are less user friendly than
> > ubuntu. For isntance the bug sytem could be made simplier for joe
> > simpler user, using an http interface than reportbug-ng (what should
> > be installed by default for your desktop user) or even mail. I think
> > having a simple bug report form and wizard  will really help your
> > user.
> 
> We already have too many bug reports. What good would it do to have
> more?

You might argue that we have too many bug reports of the form "this program 
broke and I don't know why".  But we certainly don't have enough bug reports 
with patches attached or with a good analysis of where the problem occurs.

I think that making bug reporting more friendly in the sense of allowing web 
based reporting (which means making it impossible to know the version of the 
package in question unless a bug is reported against the web browser) is only 
going to result in more bug reports with poor explanations.

It would probably be better to think of ways of making it simpler for experts 
to report bugs.  If I'm doing a relatively routine task like installing a new 
server there is a limit to the amount of time I can spend reporting bugs - 
sometimes that is less than the number of bugs that I encounter.

The ability to have reportbug write it's output to a text file that can be 
copied elsewhere is a good thing.  It would be nice if reportbug on a system 
with email access could then create an email based on that file instead of 
requiring copy/paste (which is time consuming and error prone).

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/pkgreport.cgi?ordering=normal;archive=0;src=linux-2.6;repeatmerged=0

Also bugs.debian.org could do with some performance improvements (not sure if 
it's hardware or software).  The above URL takes 55 seconds, getting a faster 
response would make it easier to report bugs.

I'm sure that there are lots of other things that could be done, I'm just 
mentioning a couple of examples that impact what bugs I report.

-- 
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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Giacomo A. Catenazzi]

On 22.07.2010 10:38, Andreas Tille wrote:


On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:28:36AM +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:

IMHO we should care about improving Debian, going toward the perfection,
not about increasing the number of users (which should
be a nice secondary effect).


So you have even found the answer to the question - or rather you
pronounced it differently, because whe need to ask:  "What exactly is
perfection?"  In my eyes perfection means:  "So good that people will
prefer it over others."


Not really. A lot of people like the "enough good" and they
change only if/when "enough is not sufficiently ''enough''".




So, let see how to improve Debian, not how to increase
our userbase!


I do not think that we succeed in improving Debian if the userbase is
decreasing.  IMHO this would mean we are trapped in an ivory tower.  So
both parameters "quality of distribution" and "number of users" are
somehow connected and you can not ignore this relation.


Yes, my point is that we should think how to improve Debian (from
our selfish point of view: an happy hacker programs more), and
then users will follow us.

But the thread seems like: what we could steal from other distributions
to gain some market share. But I think all distribution are different 
and should try to be different, so ok to copy if we improve ourself,

but not copying only to attract users.

IMHO the priorities are:
1- enjoy us (thus indirectly also to be proud of our product, so 
enjoying users)

2- quality and freedom
3- increase GNU/Linux (and other free kernels) users
4- increase our users

IMHO most of this thread discusses only to the last point, without
thinking some negative effects on the other points

[OTOH the above priorities are my personal opinion, not project wide 
manifest, so..]


ciao
cate


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Josselin Mouette]

Le jeudi 22 juillet 2010 à 11:08 +0200, Bastien ROUCARIES a écrit :
> Support of debian is excellent but we are less user friendly than
> ubuntu. For isntance the bug sytem could be made simplier for joe
> simpler user, using an http interface than reportbug-ng (what should
> be installed by default for your desktop user) or even mail. I think
> having a simple bug report form and wizard  will really help your
> user.

We already have too many bug reports. What good would it do to have
more?

-- 
 .''`.
: :' :  “Fuck you sir, don’t be suprised when you die if
`. `'   you burn in Hell, because I am a solid Christian
  `-and I am praying for you.”   --  Mike


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Re: Better GoPlay [Was: How to make Debian more attractive for users]

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 07:22:30PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
> 
> It would probably be best to have both options available.
> 
> I've exceeded my quota for the month and web browsing is a little slow, so I 
> don't want to be viewing full size screen shots right now.  But goplay is 
> quite usable and useful.

Sure.  I'm not against *having* offline screenshots.  I'm just concerned
about how they are *obtained*.  You could perfectly create the package
source of games-thumbnails out of a query to screenshots.debian.net,
right?  But having two competing systems to ask users for screenshots,
one of them with a cool and sophisticated web interface and the other one
a manually driven "send me an e-mail" interface sounds quite stupid to me.
 
> There's no reason why the same data set couldn't be used for the goplay 
> package and a web sites

Yes - I think the problem here is that goplay people and screenshots
people just do not talk to each other, right?

> - with the web site having links to bigger and more 
> screen shots.

Reducing the size of a screenshot for probably smaller package size of
games-thumbnails, shouldn't be a real problem.

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling

[Bastien ROUCARIES]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Steffen Möller  wrote:
> This should probably then move to Debian-Project?
>
> On 07/21/2010 11:31 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 05:34:27PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I think that what we need is Debian Blends that include official backports.
>>> This, no other distribution proposes yet.
>>>
>> IMHO this is worth another thread how to make Debian more attractive for
>> users ...
>>
> The computing world have become such complex, that we are all mere users
> somewhere. So yes, we should think more about our users.
>

Support of debian is excellent but we are less user friendly than
ubuntu. For isntance the bug sytem could be made simplier for joe
simpler user, using an http interface than reportbug-ng (what should
be installed by default for your desktop user) or even mail. I think
having a simple bug report form and wizard  will really help your
user.

Increasing your quality also, will improve your user base.

Last but not least improving the unbuntu to debian package transfert
and therefore the project http://wiki.debian.org/Utnubu
(i plan to package google gears BTW)

Thank you


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Re: Better GoPlay [Was: How to make Debian more attractive for users]

[Russell Coker]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Andreas Tille  wrote:
> Q: How do I submit a screenshot?
> A: Send Miriam a 320x240 thumbnail picture in png format.
> 
> Since more than one year we have screenshots.debian.net and GoPlay just
> sticks to a non-maintainable competition to this great service.  Is
> there any sense to stick to this instead of simply using
> screenshots.debian.net (and advertise this great service in the FAQ to
> motivate gamers providing screenshots which can be used in all
> applications for instance synaptics (and other apt frontends in case
> they might support screenshots) as well as the Blends web sentinel?

It would probably be best to have both options available.

I've exceeded my quota for the month and web browsing is a little slow, so I 
don't want to be viewing full size screen shots right now.  But goplay is 
quite usable and useful.

There's no reason why the same data set couldn't be used for the goplay 
package and a web site - with the web site having links to bigger and more 
screen shots.

-- 
russ...@coker.com.au
http://etbe.coker.com.au/  My Main Blog
http://doc.coker.com.au/   My Documents Blog


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Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users

[Jesús M. Navarro]

Hi, Andreas:

On Thursday 22 July 2010 10:38:03 Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:28:36AM +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> > IMHO we should care about improving Debian, going toward the perfection,
> > not about increasing the number of users (which should
> > be a nice secondary effect).
>
> So you have even found the answer to the question - or rather you
> pronounced it differently, because whe need to ask:  "What exactly is
> perfection?"  In my eyes perfection means:  "So good that people will
> prefer it over others."

Unless you are ominscient, trying to find out what others will happen to be 
choosing is quite a difficult game.

Why not go after a not so "self-imporant" but more feasible goal?  I prefer 
something on the lines of "so good that *I* will prefer it over others".

> > So, let see how to improve Debian, not how to increase
> > our userbase!
>
> I do not think that we succeed in improving Debian if the userbase is
> decreasing.  IMHO this would mean we are trapped in an ivory tower.

Don't fool yourself: given that the whole linux-at-desktop marketshare is 
around 2%, we *already* are "trapped" in an ivory tower and Microsoft is the 
one achieving perfection since that's what "people prefer over others".  Now, 
I choose to use Linux instead of Windows for a reason, and within Linux I 
choose Debian for a reason, do I?

Cheers.


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