Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Mon, 22 Oct 2012 08:27:59 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 11:25:47PM +, Felipe Sateler wrote:
Another way to look at it is the number of maintainers, as recorded in
the Packages and Sources files. I've done a bit of scripting and came
with these numbers:
Did you look only at Maintainer, or also at Uploaders? In the former
case (Maintainer only), you'll probably end up interpreting the
evolution from individual maintenance to team maintenance as a decrease
in the available people power, incorrectly imo.
It also looks at uploaders, and filters out debian lists. The script I
used was:
for dist in {0.93R6,1.{1,2,3.1},2.{0,1,2},3.{0,1},4.0,5.0,6.0.6,7.0} ; do
echo $dist
(cat Packages*-${dist}; echo; cat Sources*-${dist}) | \
grep-dctrl . -sUploaders,Maintainer | \
sed '/^[[:space:]]*$/d' | cut -f2 -d: | \
sed -e 's/\(.*\),\(.*\)/\1\2/g'| \
sed -e 's/,/\n/g' | sort -u | \
grep -v 'lists.*debian.org' maints-${dist}
done
I also grepped through the debian-devel-changes list[1] to find unique
Changed-By entries, and it suggests the number of monthly active
maintainers has been kept relatively steady, although much more variable
in recent cycles. Yearly data suggests the same.
I have uploaded to [2] an ods file with the numbers.
[1] zgrep '^Changed-By' $src | sort -u changed.${date} # done in a loop
[2] http://people.debian.org/~fsateler/activity.ods
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Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 11:25:47PM +, Felipe Sateler wrote: Another way to look at it is the number of maintainers, as recorded in the Packages and Sources files. I've done a bit of scripting and came with these numbers: Did you look only at Maintainer, or also at Uploaders? In the former case (Maintainer only), you'll probably end up interpreting the evolution from individual maintenance to team maintenance as a decrease in the available people power, incorrectly imo. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Hi, On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 08:10:54PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: But they're not as good at the things that large pools of volunteers are good at, like maintaining lots of packages that are of interest to small groups of people. I'm following the example of others by cherry picking from Russ' e-mail I would subscribe in general but I would like to add something to this statement. Since more then ten years (Debian Med became 10 years in the beginning of 2012) I do not hesitate to explain why Debian as a community driven project was choosen for supporting medical software (at this time versus commercial distributors like RedHat or SuSE - Ubuntu did not even existed at this time). When starting the Debian Pure Blends effort (under a different name) in 2003 I was hoping that other fields might follow this path quickly because if it would be possible to dive into a workfield which is really quite hard to cover (there was not that much of free medical software at this time) others like for instance games, multimedia, GIS and several other fields should have way better chances to accomplish the mission to assemble a strong team and make Debian the distribution of choice for the workfield XY. I have to admit that the effect of having some successful examples (see my last announcement[1]) is lagging a bit behind my expectations but anyway we can present also some numbers (as requested by Christian) for the growth. I made some questionnaire[2] which revealed that in the Debian Med team were 4 DDs who had this status even in 2002 but in the last 10 years we got additional 9 DDs and 1 DM (who is currently working hard to also become a DD). In other words: a very small subproject of Debian which is from a popcon point of view close to irrelevant to the general distribution, having a quite narrow focus on a small user base is able to attract one developer per year (that's about 1% of active Debian developers). Moreover those new DDs do not only stick to this small field but rather dive into other fields (Charles Plessy was just nominated as policy editor.) So my answer to Christian would be: Lets try to fill more niches inside the Free Software world and grow on narrow pathes into different directions - this way we will find many enthusiastic newcomers who currently would not even imagine to become a DD. Kind regards Andreas. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/10/msg8.html [2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Developers -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121022194956.gd8...@an3as.eu
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 02:53:43AM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: Then again,... I wonder why Ubuntu exists, if they allegedly anyway want their changes into Debian. And still sounds like a fork in a respect that forks usually don't change everything. But I mean that discussion doesn't help... the question in the end will rather be, is Ubuntu becoming a thread to Debian (which it easily can by being more of a hype, by having commerical background, by focusing pretty much on what's cool like tablets and so on)... IMHO there are at least some sings for this. Such things have been endlessly discussed ever since Ubuntu was first released, eight years ago. I agree with you that discussion doesn't help here :) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121022215811.GA13518@debian
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Friday 19 October 2012 00:53:43 Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: Another reason could be, that people have problems with the BTS. Don't get me wrong, I personally like it a lot... and I wouldn't want to have e.g. launchpad (if at all,... I'm quite a bugzilla fan)... but especially for end-users BTS might be tricky to use and I know even some fellow computer scientists which complained about it (and asked whether there was a more bugzilla-ish web interface or so). In the last 18 monthes, about half my bug reports were lost during reporting. I could work around using -ui text, but sometimes I had to rewrite them from scratch. Many people would give up I suppose. I'm talking about bug #620225 in reportbug. If you look at the merge count, you can see many people are affected. There already was a hot discussion about the priority of that bug, and I don't want to add oil on the fire. It has been partially fixed. But if someone read this and have time to help fixing it for good, that would really help the project IMHO, because it affects its overall quality, by preventing bugs to be reported. Cheers -- Jean-Michel Vourgère signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 01:26:56PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: generalisation of application stores. How can we attract the creative people who entered the field of software development and distribution on Android or iOS ? Worse, because of the fragmentation of the « Linux » landscape, if they want to distribute their work on « Linux », these developers need to learn how to do so on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, etc., or need to convince develpers to package their work. And this still does not save them from learning complex details, as for instance it is not obvious to determine how long it will take for a package to migrate from Debian to Ubuntu. I've said this at the AppInstaller meeting almost 2 years ago and I'm still convinced of it: the distribution fragmentation is the least of our concerns. The big concern is that we don't have a stable Linux API. If I invest targeting Linux, I'm pointing at a moving target: I can't have a one-off investment to get up to speed with the platform and then make stuff on it: know-how gets obsolete rather quickly, so I not only need continuous investment for staying up to speed with the platform, but I need to hire the kind of people who cope well with a moving target. Those people cost more, are harder to find, and can probably be employed in a more productive way than handling transitions from gtk/qt version n to n+1, understanding new obscure gcc 4.x+1 compiler errors, handling new backtraces or deprecationwarnings when some python library upstream feels like being cool and agile and breaks API once again. And I'm only using reasonably stable ecosystems as examples here. We won't attract the people you're looking at, until we can actually come up with a standard, cross-distro toolchain that: - is actually useful to build games, UIs, whatever you want people to build; - provides an API[1] that is guaranteed not to change for at least, say, 3 years; - when it changes 3, 6, 9, ... years later, you can trust that it will change into another that's just as stable; - is actually widely adopted by the community. When that happens, then people can invest in writing books, can offer training courses, can get value off their know-how. TTBOMK, what we currently have that fits what I said above is this: - traditional C, plus libc (not sure about C99); - bourne shell, grep, awk, perl, and the stuff sysadmins tend to use (people who have large cluebats in their toolbox are surprisingly good at demanding a stable ecosystem); - HTML, Javascript and DOM inside web browsers. Python 2.7 and its standard library are not there yet, but should be once wheezy is out. Interestingly, python 2.7 is becoming a compelling stable development environment *precisely* because upstream decided to stop improving it. Note that the only way to offer a graphical UI with the stuff on that list, is inside a web browser. Power structures are interesting: sysadmins have power over sh, grep and awk interfaces: if upstreams tries to improve those in an incompatible way, they deserve die a horrible death. The opposite is true with UI toolkits: any new iteration of the libraries is an awesome effort of awesome developers who are right and just, and if you don't understand it and don't adopt it immediately, you deserve to die a horrible death. I believe this is a topic with lots to talk about, very little in the realm of easy solutions, and quickly diverging from the initial aim of the thread. [1] I care less about ABIs, but you may need that too if you want to support proprietary software Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini enr...@enricozini.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 07:33:28PM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote: We won't attract the people you're looking at, until we can actually come up with a standard, cross-distro toolchain that: - is actually useful to build games, UIs, whatever you want people to build; - provides an API[1] that is guaranteed not to change for at least, say, 3 years; - when it changes 3, 6, 9, ... years later, you can trust that it will change into another that's just as stable; - is actually widely adopted by the community. For games, SDL (with OpenGL if you need 3D) does all of the above, and has done so since at least 10 years. It's also cross-platform. Yes, the Desktop/UI APIs change too often to be useful, I agree with that. -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121021184033.gs21...@grep.be
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Le dimanche, 21 octobre 2012 19.33:28, Enrico Zini a écrit : On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 01:26:56PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: generalisation of application stores. How can we attract the creative people who entered the field of software development and distribution on Android or iOS ? Worse, because of the fragmentation of the « Linux » landscape, if they want to distribute their work on « Linux », these developers need to learn how to do so on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, etc., or need to convince develpers to package their work. And this still does not save them from learning complex details, as for instance it is not obvious to determine how long it will take for a package to migrate from Debian to Ubuntu. I've said this at the AppInstaller meeting almost 2 years ago and I'm still convinced of it: the distribution fragmentation is the least of our concerns. The big concern is that we don't have a stable Linux API. Isn't that what LSB is meant to provide? Besides that is suffers from another type of fragmentation: upstream's engagements on long-term supporting their supposedly extra-stable APIs. The case I'm thinking about is stuff like Qt3, that is a must of the LSB version we will claim to support in Wheezy but that noone can reasonably claim to support security-wise, because Qt upstream's moved to Qt4 (or 5, or 6 already?). Salut, OdyX -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201210212233.36977.o...@debian.org
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 10:33:36PM +0200, Didier Raboud wrote: Isn't that what LSB is meant to provide? I guess it is, but as far as I understand, it kind of fails on the point is actually widely adopted by the community. Unfortunately. Besides that is suffers from another type of fragmentation: upstream's engagements on long-term supporting their supposedly extra-stable APIs. The case I'm thinking about is stuff like Qt3, that is a must of the LSB version we will claim to support in Wheezy but that noone can reasonably claim to support security-wise, because Qt upstream's moved to Qt4 (or 5, or 6 already?). Indeed. Neither distributions nor LSB can promise a long-term stable API if upstreams aren't committed to it. Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini enr...@enricozini.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Sat, 20 Oct 2012 19:18:07 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: As I agree with Christian that the most important factor is our ability to attract contributors, I've tried to gather data about the number of people that decide to join Debian per year. The easiest data to found was those about DDs and DMs; they are not a full picture of our contributors community (no translators, no project members on Alioth, etc.), but they're probably correlated significantly with it. Another way to look at it is the number of maintainers, as recorded in the Packages and Sources files. I've done a bit of scripting and came with these numbers: VersionDate Maint Delta Delta Change / Years Maint year 0.93R6 09/10/1995 41 1.1 17/06/1996 108 0.6967 97 1.2 12/12/1996 147 0.4939 80 1.3.1 05/06/1997 180 0.4833 69 2 24/07/1998 253 1.1373 64 2.1 09/03/1999 357 0.62104 166 2.2 15/08/2000 526 1.44169 117 3 19/07/2002 994 1.93468 243 3.1 06/06/2005 15522.88558 193 4 08/04/2007 18591.84307 167 5 14/02/2009 22311.86372 200 6.0.6 06/02/2011 26781.98447 226 7~ 21/10/2012 29581.71280 164 Unfortunately, this method doesn't account for MIA maintainers whose packages have not been orphaned, so it may overstate actual activity. It looks like some steam has been lost this release cycle, but that it is not the trend of other recent cycles. Saludos, Felipe Sateler -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/k6209q$4hq$1...@ger.gmane.org
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Quoting Thomas Preud'homme (robo...@debian.org): This is sometimes hidden by the incredible work and investment of several people in the project (yes, that's probably mean whoever is reading this). I don't think it's mean to recognize the amazing work some people do. At least I don't feel offended. My sentence was misspelled (and probably bad English anyway). I wanted to write : yes, that probably means whoever is reading this. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 09:40:12AM +0200, Christian PERRIER wrote: I will take this last sentence from Russ' mail to give out my own feeling about these issues. Thanks for this in-depth view on your feeling on this matter. I've been following with interest your blog posts on the decline of Debian (bug reports) since quite a while (was the first time ~3 years ago?). I've a theory on this, although not particularly original one: I think that once we're convinced of something (say, the decline), it's pretty hard to change our mind about that. It's a natural tendency to notice more prominently confirmations of our theses than counter-examples. (Unfortunately, that mixes with the tendency of noticing more prominently negative experiences than positive ones --- which is a pretty dangerous mix in a community.) Christian has shown data about the number bug reports. Those are facts. On that front I'm personally fully satisfied by the argument developed at the beginning of this thread, namely: bug reports now flow in through derivatives. I understand that others are skeptical about that, but ~1 year ago at UDS I've shown data about the amount of patches we got forwarded from Ubuntu: they were at their historical maximum, with a positive trend. But sure enough: there's always more to do, right? (and therefore reasons to be sad about the current state of affairs) Christian has also taken the d-i example. IIRC, that was an example we've used also during the Squeeze release, worrying (probably rightly so) about a not strong enough coordination in d-i release preparation. This time, d-i releases seem to go pretty well. I'm not personally involved in d-i development, but as mere developer I see: periodic releases, calls for testing, features coming in, etc. So now the reason to worry (again: probably rightly so) is that it is a one-person band coordination show (and I'd like to erect a KiBi-monument for that). I don't dispute that it would be *better* to have more people on the hot seats. But I can't help noticing that we seem to be way more inclined to look at the bad that still needs to be fixed, rather than the significant improvement over the past release cycle. About core teams. I remember years, not that far past, where teams like DSA, ftp-masters, keyring, DAM were one-person teams (and often the person in question was the same...). Nowadays they're lively, efficient teams with good turnover. Those are good examples to me, denoting significant improvements in core teams staffing, and I could find thousands more. I'm sure we can also find thousands *bad* examples. The problem is that the bad examples seem too stick in the collective memory of the community, while the good ones don't. We forget the good ones and move on, looking at what's the next bad thing we should be sad about. (Note: this is not specific to Christian. It's just a (meta-)feeling of mine that seemed relevant enough to this discussion for sharing it.) But if we stay at this level, the discussion might appear to be a typical optimistic-vs-pessimistic one (with the optimistic being invariably less visible, but fair enough). This is why, instead of discussing impressions abstractly, I often prefer to look for data that could confirm or counter those impressions. As I agree with Christian that the most important factor is our ability to attract contributors, I've tried to gather data about the number of people that decide to join Debian per year. The easiest data to found was those about DDs and DMs; they are not a full picture of our contributors community (no translators, no project members on Alioth, etc.), but they're probably correlated significantly with it. Here is the data I've collected and how: - with the invaluable help of Enrico Zini, number of NM applications per year, starting 2000 (see attached stats-dd.txt, data before 2000 are spurious) - in a way more hackish way (see attached dm-keyring-stats.pl and cry for my rusty Perl-fu) I've approximated the number of DM applications per year grepping through the keyring changelog I've then plotted the data in a LibreOffice spreadsheet (see attached stats-dd.ods). My own interpretation of the data is as follows: - if we look at DDs alone (excluding DMs) the number of applications per year looks stable since 2002: there are important variations with spike up and down (in particular in 2011 and 2004), but they are close to +/-1 standard deviation interval - but if we're interested in our ability to maintain _packages_ (something Christian and others have focused on), we should also take into account DMs. And if we do that, the trend is positive, and strikingly so. - Unfortunately, simply adding up DMs and DDs is not correct, as DMs become DDs, but I didn't have time/energy to do this properly. In the meantime, we know that the truth is in between the previous two points, which looks like a WIN to me. Please review the above data and methods, and show me
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, 2012-10-18 at 20:10 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: I'm not seeing any signs that Ubuntu actually wants to take over what Debian is the best at, which is maintaining a very broad range of packages at high quality. Notice the number of folks who start doing Debian packaging because they want to introduce their packages upstream of Ubuntu, and the number of less-widely-used packages that are maintained entirely in Debian and just imported into Ubuntu. Ubuntu has full-time developer resources available to focus on certain core work, which means they can drive archive-wide changes faster than we can and can do focused development on specific priorities often easier than we can. Having centralized decision-making also helps with both of those. But they're not as good at the things that large pools of volunteers are good at, like maintaining lots of packages that are of interest to small groups of people. I think the relationship is fairly synergistic, honestly. Well... I hope you're right :) Reading however Shuttleworth's blog[0] makes me really worried about what Ubuntu may mean to opensource... reads a lot like non-open development in secrecy just to be as cool and media-attractive as companies like Apple. Anyway... that discussion was just thought about the bug numbers originally... and I guess everything has been said already. And as I was privately notified that my contributions to Debian are too little for writing a lot at debian-devel... so EOT here for me, too. Cheers, Chris. [0] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200 smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Le Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 09:40:12AM +0200, Christian PERRIER a écrit : But, still, yes, I feel we are in danger in some way. That may sound alarming (death of Debian predicted, film at 11), but, really, getting new blood is important for usif we don't want to shrink into a club of old chaps who are doing Debian just for their needs but can't manage to do it anymore because there is too much to do..:-). Along these lines, I am worried that we are missing a turning point, the generalisation of application stores. How can we attract the creative people who entered the field of software development and distribution on Android or iOS ? Worse, because of the fragmentation of the « Linux » landscape, if they want to distribute their work on « Linux », these developers need to learn how to do so on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, etc., or need to convince develpers to package their work. And this still does not save them from learning complex details, as for instance it is not obvious to determine how long it will take for a package to migrate from Debian to Ubuntu. It looks like from big projects like Mozilla, GNOME, etc., their answer is to provide their own extension store, which co-exist with our package sytstem, adding one more level of fragmentation. I think that our long-term survival will depend on our capacity to join efforts with the other « Linux » distributions and the major Free application/extension stores, and provide a simplified and standardised entry point to our packaging systems, so that the works that do not need the most sophisticated parts of our packaging systems can be maintained in a trans-distribution way. Have a nice Sunday, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121021042656.gd23...@falafel.plessy.net
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Quoting Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org): distribution that make it more popular. But, unlike commercial distributions, we don't *have* to be popular to succeed. We have a much broader range of successful outcomes than a business that has to make money. I will take this last sentence from Russ' mail to give out my own feeling about these issues. I work on Debian for about the same reasons Russ gave in his mail and I agree with the way he says things. I indeed agree with most of what was said in this thread. Still, I see a threat against the project, somewhere. The majority of us works on Debian for these reasons, fine. We all mostly don't really care about Debian being popular or what. Fine. However, not being popular also means a declining number of contributors. If I look back to my Debian years (they start nearly to the days where Ian created the project, though I started contributing to it around 2000), during the late 90's and early 2000 years, Debian *was* a kind of a hype in the geek community. The reference, the clever thing people are *attracted* to contribute to. If I look around to my fellow French developers friends, several (not to say many, not to say most) of them originate from a generation that was in their university years in these late 90's, early 2000's. Even though I was not there, I can imagine that, among the geeky students at that time, Debian was an attractive project, something people talk about, something you want to be part of. And, imho, that perfectly explains why we were powerful enough to grow up as we did. The new blood was in some way constantly coming in. We even had problems dealing with that new blood if you remember (I think Cyril Brulebois, who is currently handling so many things in the project, including our beloved installer, remembers how much time it took for him to become a DD, around 2007 IIRC). Nowadays, would someone bet a coin that the same is happening? I would not. In my daily job, I see students coming for post-graduate or thesis work in scientific research departments (in optics, fluid mechanics, material science, etc.). I talk to them (this is my job to manage the needs of scientific departments wrt IT, in our institution), I talk about their needs for their research work, I talk to their staff. Definitely, the free software and Linux culture exists among people in our universities (or in our typically French Grandes Écoles). But Debian? Really? Not that much. I even heard (when people learn that I am involved in the project) questions like oh, Debian? Does it still exist?. And, yes, here, Ubuntu comes up more often (I would bet that more than half of students laptops installed with a Linux brand nowadays are using it). For sure, this kind of decline is not that visible. We still have new contributors, we still manage to do releases, we still have an ever growing number of packages. But, we have less bug reports. We have partly abandoned packages, including in the core of the distribution. We have an installer that has just been rescued by nearly a one-man effort. And I probably forget many other examples. This is sometimes hidden by the incredible work and investment of several people in the project (yes, that's probably mean whoever is reading this). But, still, yes, I feel we are in danger in some way. That may sound alarming (death of Debian predicted, film at 11), but, really, getting new blood is important for usif we don't want to shrink into a club of old chaps who are doing Debian just for their needs but can't manage to do it anymore because there is too much to do..:-). We *will* be old chaps anyway. Several of us already are (and are even happy with that). But we should worry about a possible start of decline and we should avoid denying it. That was indeed the exact purpose of my original blog post. The first reaction we can have is probably to start facing that reality. Hopefully such thread in one of our mailing list is kind of a way to do it. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Le vendredi 19 octobre 2012 09:40:12, Christian PERRIER a écrit : Greetings Christian, First, let me take advantage of this mail to thank you for your tireless work on localization. Nowadays, would someone bet a coin that the same is happening? I would not. In my daily job, I see students coming for post-graduate or thesis work in scientific research departments (in optics, fluid mechanics, material science, etc.). I talk to them (this is my job to manage the needs of scientific departments wrt IT, in our institution), I talk about their needs for their research work, I talk to their staff. Definitely, the free software and Linux culture exists among people in our universities (or in our typically French Grandes Écoles). But Debian? Really? Not that much. I even heard (when people learn that I am involved in the project) questions like oh, Debian? Does it still exist?. And, yes, here, Ubuntu comes up more often (I would bet that more than half of students laptops installed with a Linux brand nowadays are using it). Couldn't it be that the proportion of Debian users among Linux users has decreased but not the raw number? It's probably safe to say that Ubuntu attracted many new Linux users which could have changed that proportion. About the contributors, I believe most contributors in Ubuntu have an interest in working in Debian as well to reduce the diff size. For sure, this kind of decline is not that visible. We still have new contributors, we still manage to do releases, we still have an ever growing number of packages. But, we have less bug reports. We have partly abandoned packages, including in the core of the distribution. We have an installer that has just been rescued by nearly a one-man effort. And I probably forget many other examples. Maybe the problem stems from the fact that contributions are focused on different components of the distribution than its core. Maybe it's even worse and potential contributors are more interested in doing android apps than working on Debian packages. This is sometimes hidden by the incredible work and investment of several people in the project (yes, that's probably mean whoever is reading this). I don't think it's mean to recognize the amazing work some people do. At least I don't feel offended. Best regards, Thomas Preud'home signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 03:04:45AM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: On Wed, 2012-10-17 at 17:43 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: Ah, well, I think you misunderstood me here. What I meant is that ubuntu is gaining ground on things like Windows and MacOS. I didn't mean to refer to non-free software packaged with ubuntu, nor to non-free producers who support ubuntu. Ah I see. Well but ultimately that could mean harm to Debian, too. No, I disagree with that. I see many people in my friends and family who try out using some distribution for one reason or another. Usually, they start with Ubuntu. Often they stay with Ubuntu for a very long time, but just as often they do not, and move to Debian or another distribution instead. And this is not because I'm actively advocating Debian (or advocating against Ubuntu); in fact, when people ask me for advice about which distribution to run, I usually reply with I'm not the right guy to ask, I'm biased. When people start using Linux for the first time, they often go for what seems to be the easiest solution. This was true for myself, too: when I first installed Linux, I used RedHat, since in the sixpack that I bought at the time, containing RedHat, Debian, and Slackware, only RedHat could be installed from CD-ROM immediately (at the time, Debian and Slackware both required that you boot from floppy). If people start using a Linux distribution at some point or another, that means they're another Linux user, and that's a good thing. If they're using Ubuntu, then at some level they're also a Debian user, and that's also a good thing. If Ubuntu is the right distribution for them, they will probably remain an Ubuntu user for a long time. If it isn't, they will migrate to something else; maybe Debian, maybe not. What's important for Debian is that we continue to attract enough developers to sustain our distribution's technical level. I think we're doing that. I do think there are things we can do to improve the inflow of developers into Debian (as I also said during this year's DPL campaign), but competing against Ubuntu isn't one of them. (anyway, this is getting more and more off-topic for debian-devel, so EOT for me here) -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121019153226.gn2...@grep.be
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 12:40 AM, Christian PERRIER bubu...@debian.org wrote: For sure, this kind of decline is not that visible. We still have new contributors, we still manage to do releases, we still have an ever growing number of packages. But, we have less bug reports. We have partly abandoned packages, including in the core of the distribution. We have an installer that has just been rescued by nearly a one-man effort. And I probably forget many other examples. This is sometimes hidden by the incredible work and investment of several people in the project (yes, that's probably mean whoever is reading this). But, still, yes, I feel we are in danger in some way. That may sound alarming (death of Debian predicted, film at 11), but, really, getting new blood is important for usif we don't want to shrink into a club of old chaps who are doing Debian just for their needs but can't manage to do it anymore because there is too much to do..:-). A thread like this really makes me feel bad personally. I am no real programmer, but I am a power user for sure, and on my way to being a sysadmin. But I basically never report bugs. I have used Sid for years, and in fact I often don't notice bugs in my personal workflow (maybe if I can think of myself as a user? I notice end-user-impacting bugs in other areas). If someone comes over and sees me working the might say, wow that is an annoying bug and I say what bug? Oh that. I didn't notice, I just worked around it. Even with bugs I do notice, I usually just ignore and work around until it is fixed. I guess it is a combo of never having gotten comfortable with the bug report workflow and never feeling like I could go deep enough into debugging to be very useful (I have gotten useful info out of gdb maybe twice over the years). Now I am just in a habit of not doing it. Kelly Clowers -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAFoWM=-m_bpbsc4krvfdwzt3+0o3_fwx7wyeppn_9yb-_ok...@mail.gmail.com
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
[Kelly Clowers] But I basically never report bugs. I have used Sid for years, and in fact I often don't notice bugs in my personal workflow (maybe if I can think of myself as a user? I notice end-user-impacting bugs in other areas). If someone comes over and sees me working the might say, wow that is an annoying bug and I say what bug? Oh that. I didn't notice, I just worked around it. Even with bugs I do notice, I usually just ignore and work around until it is fixed. Don't feel bad about that. Reporting a bug is a _burden_, especially if you care enough to produce a high-quality report. Even if the actual reporting part is pretty easy, you have to gather a lot of information: is it reproduceable and if so, how? How sure am I that it isn't user error or local configuration? How sure am I that it hasn't already been fixed by a newer upload? Is there anything strange in my environment that I am forgetting to mention, that would make the bug hard for anyone else to reproduce? And of course that's not even counting the time investment of working with the maintainer after the initial report. I don't fault anyone for deciding that the return on investment for producing a high-quality bug report is higher than for just working around it. I often do the same. We of course appreciate when users are willing to contribute a good bug report, but we don't require or expect everybody to do it. Mostly we produce Debian so you can _use_ it, not so you can spend your time helping us make it better. Peter -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121019164112.gf4...@p12n.org
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
I will fill your bugreports for $1.99 per bug :-) 2012/10/19 Peter Samuelson pe...@p12n.org: [Kelly Clowers] But I basically never report bugs. I have used Sid for years, and in fact I often don't notice bugs in my personal workflow (maybe if I can think of myself as a user? I notice end-user-impacting bugs in other areas). If someone comes over and sees me working the might say, wow that is an annoying bug and I say what bug? Oh that. I didn't notice, I just worked around it. Even with bugs I do notice, I usually just ignore and work around until it is fixed. Don't feel bad about that. Reporting a bug is a _burden_, especially if you care enough to produce a high-quality report. Even if the actual reporting part is pretty easy, you have to gather a lot of information: is it reproduceable and if so, how? How sure am I that it isn't user error or local configuration? How sure am I that it hasn't already been fixed by a newer upload? Is there anything strange in my environment that I am forgetting to mention, that would make the bug hard for anyone else to reproduce? And of course that's not even counting the time investment of working with the maintainer after the initial report. I don't fault anyone for deciding that the return on investment for producing a high-quality bug report is higher than for just working around it. I often do the same. We of course appreciate when users are willing to contribute a good bug report, but we don't require or expect everybody to do it. Mostly we produce Debian so you can _use_ it, not so you can spend your time helping us make it better. Peter -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121019164112.gf4...@p12n.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/call-q8wn+y3kadso5dykw7yw-rjw6entrusk1+aaax0rz5j...@mail.gmail.com
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Sun, 2012-10-14 at 22:01 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: Except it's not, because that's not what Ubuntu does. Most of the packages are imported into Ubuntu unmodified. Among those that are modified, most of the modifications are exactly the minor changes that Debian makes to upstream, and Ubuntu folks are generally quite happy to drop the patch when possible. Then again,... I wonder why Ubuntu exists, if they allegedly anyway want their changes into Debian. And still sounds like a fork in a respect that forks usually don't change everything. But I mean that discussion doesn't help... the question in the end will rather be, is Ubuntu becoming a thread to Debian (which it easily can by being more of a hype, by having commerical background, by focusing pretty much on what's cool like tablets and so on)... IMHO there are at least some sings for this. And as second question, whether we're digging our own graves by seemingly even supporting that, which involuntarily came to my mind when I saw ubuntu-packaging-guides as a package in Debian. Made me feel like the Borg have arrived and are going to assimilate us ;-) Ubuntu has a much different release cycle, a different set of goals in terms of what packages to focus on and what bugs have to be fixed, and a different default desktop environment, all of which would be extremely difficult to do in Debian directly, and would at least have involved a vast amount of discussion. But specifically that Ubuntu put such strong focuses is IMHO indirectly also a danger for Debian. Cause as I mentioned before... when you do hype things like cloud or tablets or apps... you easily can get biggest attraction (also in terms of attracting developers away from - potentially - Debian) and support. It's however not necessarily the best for free software culture or in the end for the good of the users. Cause eventually, when the masses want, funny nice Apple-like systems and software... (which I guess is what we shouldn't want) professional and seriously usable systems and software will somehow suffer. Cheers, Chris. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Mon, 2012-10-15 at 08:11 +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: Do you remember the sorry state of, for instance hotplugging of devices and the utterly poor integration with desktops back in 2004 when Ubuntu first started? It was a _huge_ step forward. I didn't say everything was Ubuntu made or makes was wrong or from the ground up evil ;-) Still the question remains open somewhat why a separate community/distro was needed for this... I mean Debian is in most cases quite open towards contributions. Further, I'm fully aware that Ubuntu donates to Debian... but on the other hand they probably make a lot of money by using it... so this is not so special. And when looking at reports like Who wrote the Linux kernel, Canonical plays IMHO a very minor role with respect to contributions. I don't think it would be possible to make some of the large-scale-across-the-board changes that Ubuntu does, in Debian. We're a lot of people, we have a culture of discussing every change in every detail and in practice people feel like they can rightfully block other people's work. We're also generally unable to choose a single solution and prefer to say «both» rather than A or B. That's true... and sometimes it's a problem. But it can also be good if there are not few people or one person being in control, that decide where to go. I mean when looking e.g. at Unity... it seems that there is some broad dislike towards it (at least from people I know; I for myself, have never tested it... so this is no judgement from my side). I use RMS as a guide in the same way that a boat captain would use a lighthouse. It's good to know where it is, but you generally don't want to find yourself in the same spot. This made me laugh so much :D But I think he's not so untrue... there is a slight and silent but steady commercialisation going on in the open source world. While this has the advantage of brining funding into development and support from vendors... it also has the obvious drawbacks. Cheers, Chris. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Wed, 2012-10-17 at 17:43 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: Making opensource more open for proprietary stuff is sometimes simply necessary... but this may ultimately also become a big threat for the free software world, namely then when that non-free stuff plays such an important role that we couldn't get rid of it anymore. Ah, well, I think you misunderstood me here. What I meant is that ubuntu is gaining ground on things like Windows and MacOS. I didn't mean to refer to non-free software packaged with ubuntu, nor to non-free producers who support ubuntu. Ah I see. Well but ultimately that could mean harm to Debian, too. I guess most of us (as Debian and thus Linux or kFreeBSD users) think that those OSes are better than Windows/Apple. So if there's a distro that is very close to them... but still Linux like... it will draw considerable attraction... on things (users, developers, support) that will indirectly miss at other places (e.g. Debian)... Cheers, Chris. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Christoph Anton Mitterer cales...@scientia.net writes: And still sounds like a fork in a respect that forks usually don't change everything. I think of a fork as a permanent division of the code base, with possibly some importing of code back and forth but with major development happening independently. While that has happened for some packages, that's really a fairly rare case in the Debian/Ubuntu relationship. (Exactly the way that most Debian packages are not forks of upstream.) But I mean that discussion doesn't help... the question in the end will rather be, is Ubuntu becoming a thread to Debian (which it easily can by being more of a hype, by having commerical background, by focusing pretty much on what's cool like tablets and so on)... IMHO there are at least some sings for this. And that seems to be making Debian richer. We've benefited greatly from major work that Ubuntu has done in pursuit of some of their goals, such as multiarch or the PAM configuration system. And as second question, whether we're digging our own graves by seemingly even supporting that, which involuntarily came to my mind when I saw ubuntu-packaging-guides as a package in Debian. Made me feel like the Borg have arrived and are going to assimilate us ;-) I'm not seeing any signs that Ubuntu actually wants to take over what Debian is the best at, which is maintaining a very broad range of packages at high quality. Notice the number of folks who start doing Debian packaging because they want to introduce their packages upstream of Ubuntu, and the number of less-widely-used packages that are maintained entirely in Debian and just imported into Ubuntu. Ubuntu has full-time developer resources available to focus on certain core work, which means they can drive archive-wide changes faster than we can and can do focused development on specific priorities often easier than we can. Having centralized decision-making also helps with both of those. But they're not as good at the things that large pools of volunteers are good at, like maintaining lots of packages that are of interest to small groups of people. I think the relationship is fairly synergistic, honestly. Cause as I mentioned before... when you do hype things like cloud or tablets or apps... you easily can get biggest attraction (also in terms of attracting developers away from - potentially - Debian) and support. It's however not necessarily the best for free software culture or in the end for the good of the users. Maybe, but I'm not seeing anything clearcut around loss of new developer talent. There's a fairly large pool of possible packagers that both Debian and Ubuntu are drawing on, and a *lot* of people end up doing work for both. Cause eventually, when the masses want, funny nice Apple-like systems and software... (which I guess is what we shouldn't want) professional and seriously usable systems and software will somehow suffer. One of the great things about working on Debian is that what the masses want doesn't need to be particularly important. I've written about this before, but I think it's always worth keeping in mind that Debian is not primarily an entry in a popularity contest. We don't have to be the most popular distribution in the world; I, for one, am not working on Debian to achieve that goal. I work on Debian to create a Linux distribution that does the things *I* need, and one of things I love about Debian is the opportunity to work with other people with similar needs and collaboratively create the distribution that we want to actually use. Now, that motive certainly doesn't rule out others! That's one of the strengths of Debian: everyone can work on it for their own reasons. I have great respect for the folks who are working on aspects of the distribution that make it more popular. But, unlike commercial distributions, we don't *have* to be popular to succeed. We have a much broader range of successful outcomes than a business that has to make money. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87k3un40n5@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, 11 Oct 2012 02:46:18 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer cales...@scientia.net wrote: First declining bug numbers are not necessarily a problem, because it could just mean that we're getting better and better, or that more and more upstream issues are reported upstream (which would be a good thing IMHO), or that the maintainers already catch many problems themselves. I have adopted, in the last years, a stance of looking for a package's maintainer first before I file a bug. With certain individuals, or certain teams, I do not bother filing Debian bugs any more because they tend to be closed with send a patch, kthxbye anyway, or they'll rot away in the BTS without maintainer reaction, and after a few years, being closed with upstream has released three times since this bug reports was filed, things are likely that this bug is fixed, closing it without further checking, feel free to re-open if it's still present. This is, imo, the result of Debian's lack of personpower in core areas of the distribution. Greetings Marc -- -- !! No courtesy copies, please !! - Marc Haber |Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom | http://www.zugschlus.de/ Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG Rightful Heir | Fon: *49 621 72739834 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e1tonac-0001xl...@swivel.zugschlus.de
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Wed, 2012-10-17 at 08:58 +0200, Marc Haber wrote: On Thu, 11 Oct 2012 02:46:18 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer cales...@scientia.net wrote: First declining bug numbers are not necessarily a problem, because it could just mean that we're getting better and better, or that more and more upstream issues are reported upstream (which would be a good thing IMHO), or that the maintainers already catch many problems themselves. I have adopted, in the last years, a stance of looking for a package's maintainer first before I file a bug. With certain individuals, or certain teams, I do not bother filing Debian bugs any more because they tend to be closed with send a patch, kthxbye anyway, Even some bugs _with_ patches are treated the same way or kept open and never acted on. Shouldn't the number of open bugs be decreasing with time, not being constant or increasing as is the case for some packages? or they'll rot away in the BTS without maintainer reaction, and after a few years, being closed with upstream has released three times since this bug reports was filed, things are likely that this bug is fixed, closing it without further checking, feel free to re-open if it's still present. True, very true. Or bugs are closed due to a package being removed from the distribution, and never attended to at all. This is, imo, the result of Debian's lack of personpower in core areas of the distribution. Might be so, what to do about it? Maybe more team-maintained packages. And better procedures for package salvaging, as the current discussion thread on salvaging packages shows. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1350459672.5747.36.ca...@hp.my.own.domain
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On 2012-10-17, Svante Signell svante.sign...@telia.com wrote: Even some bugs _with_ patches are treated the same way or kept open and never acted on. Shouldn't the number of open bugs be decreasing with time, not being constant or increasing as is the case for some packages? in many cases, the amount of open bug reports is more a function of number of users of a given package, rather than a function of the age of the package. Might be so, what to do about it? Maybe more team-maintained packages. And better procedures for package salvaging, as the current discussion thread on salvaging packages shows. Neither of those gets *more people* in the teams of core packages. /Sune - who would like a couple of DDs and a dozen of bug workers for pkg-kde -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/slrnk7sp0f.me.nos...@sshway.ssh.pusling.com
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 03:25:21AM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: On Sat, 2012-10-13 at 20:35 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: [...] If anything, Ubuntu is gaining ground on non-free software. You can't be angry about that. That's a tricky question... ask yourself what RMS would probably answer. He'd probably answer that ubuntu is more free than windows, and that that's therefore a good thing. But to be perfectly blunt, I don't give a rat's ass what RMS thinks. I'm not a member of the Church of Free Software, nor do I want to be. Debian is the club I'm a member of, and that's more than enough for me. Making opensource more open for proprietary stuff is sometimes simply necessary... but this may ultimately also become a big threat for the free software world, namely then when that non-free stuff plays such an important role that we couldn't get rid of it anymore. Ah, well, I think you misunderstood me here. What I meant is that ubuntu is gaining ground on things like Windows and MacOS. I didn't mean to refer to non-free software packaged with ubuntu, nor to non-free producers who support ubuntu. -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Wed, 17 Oct 2012 07:53:01 + (UTC), Sune Vuorela nos...@vuorela.dk wrote: On 2012-10-17, Svante Signell svante.sign...@telia.com wrote: Even some bugs _with_ patches are treated the same way or kept open and never acted on. Shouldn't the number of open bugs be decreasing with time, not being constant or increasing as is the case for some packages? in many cases, the amount of open bug reports is more a function of number of users of a given package, rather than a function of the age of the package. And a function of the size of the package. Many packages are a nightmare to maintain just because of sheer size, but I still feel that Debian SHOULD[1] take care of Upstream Bugs as well and not require people to report upstream bugs directly to upstream. Might be so, what to do about it? Maybe more team-maintained packages. And better procedures for package salvaging, as the current discussion thread on salvaging packages shows. Neither of those gets *more people* in the teams of core packages. Ack. - who would like a couple of DDs and a dozen of bug workers for pkg-kde Amen. Greetings Marc [1] in the sense of RFC 2119. -- -- !! No courtesy copies, please !! - Marc Haber |Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom | http://www.zugschlus.de/ Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG Rightful Heir | Fon: *49 621 72739834 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e1toieu-0002md...@swivel.zugschlus.de
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
]] Christoph Anton Mitterer [...] In the case of *buntu... well to be honest I don't really see a reason unless someone wanted to create a company behind his distro, which wasn't possible with Debian. Do you remember the sorry state of, for instance hotplugging of devices and the utterly poor integration with desktops back in 2004 when Ubuntu first started? It was a _huge_ step forward. And IMHO, making it more desktop/user friendly (actually I don't think that Debian would be not) would have also been possible in Debian itself. I don't think it would be possible to make some of the large-scale-across-the-board changes that Ubuntu does, in Debian. We're a lot of people, we have a culture of discussing every change in every detail and in practice people feel like they can rightfully block other people's work. We're also generally unable to choose a single solution and prefer to say «both» rather than A or B. [...] That's a tricky question... ask yourself what RMS would probably answer. I use RMS as a guide in the same way that a boat captain would use a lighthouse. It's good to know where it is, but you generally don't want to find yourself in the same spot. -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ehl0tgbm@xoog.err.no
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Sat, 2012-10-13 at 20:35 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: No. However, Debian is an upstream to many other distributions, just as upstream developers are to us. Don't think that's true. When Debian takes software from upstreams, it's majorly a case of making a collection (of course with adaptions). When a derivative take Debian, it's - compared to single software - more like forking it. Now forks can have benefits for (free) software, but they also can have disadvantages, especially if there's no good reason for forking. Some of Debian's forks may do so because they want to add modifications which they wouldn't get into Debian easily. E.g. for policy/DFSG reasons... I guess that's ok,... but one can already question whether it wouldn't be better if it was tried to bring these changes into a state where they fit the quality of Debian. Some of course are special ones like rescue disks or so... no problem with them. In the case of *buntu... well to be honest I don't really see a reason unless someone wanted to create a company behind his distro, which wasn't possible with Debian. And IMHO, making it more desktop/user friendly (actually I don't think that Debian would be not) would have also been possible in Debian itself. On the whole, commercial entities cooperate better with other commercial entities than they do with volunteer organizations, just as much as volunteer organizations cooperate better with other volunteer organizations instead of other commercial entities. That's true... but wrt Ubuntu it sounds rather like an excuse, because many projects show that it's well possible to build up commercial support without making a fork. I don't think Debian is losing ground to Ubuntu. Well we'll see... I'm quite sceptical... and truly hope I'm wrong and people can look back in some years and laugh what that Mitterer jerk wrote about ;) If anything, Ubuntu is gaining ground on non-free software. You can't be angry about that. That's a tricky question... ask yourself what RMS would probably answer. Making opensource more open for proprietary stuff is sometimes simply necessary... but this may ultimately also become a big threat for the free software world, namely then when that non-free stuff plays such an important role that we couldn't get rid of it anymore. When you followed that recent discussion on lkml, where some Nvidia guys wanted to remove GPL from some kernel source files (for their evil deeds ;) )... you may see what I'm thinking about. Cheers, Chris. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Christoph Anton Mitterer cales...@scientia.net writes: When Debian takes software from upstreams, it's majorly a case of making a collection (of course with adaptions). When a derivative take Debian, it's - compared to single software - more like forking it. Except it's not, because that's not what Ubuntu does. Most of the packages are imported into Ubuntu unmodified. Among those that are modified, most of the modifications are exactly the minor changes that Debian makes to upstream, and Ubuntu folks are generally quite happy to drop the patch when possible. I've both been upstream for software packaged in Debian and the Debian packager of software imported into Ubuntu, and the experiences are very similar. In the case of *buntu... well to be honest I don't really see a reason unless someone wanted to create a company behind his distro, which wasn't possible with Debian. Ubuntu has a much different release cycle, a different set of goals in terms of what packages to focus on and what bugs have to be fixed, and a different default desktop environment, all of which would be extremely difficult to do in Debian directly, and would at least have involved a vast amount of discussion. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/877gqscoqo@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 10:13:51PM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 13:40 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: I wonder: did upstream developers start to worry when the number of bugs report they received *directly* started to decrease, due to Debian distributing their software? Well but that's a different situation isn't it? No, it isn't. I mean Debian typically doesn't duplicate what upstream is doing, No. However, Debian is an upstream to many other distributions, just as upstream developers are to us. but in your example rather serve as some intermediate layer for bugs, either directly solving them (and then hopefully push that upstream) or simply forwarding the bugs. How is that any different from downstream distributions? With derivatives, it's not only that (don't know how much of the bugs e.g. reported at Ubuntu are then forwarded to Debian, if they manage the respective package themselves)... the really copy and make the same work... Not in all cases. [...] And I can't quite believe that this doesn't ultimately take users and manpower away from Debian. An example is that, especially stuff from the commercial- (or at least non-open-source-) world seems to drop out Debian from their supported major distros and replace it by *buntu (given that it must be better for its commercial support) well at least in my experience. On the whole, commercial entities cooperate better with other commercial entities than they do with volunteer organizations, just as much as volunteer organizations cooperate better with other volunteer organizations instead of other commercial entities. There may be exceptions, however, though strictly speaking canonical isn't one of them (otherwise we wouldn't have be having this discussion yet again). I don't expect most major corporations to see Debian as something they can work with, mostly because Debian is something so far removed from what such entities are used to be dealing with that it's not something they can wrap their collective minds around. That's a pity, but it's not the fault of our commercial derivatives. The fact that they can take Debian, make some changes so it does something they think is important, and then offer that to major corporations in a way that these corporations will be interested in the offer is a good thing, and in no way threatening to Debian. I don't think Debian is losing ground to Ubuntu. If anything, Ubuntu is gaining ground on non-free software. You can't be angry about that. -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121013183504.gg4...@grep.be
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 09:45:58PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: Marco Nenciarini mnen...@debian.org writes: I've seen recently several company I'm working with getting away from Debian in favor of Ubuntu because they have a LTS version. However I don't know if this is a general trend. I can confirm the trend for a couple of organisations. The primary reason that I identified was the retirement of security support for Lenny and that Lenny packages are removed from many Debian mirrors which made it difficult to use Lenny machines. IMHO, supporting an OS release for only 3 years is not long enough. Well the challenge is that everyone has a opinion what Debian should do, but few are ready to WORK to make it happen. Getting volunteers to be interested in maintining 3 years old release is hard enough. If companies and organisations are not prepared to assign people to work on debian LTS, it is unlikely to happen. While people want LTS, they still want latest version of various apps they use (browser, new gcc and python for some inhouse development, etc), as well as support for all the new hardware they buy. Solving these two goals at the same time is tricky. We'd like to have the cake and eat it too. My gut feeling is that when people say We want long term support for old distro releases, they mean We have had so many bad experiences of things breaking when upgrading the whole distro, that we'd rather not upgrade if possible. Which means the root of the problem is regressions when upgrading. Riku -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121012084730.ga28...@afflict.kos.to
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 21:45 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: IMHO, supporting an OS release for only 3 years is not long enough. I think that such very-long-term security support is quite an illusion. Of course, problems found get then back-ported,... but software changes so rapidly while usually the quite recent versions are tested/analysed... so it's questionable whether issues in very old versions will ever be found (be the good guys), simply because they are no longer that intensively looked at. No to speak about all issues that get silently closed, simply because no one ever notices that there was actually a problem. So IMHO, the older software gets, the less security support can be provided. Personally I think the 3 years are fine. Cheers, Chris. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 13:40 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: I wonder: did upstream developers start to worry when the number of bugs report they received *directly* started to decrease, due to Debian distributing their software? Well but that's a different situation isn't it? I mean Debian typically doesn't duplicate what upstream is doing, but in your example rather serve as some intermediate layer for bugs, either directly solving them (and then hopefully push that upstream) or simply forwarding the bugs. With derivatives, it's not only that (don't know how much of the bugs e.g. reported at Ubuntu are then forwarded to Debian, if they manage the respective package themselves)... the really copy and make the same work... And I can't quite believe that this doesn't ultimately take users and manpower away from Debian. An example is that, especially stuff from the commercial- (or at least non-open-source-) world seems to drop out Debian from their supported major distros and replace it by *buntu (given that it must be better for its commercial support) well at least in my experience. In fact, the resulting ecosystem probably brings *more* users and bug report to them than before, albeit now they are mediated. Looks like the same situation. I wonder whether the majority of the Debian community sees it like that... especially the Debian/*buntu relationship. Guess I'll be in the minority, but I think all that is quite worrying for Debian's long term future. Cheers, Chris. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Le Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 11:47:30AM +0300, Riku Voipio a écrit : While people want LTS, they still want latest version of various apps they use (browser, new gcc and python for some inhouse development, etc), as well as support for all the new hardware they buy. Solving these two goals at the same time is tricky. We'd like to have the cake and eat it too. There may be some light at the end of the tunnel with two game-changing developments: - The possibility to copy packages between archives with the same interface already in use to manage DM permissions. This could be used to allow the maintainer of a package in Testing to copy it to Backports. (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/09/msg8.html) - The transfer of a package's regression tests from the build process to the autopkgtest system. This would allow to frequently test that packages in Backports are working. (http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep8/) In my field (command-line bioinformatics), where the build dependencies are often simple and not too demanding, it think it will be straightforward to provide up-to-date backports even if the support for Stable is extended of a few years. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121013024351.gb30...@falafel.plessy.net
(seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Hi. Some days ago Christian reported[0] about #69 with the feeling that bug report numbers in Debian were declining, which Don’s post[1] later seemingly confirmed. I wondered myself whether this is a problem for Debian and if so, what we can do against it? First declining bug numbers are not necessarily a problem, because it could just mean that we're getting better and better, or that more and more upstream issues are reported upstream (which would be a good thing IMHO), or that the maintainers already catch many problems themselves. On the other hand, some worries are there that this could imply some decline in Debian itself. Well I still think Debian is the best distro out there for most (if not all cases), even though I'd like to see it putting more emphasis on security. But, admittedly me not being the biggest *buntu fan (diplomatically said), things like [2] disturb me quite a lot. Gives me somehow the feeling as if it was an invitation to leave Debian towards *buntu. Anyway,... that might be another reason for a decline (if there is any),... being slowly assimilated by *buntu (and even helping with that) Another reason could be, that people have problems with the BTS. Don't get me wrong, I personally like it a lot... and I wouldn't want to have e.g. launchpad (if at all,... I'm quite a bugzilla fan)... but especially for end-users BTS might be tricky to use and I know even some fellow computer scientists which complained about it (and asked whether there was a more bugzilla-ish web interface or so). Well.. I'm curious what other people think. :) Cheers, Chris. [0] http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2012/10/09#69 [1] http://www.donarmstrong.com/posts/bug_reporting_rate/ [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2012/10/msg00539.html smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 2:46 AM, Christoph Anton Mitterer cales...@scientia.net wrote: Some days ago Christian reported[0] about #69 with the feeling that bug report numbers in Debian were declining, which Don’s post[1] later seemingly confirmed. I believe the script is incorrect. It does not count ubuntu bugs that gets fixed in debian, without ever being referenced in debian BTS... 2cts -M -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/ca+7wusxbt1bszp_tmevealhw_8d7uomxbeppdcwqnosq8an...@mail.gmail.com
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 09:15 +0200, Mathieu Malaterre wrote: I believe the script is incorrect. It does not count ubuntu bugs that gets fixed in debian, without ever being referenced in debian BTS... Well but it's up to interpretation, whether that wouldn't be a worrying sign, too. I mean that bugs are fixed rather via Ubuntu. Cheers, Chris. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: Well but it's up to interpretation, whether that wouldn't be a worrying sign, too. I mean that bugs are fixed rather via Ubuntu. Where bugs are reported doesn't matter, as long as they get fixed. Personally I look at the bug trackers for Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo and other distributions (using whohas) when I'm preparing both new upstream releases and also when preparing Debian uploads. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAKTje6FLxM=GMMM0nGtz+v8nLLpSQ-gNy_9v6x4W+J4j=g...@mail.gmail.com
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 11:51:50AM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 09:15 +0200, Mathieu Malaterre wrote: I believe the script is incorrect. It does not count ubuntu bugs that gets fixed in debian, without ever being referenced in debian BTS... Well but it's up to interpretation, whether that wouldn't be a worrying sign, too. I mean that bugs are fixed rather via Ubuntu. I wonder: did upstream developers start to worry when the number of bugs report they received *directly* started to decrease, due to Debian distributing their software? (Note: that started to happen a few years ago, like 15-20 :-)) They probably did worry, yes. But as long as Debian play it right with them, by triaging/forwarding bug reports to them as needed, no harm is done. In fact, the resulting ecosystem probably brings *more* users and bug report to them than before, albeit now they are mediated. Looks like the same situation. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Il giorno gio, 11/10/2012 alle 02.46 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer ha scritto: On the other hand, some worries are there that this could imply some decline in Debian itself. Well I still think Debian is the best distro out there for most (if not all cases), even though I'd like to see it putting more emphasis on security. I've seen recently several company I'm working with getting away from Debian in favor of Ubuntu because they have a LTS version. However I don't know if this is a general trend. Ciao, Marco -- - |Marco Nenciarini| Debian/GNU Linux Developer - Plug Member | | mnen...@prato.linux.it | http://www.prato.linux.it/~mnencia | - Key fingerprint = FED9 69C7 9E67 21F5 7D95 5270 6864 730D F095 E5E4 signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 Le 11/10/2012 13:40, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit : On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 11:51:50AM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 09:15 +0200, Mathieu Malaterre wrote: I believe the script is incorrect. It does not count ubuntu bugs that gets fixed in debian, without ever being referenced in debian BTS... Well but it's up to interpretation, whether that wouldn't be a worrying sign, too. I mean that bugs are fixed rather via Ubuntu. I wonder: did upstream developers start to worry when the number of bugs report they received *directly* started to decrease, due to Debian distributing their software? (Note: that started to happen a few years ago, like 15-20 :-)) They probably did worry, yes. But as long as Debian play it right with them, by triaging/forwarding bug reports to them as needed, no harm is done. In fact, the resulting ecosystem probably brings *more* users and bug report to them than before, albeit now they are mediated. Looks like the same situation. Users who get software through the Debian packages are still 100% users of said software. I guess the matter here is the recurring questions: are Ubuntu users 100% Debian users? Are we happy to provide high quality through derivative distributions, or are we worried (or sad) that they don't use Debian directly? I personally really don't see a problem with having less bugs reported in Debian proper, as long as the bugs are found and eventually fixed in Debian (and further upstream). And I don't care much whether my packages are used under Debian or rebuilt for Ubuntu, as long as they are useful to somebody. As a matter of fact, I consider it bonus if work I do for Debian also benefits users of other distros, and being higher along the stream means whatever we do trickles down to more users. Kind regards, Thibaut. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJQdrofAAoJEJOUU0jg3ChA+2MP/3DUG84rhIXSNFn6ZiiYD+1C TgQt78wCvpQzp+Ept1ncuCuMFp8kVJE/D0UhOFhOVWnVJte9WGCWgsac1jSEBeFd QHli9cQAsD9iq3ICuioWWVp2sHvptOmnP4z0Q1myT9RVQm9tmsyTWkPYw2sZsYme ITy+B8VDHagqiFruxW9mj/1gD5+ePf0rILAuX4xHMFbI9vU0WqYRMT0sSLRW7D0k SEHUP1P4P9ceAehr3ibOF3N1k0IIUhwpPGE7quZ9Z6aesDzNKusi2VABBoHWJm41 VbnwTYIXZ2MOC8F1z+ToXTAtfJw+O7hoIFelTokOL25q4Db7adFVl/VVCBQvbZt4 SeRd6a9cRRgO03rrV40KfhRM1mK5Wk6nSLuDUPvJXZ2ZqRyHrbzL+bAcNN8GGSLJ +Z7vdNpV8KHm0CdLdOfQty9M/RaeWO+XT81ZbiI+tUJ3egDuArQiUFNxlv5nSQM7 30JV8fYpfuzxlZdonfwlofjYYe7vqaAyhL4I+uWpXO0WOxHk3bAK31uSlKcGwfQ7 IIM4sEwXiNTjmcnFVQQ7eqPmebEjD4JQ8qx8RS4bBsd7diLuzyedgmwjgSYaQuFo PFWP9z1Uk6uB0/SR8Pf/REEu2H9mrqSNxl1QjZi3LCTKB6m8jxrJhv1KzQe4JTnf EChnJm7LYXyx1vpuEwyk =//DT -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/5076ba29.8020...@debian.org
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
]] Thibaut Paumard Users who get software through the Debian packages are still 100% users of said software. This might be your impression. It does not at all match my impression. Quite a few upstreams thinks Debian are working contrary to their design and their goals and are actively hindering adoption of their software. If you're interested in examples, just take a look at how rubygems was handled in Debian until wheezy and all the silliness around node.js and /usr/bin/node. -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87bog9f2mo@xoog.err.no
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 Le 11/10/2012 17:29, Tollef Fog Heen a écrit : ]] Thibaut Paumard Users who get software through the Debian packages are still 100% users of said software. This might be your impression. It does not at all match my impression. Quite a few upstreams thinks Debian are working contrary to their design and their goals and are actively hindering adoption of their software. If you're interested in examples, just take a look at how rubygems was handled in Debian until wheezy and all the silliness around node.js and /usr/bin/node. Well, upstream may have bad feelings about it, but from my point of view Debian did the right thing, and by helping realize that node was a poor name choice for an executable, actually helped upstream on the longer run. In any case Debian users of node.js are users of node.js (welcome to the tautology club). As upstream, one reason I value packaging early my own software under Debian is precisely that it helps me spot conflicts with unrelated software. Kind regards, Thibaut. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJQduwEAAoJEJOUU0jg3ChAjb0QALKqLDnxmJPJ44X+lfHOGWOP 5TK4RUXS6AXodQhtkDQAK1lPdO8ykl7G008I7oG6chyIGy6wE1JrPutXRUSwtMIU izZmxtamSm494em3Ehvt33wkDoMcHqfw0BaA/GI9/Ww+UedVZncjYZSQkwT6CeQx OTdm0mb9oXPcsDKR89heRT2d9XZkgI8cUE9HdfKa+UGpQz32qZ28a9roPw+oxfZd yFsJ2qbUHBvQRRoa768WitmfEZP2tGM6B/pfV+QWI1T3p/MoK8JCBhf/OKr3xk3P Gi0V1kHIn1ZMSIj98/osvLWZHKUvdXEhIu/0/7khX/V3e7NjhZdyogqAofEz89TG ydgY9bSrpVbi2fqA1+iUwLmZW2E3wJON+JNJ2dc7e65eJXdaB4cRz9dJxurQLOyo ELSwH4UqIAHzduLGha7C6M+/j3K1rIENeQt4zb63jAoxO8tkrTAjdrT/6pXUYa/a Yh3Q8TNR/PfsqwE+VnG97REGhhYBQJ0L2qR8MrDFBVumYMQrS83JCIfPUrJIUEO6 JNrhijV/gAV7eE+hUHdOG0ecZumJJn3ZfyUGH2HA8AOg4dcAvZcnr+BtGBl8Yrj8 qIbXvtpSaNWzrLDnQdwvrpUIA+P8GUja7njDXkVewCoAS6BYqKSJGPOC8rH3CIkv EyLC44VPNkm4IolSQuWq =g8ok -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/5076ec04.3000...@debian.org
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 05:29:51PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: This might be your impression. It does not at all match my impression. Quite a few upstreams thinks Debian are working contrary to their design and their goals and are actively hindering adoption of their software. If you're interested in examples, just take a look at how rubygems was handled in Debian until wheezy and all the silliness around node.js and /usr/bin/node. When, as in the case of node.js, upstream is antisocial and has an overinflated sense of self-importance, it's perfectly appropriate for Debian to work contrary to their design. Our job is not to make upstreams happy, it's to make our *users* happy; and while being good Free Software citizens means we try to respect the wishes of upstreams as well, there are exceptions. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
]] Steve Langasek On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 05:29:51PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: This might be your impression. It does not at all match my impression. Quite a few upstreams thinks Debian are working contrary to their design and their goals and are actively hindering adoption of their software. If you're interested in examples, just take a look at how rubygems was handled in Debian until wheezy and all the silliness around node.js and /usr/bin/node. (Just to be very clear: I'm reporting what I see other people are saying. I am not saying I agree with them.) When, as in the case of node.js, upstream is antisocial and has an overinflated sense of self-importance, it's perfectly appropriate for Debian to work contrary to their design. Our job is not to make upstreams happy, it's to make our *users* happy; and while being good Free Software citizens means we try to respect the wishes of upstreams as well, there are exceptions. In some cases, making one set of users happy means making another set of users unhappy, so it always comes down to tradeoffs. -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/874nm0g53b@xoog.err.no
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Marco Nenciarini mnen...@debian.org writes: Il giorno gio, 11/10/2012 alle 02.46 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer ha scritto: On the other hand, some worries are there that this could imply some decline in Debian itself. Well I still think Debian is the best distro out there for most (if not all cases), even though I'd like to see it putting more emphasis on security. I've seen recently several company I'm working with getting away from Debian in favor of Ubuntu because they have a LTS version. However I don't know if this is a general trend. I can confirm the trend for a couple of organisations. The primary reason that I identified was the retirement of security support for Lenny and that Lenny packages are removed from many Debian mirrors which made it difficult to use Lenny machines. IMHO, supporting an OS release for only 3 years is not long enough. /Simon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87sj9k23nt@latte.josefsson.org
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 09:45:58PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: Marco Nenciarini mnen...@debian.org writes: Il giorno gio, 11/10/2012 alle 02.46 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer ha scritto: On the other hand, some worries are there that this could imply some decline in Debian itself. Well I still think Debian is the best distro out there for most (if not all cases), even though I'd like to see it putting more emphasis on security. I've seen recently several company I'm working with getting away from Debian in favor of Ubuntu because they have a LTS version. However I don't know if this is a general trend. I can confirm the trend for a couple of organisations. The primary reason that I identified was the retirement of security support for Lenny and that Lenny packages are removed from many Debian mirrors which made it difficult to use Lenny machines. IMHO, supporting an OS release for only 3 years is not long enough. FWIW, it should be noted Ubuntu only supports most packages for 3 years as well. The subset of packages considered for Server support is supported for 5, but most people will suggest you follow the LTS upgrade path, which is very similar to Debian Stable's. My 2 cents. /Simon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87sj9k23nt@latte.josefsson.org -- All programmers are playwrights, and all computers are lousy actors. #define sizeof(x) rand() :wq signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Am Donnerstag, den 11.10.2012, 16:14 -0400 schrieb Paul Tagliamonte: On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 09:45:58PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: Marco Nenciarini mnen...@debian.org writes: Il giorno gio, 11/10/2012 alle 02.46 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer ha scritto: On the other hand, some worries are there that this could imply some decline in Debian itself. Well I still think Debian is the best distro out there for most (if not all cases), even though I'd like to see it putting more emphasis on security. I've seen recently several company I'm working with getting away from Debian in favor of Ubuntu because they have a LTS version. However I don't know if this is a general trend. I can confirm the trend for a couple of organisations. The primary reason that I identified was the retirement of security support for Lenny and that Lenny packages are removed from many Debian mirrors which made it difficult to use Lenny machines. IMHO, supporting an OS release for only 3 years is not long enough. FWIW, it should be noted Ubuntu only supports most packages for 3 years as well. The subset of packages considered for Server support is supported for 5, but most people will suggest you follow the LTS upgrade path, which is very similar to Debian Stable's. Since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the LTS versions are supported for five years on the desktop, too. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS -- Benjamin Drung Debian Ubuntu Developer signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Simon Josefsson si...@josefsson.org writes: Marco Nenciarini mnen...@debian.org writes: I've seen recently several company I'm working with getting away from Debian in favor of Ubuntu because they have a LTS version. However I don't know if this is a general trend. I can confirm the trend for a couple of organisations. The primary reason that I identified was the retirement of security support for Lenny and that Lenny packages are removed from many Debian mirrors which made it difficult to use Lenny machines. IMHO, supporting an OS release for only 3 years is not long enough. I've heard lots of this too, and have seen multiple concrete examples. However, they all uniformly seem to significantly misunderstand Ubuntu security support and think that considerably more of the Ubuntu archive is supported in LTS than is actually the case. People don't seem to realize that Debian security support is rather more comprehensive than Ubuntu's is for their LTS release. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87txu0wutz@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
❦ 11 octobre 2012 20:26 CEST, Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org : Quite a few upstreams thinks Debian are working contrary to their design and their goals and are actively hindering adoption of their software. If you're interested in examples, just take a look at how rubygems was handled in Debian until wheezy and all the silliness around node.js and /usr/bin/node. When, as in the case of node.js, upstream is antisocial and has an overinflated sense of self-importance, it's perfectly appropriate for Debian to work contrary to their design. About the first part of the sentence, this is a good way to get a whole community against us if it becomes publicized. We'll be happy to work for a distribution that nobody uses because nobody likes us any more. -- printk(KERN_WARNING Multi-volume CD somehow got mounted.\n); 2.2.16 /usr/src/linux/fs/isofs/inode.c pgpHzSMsyOtoi.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
❦ 11 octobre 2012 22:33 CEST, Benjamin Drung bdr...@debian.org : I can confirm the trend for a couple of organisations. The primary reason that I identified was the retirement of security support for Lenny and that Lenny packages are removed from many Debian mirrors which made it difficult to use Lenny machines. IMHO, supporting an OS release for only 3 years is not long enough. FWIW, it should be noted Ubuntu only supports most packages for 3 years as well. The subset of packages considered for Server support is supported for 5, but most people will suggest you follow the LTS upgrade path, which is very similar to Debian Stable's. Since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the LTS versions are supported for five years on the desktop, too. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS This only applies to main, right? -- Use variable names that mean something. - The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan Plauger) pgpQ14Bo4x2r8.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
Am Freitag, den 12.10.2012, 00:00 +0200 schrieb Vincent Bernat: ❦ 11 octobre 2012 22:33 CEST, Benjamin Drung bdr...@debian.org : I can confirm the trend for a couple of organisations. The primary reason that I identified was the retirement of security support for Lenny and that Lenny packages are removed from many Debian mirrors which made it difficult to use Lenny machines. IMHO, supporting an OS release for only 3 years is not long enough. FWIW, it should be noted Ubuntu only supports most packages for 3 years as well. The subset of packages considered for Server support is supported for 5, but most people will suggest you follow the LTS upgrade path, which is very similar to Debian Stable's. Since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the LTS versions are supported for five years on the desktop, too. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS This only applies to main, right? main + restricted are supported by Canonical. universe + multiverse are supported by the community (in a best effort manner). -- Benjamin Drung Debian Ubuntu Developer signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 11:57:24PM +0200, Vincent Bernat wrote: ❦ 11 octobre 2012 20:26 CEST, Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org : Quite a few upstreams thinks Debian are working contrary to their design and their goals and are actively hindering adoption of their software. If you're interested in examples, just take a look at how rubygems was handled in Debian until wheezy and all the silliness around node.js and /usr/bin/node. When, as in the case of node.js, upstream is antisocial and has an overinflated sense of self-importance, it's perfectly appropriate for Debian to work contrary to their design. About the first part of the sentence, this is a good way to get a whole community against us if it becomes publicized. We'll be happy to work for a distribution that nobody uses because nobody likes us any more. I have no problem with the above statement being publicized. The rude behavior of node.js upstream in regard to their namespace handling is already well known. I'm not going to meekly pretend that their behavior is ok for fear of angering whatever the node.js equivalent of the Slashdot crowd is. The TC resolution carefully balanced the needs of both sets of users, but as for node.js upstream, they receive my full scorn for their role in this as namespace hijackers. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (seemingly) declinging bug report numbers
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Simon Josefsson wrote: I can confirm the trend for a couple of organisations. The primary reason that I identified was the retirement of security support for Lenny and that Lenny packages are removed from many Debian mirrors which made it difficult to use Lenny machines. IMHO, supporting an OS release for only 3 years is not long enough. We don't have enough human power to fix all the RC bugs that crop up in stable during its lifetime, I doubt maintainers are ever going to want or be able to support oldstable for longer than we do already. http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/ As far as support for oldstable on security issues goes, you might want to take a look at these pages: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianSecurity/Meetings/2011-01-14 http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/01/msg6.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2011/10/msg00029.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2011/10/msg00030.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2011/10/msg00033.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2011/10/threads.html#1 -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAKTje6FBbk8smMq0=vGVmU0cpy_8gF0OmsM-15N1VyXaR==-v...@mail.gmail.com
