Frame.work might deliver RISC-V boards soon

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

just some hint to some laptop I consider interesting:

  
https://frame.work/de/de/blog/introducing-a-new-risc-v-mainboard-from-deepcomputing

It would be good if we would make sure Debian will run on this hardware.

If anyone is willing and able to invest some time into this machine I
might contact frame.work for some test machine.

Kind regards
 Andreas.

-- 
https://fam-tille.de

Re: Community renewal and project obsolescence

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Raphael,

thanks a lot for your analysis and sorry for my late reply.

Am Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 08:01:16PM +0100 schrieb Rafael Laboissière:
> > https://salsa.debian.org/rafael/debian-contrib-years
> 
> First of all, I wish you all a happy 2024.

+1
 
> I have updated my repository at salsa.d.o (URL above), integrating some
> elements discussed in the present thread, in particular the analysis
> proposed by Mo Zhou and the comments made by Steffen Möller.

I'd like to share some ideas.  Steffen blamed the advent of homebrew and
conda as one factor which I think is true to some extend in some fields.
But I also think that we are a victim of our own success to be the
distribution growing the most derivatives.  Ubuntu and Mint might be the
most famous ones and if I'm not misleaded the number of Ubuntu users is
at least one order of magnitude higher than from (pure) Debian (if you
don't count Ubuntu users as Debian users which they actually are
indirectly).  I do not want to discuss whether this is good or bad for
Debian (which would be a long list of pros and cons) but contributors
are recruited from users and we simply do not see the number of
derivatives contributors in our stats.  Maybe we simply see patches
arriving from some derivative which are simply collected by a single
contributor (hopefully they really report back issues - my experience
with bug reports+patches from Ubuntu are pretty good ... but I see only
those isses that are reported since I do not check the bug trackers
there whether there are other known problems hidden from our sight).

You might know that I'm very focussed on Blends.  The idea way born when
I noticed lots of dervatives dealing with the same topic as I (Debian
Med with a focus on biology and medicine).  While lots of people
understood Blends wrongly as a way to create a derivative its the
contrary: Don't derive from Debian but rather create a Blend to find a
solution *inside* Debian.

Over more than 20 years of Blends effort I learned that it is pretty
hard to make this concept popular.  In Debian Med we finally managed to
attract some of the derivers in this field to integrate their stuff into
Debian and by doing so they also became Debian contributors.  But
meanwhile those contributors drifted away for different reasons (changed
jobs etc.)  So at least their work was kept in Debian instead of beeing
lost in an orphaned derivative.

After all these years I need to confess, that my original plan about
Blends somehow failed.  I assumed that every Debian Developer /
Contributor is inside the non-Debian world in some community.  If this
Contributor would work hard to make Debian fit for this community new
contributors would arrise from this community inside Debian to make
Debian fit even better for the own usage.  Since years I include the
proof that this *can* work in my slides of Debian Med related talks[1].
So some outsiders project - biologists and people working in medicine
are by far a lower percentage of overall Debian users than the >1% of
Debian Developers we have in this field - can attract constantly
contributors with a growing tendency in contrary to your graph!  This is
a good sign that my original assumption, a Blend can attract
contributors, might be correct.  To come back to the "reasons for
decreasing number of contributors":  We have to less Blends done right.

My gut feeling is that this is somehow connected to the fact that
developers usually are overworked even with technical work and do less
to reach out to some community which is considered "additional work
squashing some time limit dedicated to Debian".  I confirm that lots of
my outreachy acticitiy (GSoC, Outreachy, MoM, in person meetings
(sprints), other ways to contact the community) did not really led to
long term contributors.  However, if I would not have started to reach
out the Debian Med project would never ever have reached its current
status of nearly 1000 packages in main[2] with a relatively low number
of RC bugs and by probably maintaining definitely more than 500 packages
in other teams (Debian Science, Debian Python Team, R Pkg tem, etc.) 

I also did some investigation in team metrics[3] to see how teams
(originally targetting at Blends teams) are performing.  I admit I'm
really proud about beeing "beaten" last year in the number of bugs
squashed[4].  The interesting thing in this bug squashing graph is not
only the fact that it is in contrast to your graph since the number of
contributors is increasing over years.  Its also the not visible fact
that the top 3 bug squashers are not actually experts in our field.
Étienne and Nilesh just joined since its fun to work in this team.

To summarise this long mail: Another item in your list of reasons is,
that we should care better for our contributors in strong teams (either
topic related Blends or kind and inviting language teams).

Kind regards
Andreas.

[1] 

Re: We need to define a path for Debian to climate neutrality

[Andreas Tille]

Am Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 10:20:16AM -0700 schrieb Russ Allbery:
> This also has the advantage that, whether or not the specific framing of
> this thread is inspiring to a given Debian contributor, everyone wants
> longer laptop battery life and lower power bills for their data centers.

While I personally absolutely subscribe the need to reduce the carbon
footprint I think we should focus on those points (battery life and
power bill) since this also gets those persons on our side who do not
believe in climate crisis.  I mean, it does not really matter why people 
behave correctly as long as they do so.  Thus I personally focus on
putting rather those terms in the subject.

Kind regards

  Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: Questions around Justice and Our Current CoC procedures

[Andreas Tille]

Am Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 11:06:54AM + schrieb Scott Kitterman:
> On February 23, 2022 8:50:58 AM UTC, Andreas Tille  wrote:
> >Am Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 12:06:17AM -0500 schrieb Scott Kitterman:
> >> 
> >> Currently a DAM warning is a suspension/expulsion with deferred execution. 
> >>  I 
> >> think every non-government job I've had had a discipline process that went:
> >> 
> >> 1.  Verbal warning.
> >> 2.  Written warning.
> >> 3.  You're fired.
> >
> >In my eyes this sequence is missing some
> >
> >Mediation attempt on a face-to-face medium
> >
> >which I would put between 1. and 2.
> 
> It's not a proposal.  It's a description of what I've seen in my working 
> experience.

I perfectly understood this - and I tried to express what we should
implement in Debian to (hopefully) enhance the situation.

Kind regards

 Andreas. 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: Questions around Justice and Our Current CoC procedures

[Andreas Tille]

Am Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 12:06:17AM -0500 schrieb Scott Kitterman:
> 
> Currently a DAM warning is a suspension/expulsion with deferred execution.  I 
> think every non-government job I've had had a discipline process that went:
> 
> 1.  Verbal warning.
> 2.  Written warning.
> 3.  You're fired.

In my eyes this sequence is missing some

Mediation attempt on a face-to-face medium

which I would put between 1. and 2.

Kind regards

 Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Debian Med sprint from 2022-02-18 to 2021-02-20

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

since more people confirmed the dates Friday 2022-02-18 to Sunday
2021-02-20 the Debian Med team will do the second sprint online at
this time.  The main information about the sprint can be obtained
from the Wiki page[1].  If you have short questions you are kindly
invited to ask on our Matrix channel.

Everybody (specifically beginners) are welcome to join the fun of
our meeting.  We try to find interesting tasks also for newcomers.

See you

 Andreas.


[1] 
https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/community/sprints/-/wikis/202202_debian-med_sprint_online
[2] https://app.element.io/#/room/#debian-med:matrix.org

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: Using Debian funds to support a gcc development task

[Andreas Tille]

Hi

On Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 11:44:26AM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> So, would -project be willing to support our cause through Debian funds?

Besides other good reasons to say "no" to this question I'm wondering
whether donators of our money would consider supporting gcc on m68k is a
good use of their money.

Kind regards

 Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: Debian supports pridemonth?

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, Jul 01, 2019 at 08:37:13AM +0200, Gerardo Ballabio wrote:
> 
> On the other hand, nobody but me has spoken openly to say that it was
> a mistake to issue that statement. So I'm taking that as meaning that
> there is indeed a project-wide consensus that it was ok.

I do not consider it a mistake but I was astonished about changing the
logo.  While I *personally* think it is definitely a good thing that we
are inclusive it flashed through my mind that Free Software is not
political (see the non-free licenses like "GPL but you are not permitted
to do evil" or so).  And yes, I've read Russ' good arguments to be
political.

I simply refrained from contributing to that discussion (and will not
take part any more) since I consider discussing this topic on the
mailing list as very less productive.  Lets do this at DebConf rather
face to face.

Kind regards

Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: Debian Helping Scammer Websites to Cheat its Readers?

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 10:22:01AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 12:01 PM Jeff Licquia wrote:
> 
> > That link on Debian Junior for shoes should probably be removed now.
> 
> The link is pulled directly from the package metadata from
> (now-obsolete) Debian releases. The junior-programming metapackage
> still suggests it.

Fixed in

   
https://salsa.debian.org/blends-team/junior/commit/96eb3ccbfc7fe6021f0278b208b81ef1c93e4b03

The link will vanish from the tasks page after it is regenerated (in
a couple of hours).

Kind regards

 Andreas. 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: Apology and DAM decisions

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 10:33:15PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Norbert, Enrico, Joerg and Jonathan,
> 
> many thanks for all your patience, efforts, and dedication,
> 
> today is a great day for Debian.

+1

Best news of today.

Thanks to all involved

   Andeas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: should debian comment about the recent 'ransomware' malware.

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 09:51:12AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Ian Jackson  writes:
> 
> > If these systems were running Debian, big organisations like the British
> > government could hire people to provide security support for their
> > users, even for versions which we no longer support.  When the obsolete
> > operating system is Windows, they can only hire Microsoft, who can set
> > the price at whatever they think the market will bear.
> 
> > As it happens this particular vulnerability was indeed fixed by
> > Microsoft, and that the UK NHS suffered so much is because of government
> > and management failures[1].  But in general, users who for any reason
> > are stuck on very old systems are in a much better position if those
> > systems are free software.
> 
> That's a very good point that I neglected.  Thank you for adding that!
> 
> > Also, Debian's engineering approaches mean it's easier to support
> > obsolete environments, eg via chroots and/or mixed systems and/or
> > selective backporting.
> 
> Also a good point.

I might like to add an additional point which is also not brought up. It
is not even directly connected to security issues:  In German railway
stations there are information panels which basically display schedules
as anybody might know from airports.  These were affected as well.  So
who on earth considers building such simple text displays based on a
windows (probably XP or before) system.

If people decide for a desktop system where users are expecting certain
applications and user experience I have some understanding for a
decision for a Windows system.  But to simply display a set of text
lines is just a matter what kind of programmer you hire.

Paying licenses (even if they probably cost close to nothing in those
cases) is pretty stupid, but even from an environment saving point some
arm based linux system would be way more sensible.  So there are way
more reasons than security to avoid Windows systems for this kind of
dedicated devices and somebody should explain this to decision makers.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Lets encourage new DDs to run for DPL (Was: Let's make Debian DPLess!?)

[Andreas Tille]

On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 01:49:03AM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> the position is a
> largely thankless, massive amount of work that's contrary to what Debian is
> about (code hacking and solving technical problems[1]).  Our kind of people
> is strongly awerse to bureaucracy and management.  Thus, a lofty glorious
> title is a perk of the job, let's not make it even less unappealing.

+1

I think Guillem's suggestion is not respecting the great work several
DPLs have done and I remember DPLs who saved Debian from beeing trapped
in a blind alley.

I admit I have ideas how we could move Debian a bit but to do so I
expect so many time draining jobs that it would become incompatible with
my day job.  Beeing in a sitiation where my employer would not support
pure Debian dedicated work I feel not able to do a responsible job as
DPL.

However, I would like to encourage new DDs to apply for the job.  There
is no need to be a long standing DD to run for the position.  It is your
chance to implement your ideas and fix issues long standing DDs might
have became blind about.

Kind regards

  Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: Team analysis graphs

[Andreas Tille]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2017 at 08:46:13PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> The code is at
> 
> https://git.debian.org/git/teammetrics/teammetrics.git

s/git.debian.org/anonscm.debian.org/

sorry, Andreas.
 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: Team analysis graphs

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Gunnar,

On Wed, Feb 08, 2017 at 01:11:26PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> The sheer number of files you are presenting is overwhelming as it is,
> but, if this person is interested in this data, could you share your
> dataset at a finer resolution? (say, monthly instead of yearly) Or, if
> you don't keep the source data with you, the scripts that produce
> them?

The code is at

https://git.debian.org/git/teammetrics/teammetrics.git

and any interested person could get a login on blends.debian.net.  Just
send me a login name and an ssh public key.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: Team analysis graphs

[Andreas Tille]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2017 at 10:25:35AM +0100, Javier Fernandez-Sanguino wrote:
> > The idea for the graphs was first presented at DebConf8[1] and the final
> > realisation was done by Sukhbir Singh in a GSoC project[2].  I'm generating
> > the graphs at beginning of each month.
> >
> 
> Very interesting work Andreas, would it be possible to add the Debian
> documentation team there too? (More information on CVS sources and lists
> here: https://www.debian.org/doc/cvs)

Added ddp team to commitinfo in Git.
 
> If possible, I would also be interested in having information from the
> Debian Spanish i18n team (only the mailing list).

Added debian-l10n-spanish to listinfo in Git.

I'll collect some further wishes and graphs will be available in beginning
of March.

Kind regards

  Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Team analysis graphs

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

this is my yearly hint to the teammetrics graphs you can find for your
team at

 http://blends.debian.net/liststats/

The idea for the graphs was first presented at DebConf8[1] and the final
realisation was done by Sukhbir Singh in a GSoC project[2].  I'm generating
the graphs at beginning of each month.

Last year I added some teams to the metrics set - feel free to ask me to
add your team if you are interested.  You could also make suggestions for
new graphs that might be interesting.

Kind regards

Andreas.

[1] https://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200808_lightning/index_en.html
[2] 
http://saimei.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2011/debconf11/high/712_Measuring_Team_Performance.ogv

-- 
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Re: Replace the TC power to depose maintainers

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 01:39:30PM +, Holger Levsen wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 01:40:31PM +0100, Johannes Schauer wrote:
> > > motivation. being able to say "I'm the maintainer of $foo" is a *great*
> > > motivation for many. Taking this away *might* cause a lot more harm that
> > > gain.
> > Why would this be taken away?
>  
> motivation works in strange ways. and it doesnt work the same all of us
> too…

I agree that motivation is important and different.  From my personal
point of view it does not matter who is named in the Maintainer field
but in the latest changelog field since this person has done recent
work.  To support this I frequently leave "Team uploads" of people who
did a slight contribution in a changelog with several people
contributing instead of simply using my Uploader hat to become changelog
owner.  So we have several packages uploaded by GSoC students who
contributed autopkgtests and these changelog owners are even prominently
displayed on the Debian Med tasks pages.
 
> I do agree with zack's original goal here however. And I also understood that
> he is well aware that this needs changes in our culture. I just wanted to
> point out that this aspect of our  cultur is not only harmful but also has
> huge benefits. So I'm wondering, maybe instead of getting rid of the
> maintainer field, we should get rid of the uploaders field and allow several
> maintainers in the maintainers field? I dunno.

I admit I do not mind about the name of the field as long as the
principle which Zack had in mind will be realised.  BTW, keeping the
Maintainer field as a mailing list address - and allow only mailing
lists there is another option.

Kind regards

  Andreas.

[1] Feel free to seek for "Canberk Koç" and "Tatiana Malygina" at
https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio

-- 
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Re: Replace the TC power to depose maintainers

[Andreas Tille]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2016 at 05:08:06PM +0100, Jérémy Bobbio wrote:
> > > For each such dispute, we should pick a panel of randomly chosen DDs,
> > > and have them decide (with a time limit).
> > 
> > No randomness please.  Probably all bodies in Debian are either elected
> > or appointed (by previously elected bodies).  We all know that there are
> > DD with a known bad track at mediations which would be totally unfit for
> > such a role.
> 
> I think random selection would be a nice idea to try.

+1

I trust my fellow DDs sufficently enough that a random pick of 5 people
would be able to decide about things like the discussed question.  The
side effect is that those random people are confronted with problems
they are not yet aware about.

Possibly a staus flag in your maintainer profile: "yes, I'd volunteer to
be in the pool for random picks" might be sensible.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: does Debian help detect gravitational waves?

[Andreas Tille]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 06:58:14PM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> 
> - Not that I wish that upon ourselves, but rather to accent
>   importance/significance/value of some folks... I wonder where Debian
>   Science and Med would end up if Andreas changed his job/moved to
>   another direction (I have seen many things happened in my lifetime).

Well, Debian Med is safe regarding me changing my job (even if it would
lose its main contributor the team is strong enough to cope with this).
I actually regard the status that I'm not evident for the survival of
Debian Med as the main outcome of all my involvement.

My work in Debian Science is quite limited.  My main job is sponsoring
other peoples packages and forward interesting ITPs.
 
> but I would say -- such disgussion wouldn't be productive, so
> let's stop here for now ;)

Fine for me - but I wanted to clarify the statement above. :-)

Kind regards

  Andreas. 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: does Debian help detect gravitational waves?

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 08:45:02AM +0100, Ole Streicher wrote:
> In my opinion, that is the point: NeuroDebian does not look any
> different to me than f.e. DebiChem or Debian Astro, or DebianMed. It has
> some interesting developments however (the extensive backports solution,
> f.e.)

BTW, the whole Blends framework was assembled by picking interesting
solutions from different user oriented groups and make them generally
available for all other user oriented ... and finally found a common
name for these.

Following these idea you can turn NeuroDebian into a Blend by
implementing their features into the Blends framework (since you can
not convince them to do this themselves ;-) ).
 
> Therefore I don't see a reason why it is not listed on
> .

I would consider it apropriate to list NeuroDebian there but finally
the initiative should come from the people behind NeuroDebian.

Kind regards

  Andreas. 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: does Debian help detect gravitational waves?

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 03:24:14PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> > BTW, while building bigger plans -- who is going to the next Debconf? ;)
> 
> I hope to be there.

+1 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: does Debian help detect gravitational waves?

[Andreas Tille]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 09:49:59PM +0100, Ole Streicher wrote:
> > Anyways -- those were rhetoric questions, not intended for an answer ;)
> 
> Are they? I (being new to this) would be not sure: There are always
> tasks (tasks? or packages?) that do not really belong to exactly one
> blend -- many of "astro-publication" is not really astronomy related but
> taken from science-publication. And astronomy-education is essentially
> identical to education-astronomy ... A potential
> high-energy-astrophysics task would share much with a common high energy
> physics task. And so on.

Good to know that somebody fully agrees with the opinion I raised
frequently before. ;-)
 
> In my opinion (this was, however, advocated so by Andreas :-) ) it is
> about visibility: I didn't really realize that there is a neuro-debian
> what-ever until this thread.

I know since some of the parts are in Debian Med - but this is "by
chance" since we share a common interest.  If I would like to promote
NeuroDebian I would not ignore the chance to be mentioned at the Blends
entry page[1].  From a promotion point of view NeuroDebian looks rather
like a derivative than a Blend.  As far as I understood Yaroslav and
Michael they somehow promote NeuroDebian also under this name in their
scientific community.  I personally consider this dangerous since if the
two main propagators might change their jobs in a different direction
the stuff they invented will be orphaned. (I have seen this happen in
other derivatives frequently.)

>From a Debian centric point of view NeuroDebian is a Blend that fully
ignores existing Blends tools but rather invents their own and don't
give it the name Blend. :-)

> And I am at the end curious why this is the
> case. Even if it shares much with d-science and d-med, it would be IMO
> useful to have a "NeuroDebian" entry in the blends list; just for the
> case that someone like me want to know for what fields we have "special
> editions". And the backports problem *is* IMO a common interest, at
> least.

+1
 
> > yeap ;)
> 
> While this is in principle correct, it misses a bit my point: Sure,
> build time tests are essential for backports. However, if you backport
> package A which is a dependency of B, then the build time test of A will
> not test the function of B with the backported A. There is always the
> danger that backported packages break installed ones. That's why I would
> opt for CI tests wherever possible -- usually the build time tests are
> easily rewritten to run on the installed package as well. And for Python
> (which today is a large part of analysis packages), this is really
> trivial.

+1

Kind regards

  Andreas.

[1] https://www.debian.org/blends/

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: does Debian help detect gravitational waves?

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 08:47:37AM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> 
> Because we overlap with / part of / superset of both Med and Science, so
> we are part of those blends.  We didn't feel like duplicating anything
> from those two blends within yet another blend would be of any benefit
> to anyone.

Just for the record: I disagree with this statement. :-)

It would be not duplicated work to arrange sensible tasks for your
workfield.  I'm not sure what other duplication you might have in mind.

I'd really welcome if you would integrate some of your tools into the
general Blends framework (but I we talked about this before).

> And then we provided on top of what blends do not
> provide: repository with backports, VMs etc... may be at some
> point things would converge somehow but not yet

I'd like to point out that Blends do not explicitly exclude these
features - its just that nobody has done the work to generalise simply
methods to do this (but I we talked about this before :-P ).

> > Right. I also find the CI tests important, and it would be great to
> > extend them to backports, experimental and such.
> 
> yes -- autopkgtest CI is great but doesn't cut it for mass backporting
> since we don't even want to upload any package backport to distro X if
> we know that it is going to fail there.  Thus package build time
> testing is necessary.  and then it would indeed be great to setup a CI
> using autopkgtest for all the backports to guarantee that they continue
> working as additional backports enter the stage.

+1

Kind regards

  Andreas. 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de

Re: does Debian help detect gravitational waves?

[Andreas Tille]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 03:33:16PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 02:31:34PM +0100, Ole Streicher wrote:
> > There are some problems why Debian is not soo widely used in the science
> > analysis (yet): One is that due to our long freeze many important
> > packages are already outdated when the stable release comes out.
> 
> Well, they're using oldoldstable and old^3stable, so it doesn't appears as
> if they rely on newest versions of packaged tools.

It is probably not so much about latest versions of tools inside
old*stable.  Its rather about tools that are not yet packaged in
old*stable.  So Ole has a point and in the Debian Med team we started
(heavily) backporting for Jessie which is basically solving many issues
(at least those I'm aware of).

At the Debian Med sprint in Copenhagen eight days ago we came to the
conclusion that at least in the field of Biology we made quite a move
from Debian as a facilitating into the direction of a indispensable at
least for well informed people in the field.

As far as I can see Debian GIS, Debian Astro and DebiChem are working in
this direction.  I'd strongly suggest to organise sprints as in the
Debian Med team (if you keep on wondering about the effects feel free to
check out the latest teammetrics graphs I assembled in my sprint
intro[1] and keep an eye on the difference in activity before and after
2011 when we did our first sprint).

The key to success is to directly involve users by either dragging them
into Debian directly by proper mentoring or getting them involved by
their need to find proper software which our last sprint was dedicated
to by finding proper categorisations of bio tools.  People who are
working on an ontology of bio tools (EDAM) where overwhelmed by the
amount of easily accessible metadata (via UDD) of lots of ready to
install software.

In short try to reach out to your target users and get them involved.
In other words: Run a Blend in your personal field and find friends
doing the same.

Kind regards

 Andreas.

[1] 
https://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/20160204_debian-med-sprint/sprints+mentoring.pdf

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How to contribute paragraphs to release notes

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

we are short before the release and I wonder how it would be possible to
contribute to the release notes.  I have drafted (not finished) some
text for the Debian Med Blend[1] which is to long for the general notes
and thus will be delivered via other channels.  However, I would love to
see some mentioning of Blends in the release notes.  Is there any draft
where people could contribute as far as some guidance how much text
would be appropriate?

Kind regards

  Andreas.

[1] 
https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-med/trunk/community/releasenotes/jessie?view=markup

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Re: Mentoring of the Month for woman

[Andreas Tille]

 appliances. Link to Xamin site: http://xamin.ir/en/

I'd recommend that Xamin should be added to Debian Derivatives
Census[5].  There is also the debian-derivatives mailing list you might
possibly want to join.

Kind regards and thanks for your interest in the MoM project

   Andreas.
 
 On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 12:21 PM, Andreas Tille andr...@an3as.eu wrote:
 
  Hi,
 
  since three years I'm running the Mentoring of the Month[1] project in
  Debian Med.  The purpose is to get new people into the Debian Med team
  and thus into Debian.  The effort has lead to some new team members (not
  all students remained) and some new packages.  Both (the members and the
  packages) would not exist without this effort.
 
  At DebConf13 I reported about MoM[2] (video recording[3]) and I
  explicitly considered reserving a month for woman.  Until now I did not
  added this constraint since there were always free sloths (monthes)
  without any student.
 
  ...
 
  [1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM
  [2] https://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/20130815_mom/
  [3]
  http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/high/987_How_to_attract_new_developers_for_your_team.ogv

[4] https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct
[5] https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census

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Mentoring of the Month for woman

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

since three years I'm running the Mentoring of the Month[1] project in
Debian Med.  The purpose is to get new people into the Debian Med team
and thus into Debian.  The effort has lead to some new team members (not
all students remained) and some new packages.  Both (the members and the
packages) would not exist without this effort.

At DebConf13 I reported about MoM[2] (video recording[3]) and I
explicitly considered reserving a month for woman.  Until now I did not
added this constraint since there were always free sloths (monthes)
without any student.

My observation on our yearly sprints (five since 2011 with about 15
participants) was that we had one woman joining our first sprint and
another woman joining the second one.  We did not managed to attract any
woman for the later sprints (despite the fact that I explicitly invited
the participating woman from second sprint via private e-mail).

I also tried to gather a woman for the Debian Med team at DebConf11 but
failed to get her actively involved.

My current conclusion is that it might help if I would focus more on the
trying to attract woman point rather than the Debian Med team point
since if we have only a small number of potential applicants chances are
even lower that these are obliged to the field of Biology and Medicine.

So if there is any woman who is interested in learning Debian packaging
and wants to become a member of some team inside Debian I leave her all
freedom to pick from any random package she wants to add to the pool and
join any team that might be interested in this package.  I'll try my
best to guide her for one month into the (not so secret) secrets of
Debian packaging.  Since I personally do not want to subscribe to any
additional team mailing lists I would suggest to mis-use debian-project
list for the mentoring communication if I'm not yet a member of the
target team and I really hope that the team will be inviting enough to
help in the integration effort.  I personally see the positive side
effect that some [MoM] tagged mails on debian-project could attract some
interest of further candidates.

I'd be happy if

  a) the MoM Wiki page[1] would now be flooded by student applicants
  b) other DDs might share the burden of mentoring with me if a) might
 become true

Kind regards

   Andreas.


[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM
[2] https://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/20130815_mom/
[3] 
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/high/987_How_to_attract_new_developers_for_your_team.ogv

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Re: Mentoring of the Month for woman

[Andreas Tille]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 05:22:48PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
 On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Andreas Tille wrote:
 
  since three years I'm running the Mentoring of the Month[1] project in
 
 Great initiative :)

:-)
 
  So if there is any woman who is interested in learning Debian packaging
 
 You might want to send a copy of this mail to the debian-women list.

Thanks for reminding.  I intended to CC debian-women but forgot.  I
bounced the mail now.
 
  I would suggest to mis-use debian-project list for the mentoring 
  communication
 
 Would debian-mentors or debian-women be more appropriate?

After pressing send in second thought I also considered debian-mentors
as a potentially better place.  I have mixed feelings about debian-woman
for the actual mentoring.  The intention is not to introduce the
newcomer into something that might be considered a closed circle but
rather in the well known channels.  On the other hand I have no strong
opinion on this and we can sort out these details once we have the first
candidate (hopefully soon).

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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How many people are working on our packages (Was: Team statistics updated)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 11:35:19PM +0100, Joachim Breitner wrote:
  http://blends.debian.net/liststats/
  
  to show who belongs to your team.
 
 nice. Can you add the Haskell team? We are on debian-haskell, maintainer
 field is pkg-haskell-maintain...@lists.alioth.debian.org.

Done.

In addition I added a new measure which was inspired by a (former) team
member of Debian Med and Debian Science team who claimed that Debian
scientific groups are organized as single person team.  I tried to find
out whether this is really the case and wrote an extensive answer[1]

Since I think my investigation might be interesting for a wider audience
and more teams you might like to visit the two pages I linked in my mail
([2] Blends teams, [3] language teams).  This gives a nice comparison.
You find more team graphs (and the according text data) at the general
output page[4] all starting with maintainer_per_package_*.

In my mail[1] can see what conclusions you can draw from this kind of
graphs and you can also drain other data as I have shown in the attached
text table.  This is supported by some predefined functions in the
teammetrics database on blends.debian.net.  The code of these queries
is in Git[5].

I'm considering to also generate graphs over time to make yearly slices
and look at the same measure year by year whether there is some
distinction.

Feel free to bring in further ideas what we can do when looking at these
data.

Kind regards

Andreas.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2015/01/msg00052.html
[2] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/blends-teams.html
[3] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/language-teams.html
[4] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/
[5] 
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/teammetrics/teammetrics.git/tree/maintainer_per_package.sql

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Re: Team statistics updated

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Guido,

On Fri, Jan 09, 2015 at 09:47:20AM +0100, Guido Günther wrote:
 
 Awesome. Could pkg-libvirt (alioth project) be added. Lists are
 
 pkg-libvirt-maintain...@lists.alioth.debian.org
 pkg-libvirt-disc...@lists.alioth.debian.org

Now added (and all the other requested projects).

Hint:  Team members might check the according *.txt data file for
possible duplicated mentioning of the same person with different name
spelling / alioth ID or whatever or spammers we should exclude.  Spam is
usually exlcuded since a spammer doese not post several times to the
same address but it happens in small teams with less than 10 people that
a single spammer occures.

The easiest way to fix name spellings or duplicated ids for one person
is to send (or even commit if you are a DD) a patch to

   
http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/teammetrics/teammetrics.git/tree/etc/teammetrics/names.list

If you want to exclude spam this could added to the list of bots:

   
http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/teammetrics/teammetrics.git/tree/etc/teammetrics/bots.list

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: Team statistics updated

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Norbert,

On Wed, Jan 07, 2015 at 05:07:59PM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
 Hi Andreas,
 
 (my email was rejected from the teammetrics-discuss list, administrative
 reasons???)

:-( - this should not be.  Need to check.

I keep debian-project in CC since this is the list you've got the
information from anyway.

  Do you have some other lists than
 debian-tex-ma...@lists.debian.org
 
 No.

OK.  Will be added and updated.

  and what VCS is the team using?
 
 git and svn. Mostly git, but a few things are left in svn
 (mostly due to the main contributore preferring svn).

The script deals with svn and git.  I added debian-tex (svn+git)
Anything else out of

moszumanska:/svn$ ls | grep tex
debian-tex
pkg-tetex
pkg-texmacs
tetexcvs

I'll run the update at the end of week in case some more teams have
interest.  (Its currently running for pkg-xfce-devel and pkg-swan-devel
but it does not make sense to run the job over and over on alioth for
each additional team.)

Thanks for your interest

   Andreas.

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Re: Team statistics updated

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 07, 2015 at 11:31:56AM +0100, Mathieu Parent wrote:
  files.  Feel free to use the graphics from
 
  http://blends.debian.net/liststats/
 
  to show who belongs to your team.
 
 Thsi tool is great. Could the pkg-php-pear and pkg-php-pecl teams be
 added there? (they have a different mailing list, but share the git
 namespace with the php team).

I added both mailing lists and general pkg-php repository to teammetrics
git.  Data will be updated an next weekend.

Kind regards

  Andreas.

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Team statistics updated

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

the team statistics graphs are updated monthly but the commit statistics
were not calculated properly in the last year.  So this announcements is
for those who do not yet know the work of the GSoC project about
teammetrics and also to announce the rewritten code for the commitstat_*
files.  Feel free to use the graphics from

http://blends.debian.net/liststats/

to show who belongs to your team.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Thanks Russ for all your hard work

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Russ,

I just feel the need to express my deep thanks to all your work in
Debian specifically in the endless systemd debate.  While I'm personally
very neutral and just expect my computer to boot (which it does with
systemd) I really appreciate all your sensible and always patient mails
on the mailing list in situations where possibly every other person
would have become crazy.  I never have observed a person like you who is
constantly able to write kind and very nicely readable mails.  I admit I
stopped to read close to everybody else mails in these endless threads
but just read your postings.

If I had any power to nominate somebody I would nominate you as the
White Knight on the battlefield of flamewars.

Thanks a lot and keep on with this great work

  Andreas.

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How to add avatar image to BTS?

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

I was desperately searching for the announcement how to add an avatar
image to the bugs in BTS.  It seems simply adding an image at

   www.libravatar.org

is not sufficient.  Any pointers?

Thanks

   Andreas.

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Re: How to add avatar image to BTS?

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 08:56:37AM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote:
 On Fri, 17 Oct 2014, Andreas Tille wrote:
  I was desperately searching for the announcement how to add an avatar
  image to the bugs in BTS.  It seems simply adding an image at
  
 www.libravatar.org
  
  is not sufficient.  Any pointers?
 
 That should work unless your email address has configured a federated
 libravatar service, in which case you'll have to add it to whatever
 server you use to serve avatars from.

??? This statements opens more questions at my side than its answering.

What I did is creating a login at

   https://www.libravatar.org/

Adding two e-mail addresses (ti...@debian.org and andr...@an3as.eu) and
attached an image to these.

I did not *configure* anything neither have I any idea what a federated
libravatar service might be and in how far I would need to setup an
extra server (since I assumed that www.libravatar.org actually is the
server providing the images.
 
 perl -MLibravatar::URL -e 'print libravatar_url(email = 
 q(andr...@an3as.eu),default=404)'
 
 is basically what the BTS does, so if that works, the
 BTS works. 

I can confirm that this throws 404 for this address as well as tille@d.o.

I admit I feel pretty stupid since so many avatar images are available
in BTS and I seem to have trouble beeing the only one not managing to
add one.  BTW, I have also an image attached to my gmail address.  Could
this be used as well?

Kind regards

  Andreas.

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Re: How to add avatar image to BTS?

[Andreas Tille]

Hi again,

On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 10:52:07AM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote:
 
 We actually have a fully federated setup, so something as simple as what
 Sune did will work:
 
 http://pusling.com/blog/?p=274

In other words:  All those people with proper avatars in BTS have setup
some DNS record on one of their hosts and providing an image on one of
their web servers (Jonas' hint seems to point to the same information).
 
Uhmmm, for me personally this sounds like a waste of time just to add
my image to some records in BTS.  I think I could spent my time rather
on fixing some bugs.

  BTW, I have also an image attached to my gmail address. Could this be
  used as well?
 
 Yep; we just do it based on e-mail address with libravatar as the
 fallback in case you don't have a federated libravatar setup.

The only thing is that I do not use my gmail address for Debian work and
we somehow need to map my other addresses to the gmail entry.

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Is there any inofficial cgit package since cgit is used on git.debian.org

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

when seeking for cgit in the Debian package pool I failed.  I wonder
whether there is just some inofficial package if we follow the principle
to package what we are using.  Any pointers to a source package or
something like this?

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: Is there any inofficial cgit package since cgit is used on git.debian.org

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Alexander,

On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 11:35:30AM +0200, Alexander Wirt wrote:
  when seeking for cgit in the Debian package pool I failed.  I wonder
  whether there is just some inofficial package if we follow the principle
  to package what we are using.  Any pointers to a source package or
  something like this?
 cgit is currently in NEW (since debconf). The packaging is available via
 https://github.com/formorer/pkg-cgit

Cool, thanks a lot (also for the quick and helpful response)

  Andreas.

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Re: DEP-5 (copyright file format) ... gap with practice

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 10:48:22AM +0600, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
 On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 05:40:46PM -0400, Michael Gilbert wrote:
  Not sure how that's a lot of work since uscan does all the magic for
  you.  
 I don't use uscan to download tarballs for packages I maintain. Not to
 mention time required to fill in the Files-Excluded field.

Just for the sake of interest:  Is there any reason not to use uscan?
(I hope the answer will not be since I need to remove files from
upstream source.)

Kind regards

 Andreas.

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Re: [Proposal] GR: Selecting the default init system for Debian

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 01:35:15PM +, Ian Jackson wrote:
   And, I strongly suggest you trim down both the
   number of options
  
  I will not vote on any GR with more than four options.
 
 Note that the number of options on a GR is not necessarily controlled
 by the proponent.  For example, the proponent could propose a GR with
 four options, but then some people who think the GR was a very bad
 idea propose a rotten tomatoes option as an amendment.

... and so I will not vote.
 
 So if you are to apply a rule of thumb like the one you suggest, you
 should apply it to the options proposed by the proponent.

I do not suggest this as a rule of thumb.  It was just a statement that
at least I seem to have a mental restriction to decide between more than
four options.  May be it is just me - I simply wanted to let others
know.  (Hey for what purpose did people invented the internet other than
share your personal point of view. ;-))

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: [Proposal] GR: Selecting the default init system for Debian

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 01:52:44PM +, Ian Jackson wrote:
 And, I strongly suggest you trim down both the
 number of options

I will not vote on any GR with more than four options.

Kind regards

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Re: Geant321 and geant4 in science package

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Christophe,

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 12:36:35PM +0100, Christophe Hugon wrote:
 Hi,
 I relaunch the question of GEANT4.

thanks for bringing this up to the table again as you did last April
when I answered[1] that it might be a good idea to contact Debian
Science team since the coordination of packages like this is done on
this list.  Since a web search did not revealed a single post of yours
on this list I put it in CC for this mail to just leave a record there.

 I tried the repository that you introduced me, but it wasn't
 satisfying (not up to date, I had some bug troubles...)
 The version 4.10 of Geant is out, so I had to recompile it and I
 wasn't satisfy to do it locally on all of my computer and only for
 myself.
 So I was wondering, since it is not DFSG-conformed due to an
 anti-patent clause in the license, isn't its place in the contrib
 part of the debian project ? If it is the case, with which
 contribution group should I get in contact ?

It is good to contact Debian and as I said Debian Science is the right
forum to find people working on the same problem.
 
 An other point, I otfen use this soft
 http://sourceforge.net/projects/plotdigitizer/ to get back the data
 from plots (mainly from old publications). I find it very useful, it
 is under GPLv2 or LGPLv2. I didn't find this packet in the debian
 science project. I would like to create it. I could start with this
 one first.
 
 If you have some comments or some advices for a beginner, thanks in advance.

I'd recommend to read the Debian Science policy document[2] which has
some pointers to beginner documentation.  I'd be happy to sponsor your
package in my Sponsering of Blends effort[3].  You might be interested
in the viewing task[4] and the data acquisition task[5] of Debian
Science.

Hope this helps

  Andreas.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/04/msg00079.html 
[2] http://debian-science.alioth.debian.org/debian-science-policy.html
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends/SoB
[4] http://blends.debian.org/science/tasks/viewing
[5] http://blends.debian.org/science/tasks/dataacquisition

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Please give a summary (Was: Debian services and Debian infrastructure)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

as a random reader I have the feeling that this thread is about a
conflict between DSA members and DPL.  For me all these mails do not
make the slightest sense and it would help if someone could give a
summary what you are talking about and if possible give some example
what you think is OK and what not.

Thanks

 Andreas.

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Re: GR: Selecting the default init system for Debian

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Holger,

On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 04:53:12PM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote:
 o.) my brain hurts, this is difficult, let's go shopping!
 p.) further discussion

p.) is rather I'd prefer fixing some bugs over voting
and further discussion is q.)
 
 *excellent* (bad) example, why voting is or can be bad: uninformed people 
 vote 
 on matters they dont fully understand.

+1
 
   Holger, who has come to the conclusion that this init system discussion 
 is
   way more a bikeshed than what I would have assumed half a year 
 ago.
   Indeed 99% of our users don't care and the majority of those 
 who do 
   care want their bikeshed their way or the highway...

While I agree in principle with all what you said before I think here is
some distinction to bikesheding since the color of the bikeshed does
not matter but the init system matters despite this attempt to put the
decision on uninformed people (like me).

But what I really wanted to say: Thanks for the nice MiniDebConf in
Paris - it was a pleasure to be here.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: Debian Enhancement Proposals website temporarly broken.

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 07:33:41PM +0100, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote:
 
 assuming the content is entirely static, we could move dep.debian.net to
 dillon.debian.org.

What about using dep.debian.org?

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: Code of Conduct: picking up

[Andreas Tille]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 04:29:33PM -0500, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
 On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 06:21:21AM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
 You're not being productive and you're really showing the type of
 behavior that the CoC works to prevent.

+1

Thanks to all those brave people working on CoC while I follow my
personal policy to only cherry pick a few mails.  This was a cherry.

 Andreas.

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Debian infrastructure teams needing you -- yes, actually you

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

in Debian we have some infrastructure projects which to my perception are
quite important because they are:

  1. directly visible for the user
  2. globally needed for all packages

I'm personally speaking about I18N and DebTags - may be there are more.
After some observation I came to the conclusion that due to a flow of
manpower both projects lost some part of the momentum they had before
and I wonder if nobody would like to join these teams.  IMHO the
advantage to start contributing to Debian in teams like this is that you
not necessarily need to have high technical skills but there are nice
ways to contribute with communication and classification tasks.  This
could be a fascinating way to dive into the Debian universe from a pure
users perspective and dedicate some time to Debian that it will remain
your favourite distribution also in the long term future.

Why do I think that the teams need help?

1. I18N
---

The team is responsible for all those users out there who do not
understand English necessarily enough to make the best out of Debian.
While it is probably not you when reading this mail - it is the majority
of the world population anyway.  So we should care and the I18N team has
done an amazing job.  Christian Perrier had a lot of talks with pure
success stories colouring the world map more and more with countries
that at least for some languages spoken there covered by the Debian
installer.  And speaking about talks:  Christian will tell you more
precisely like I could do in how many countries he was invited to talk
to people.  So if you like to travel around the world - the Debian I18N
team could provide some options for you. ;-)

Unfortunately several people left the team for different reasons which
even becomes visible on the teammetrics graph[1].  It somehow looks like
the-bubulle-list but please have a second look at the years 2006 to 2009
when there was a quite colourful baseline of people who were doing active
work.  It would be great if we somehow could fill the gaps at the bottom
with active people.

Another signal why I think the team needs help is that since the Wheezy
release the propagation of translations to Debian seems to have stalled
(see #722618) and translators are not happy about this[2] if the time
they spent seems to be wasted.  While this is certainly a technical
issue it also has a lot to do with communication and trying to bring
together the right people.


2. DebTags
--

DebTags are a really cool way to dig for packages inside Debian and I
think their current application is even lagging behind the possibilities
this clever tool could provide.  We have one shiny example for a nice
use case which is goplay (with friends golearn, goscience, gosafe and
others) which could be quite helpful for newcomers and we also have
axi-cache which might be widely unknown even if it would deserve more
attention by users.  May be we have even more DebTags based
applications.

On the other side the teammetrics image shows[3] that people left alone
the place where we discuss about the development of tags.  If you look
into the archive of this list for this month[4] you find only one thread
which is basically a CC from the Debian Junior list where people
desperately try to discuss some new tags to push the Debian Junior
project a bit (BTW, also Debian Junior is a project that wants you, but
this does not really fit into the two criterions I have put in the
beginning of this mail).   So in other words:  There is nobody who is
able to make up his mind about new tags - even if this is something that
does not require actual technical skills but rather some sense for
finding proper categories, simply applying common sense to the Debian
package pool.


So if you feel you want to become a well respected member of the Debian
community just be bold (Sam Hocevar[5]) and try to become active in
these teams according to your preference.  I'm pretty sure the current
team members will be very welcoming and will not leave you alone in your
struggle to learn the internals.  They have some good history of
teaching newcomers and you can rely on them ... as long as they are
motivated and not fully left alone which might be the case in the future
if nobody might come and join them.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

[1] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/authorstat_debian-i18n.png
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=722618#10
[3] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/authorstat_debtags-devel.png
[4] 
https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debtags-devel/2013-September/thread.html
[5] http://sam.zoy.org/lectures/20070617-debconf-dpl/slides.pdf

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Re: Paths into Debian

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Moray,

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 08:59:24PM +0100, Moray Allan wrote:
 At DebConf13 I was interested to hear people's views in the
 discussion session on Paths into Debian.
 
 The video of the session is available here:
 
 http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/high/999_Paths_into_Debian.ogv
 http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/low/999_Paths_into_Debian.ogv
 
 I have also put up a copy of my introductory slides, though they
 really just contain headings for what I said/for discussion, rather
 than much content:
 
 http://people.debian.org/~moray/paths-into-debian.pdf

Thanks for the pointer.  It seems there is currently no way to submit
slides to Penta.  I also uploaded my slides to my talks page and added a
link to this in Penta.  Is this something we should report or am I just
missing something?
 
 The two points that seemed to gather most potential volunteers were
 improving the Debian website pages about how to contribute, and
 encouraging more local Debian meetings -- I hope that some of the
 apparent enthusiasm on these points can now be channelled into
 productive action!

+1

Kind regards

   Andreas. 

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Re: Survey of new contributors -- results

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2013 at 01:44:05AM -0700, Vincent Cheng wrote:
 
 On the other hand, people who do not already have existing
 relationships or contacts with DDs, and who want to get involved in
 Debian, may find it much harder to do so than someone who already
 knows a DD. Having a friend/colleague who is also a DD shouldn't be a
 prerequisite to contributing packages to Debian (and thankfully it
 isn't), yet there's no doubt that receiving personalized and prompt
 feedback from someone you already know puts you in a better position
 to actively contribute to Debian, compared to somebody with no
 existing contacts in the FOSS community who uploads a new package to
 mentors.d.n, files a RFS request, and then waits, only to see his/her
 package bitrot at mentors.d.n.

Hmmm, this comment looks like a déjà-vu to me and my answer was on
debian-devel

   http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/08/msg00067.html
 
Kind regards

Andreas. 

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Re: Doing something about should remain private forever emails

[Andreas Tille]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 07:11:26AM +0100, Stephen Gran wrote:
 So, who's going to do this work?  While they're reading every single
 message sent to the list over the last decade and a half, wouldn't it
 make more sense to just honor the GR than to make up more work that
 nobody is ever going to do?  This was precisely the problem with the GR
 in the first place - it was a somebody should really do that
 statement, and Debian has never worked that way.

+1
(even if there exist several +1 about the GR in previous threads)

Could please everybody who adds another suggestion please start the mail
by I'm volunteering to spend x hours to implement the following ...

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: Debating difficult development issues in essay form

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 08:45:08PM +0100, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
 We think discussions on Debian development mailing lists sometimes
 suffer from repetition of facts, opinions, and arguments. During a
 long discussion of a controversial topic, it is hard for anyone to
 keep track of what has been said, and so everything tends to get
 repeated.
 ...

+1

I really like this idea.  The only problem I have is: How to know in
advance whether a debate might concern a difficult development issue
or not.  For instance when I wrote my first mail about uscan
enhancement[1] I did not expected this to be a complex topic but the
various threads afterwards have shown this later.  We intuitively
followed your suggestion by creating[2] but I'm not yet fully convinced
that this is a difficult development issue.

Using this example as criterion I'd say we are seeing something that
qualifies as difficult development issue if:

  1. At least 10 postings on this topic (with on this topic I mean
 *really* on topic and no troll / fun posts)
  2. At least two different threads to the same topic both with at
 least five postings.

I know that the numbers are perfectly debatable but I'm mentally using
these.  I would not see these criterions as a requirement to enter a
Wiki Debate but I would recommend starting a Wiki Debate if the
criterion is met.

Considering this would you agree to turn [2] into a Debate or would
you apply further creterions for this?

Kind regards

 Andreas.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/08/msg00380.html
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/UscanEnhancements

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Debian in space

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

Debian seems to have some nice history at NASA reaching from very old news

http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg5.html

to quite hot news:

http://www.zdnet.com/to-the-space-station-and-beyond-with-linux-714958/

(isn't this really cool?)

I wonder whether there is any better contact point for Debian than just
grabbing it from their homepage[1].  If they use Debian in critical
missions I can not imagine that no one from NASA is watching one of our
lists and we might get a better entry point.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/about/contact

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Re: Upstream packaging (was Re: Derivatives, MongoDB and freezes)

[Andreas Tille]

[moved to debian-project where it belongs.  This mail is in response to
 https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/04/msg00769.html the fork
 of the thread started at
 https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/04/msg00756.html]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 10:06:27AM -0300, Ben Armstrong wrote:
 But the common
 conception of an app store as involving you solely as consumer and not
 as participant in the free software ecosystem encourages poor
 relationship between users and producers (or distributors) of free
 software. So long as users continue to see themselves as a tiny,
 insignificant recipient at the end of the production of the software
 with no input into the system, you've stripped them of the power to
 change the software to meet their needs. So using the app store
 analogy is walking the fine line and really needs to be qualified to
 avoid doing damage to the user's relationship to the community.

Well, that's a reiteration of what those companies have drawn the term
into.  My initial question (reworded) was:  Is the name app store
simply burned because it is occupied by companies who are just doing
what you describe above?

  If you do not like the selling part:  Store in the sense of some
  storage of goods is not necessarily about bying (at least of my
  understanding).  Or tweak it like this:  We are selling our stuff but
  the price tag says 0€/$.  Feel free to blame me about oversimplification
 
 Honestly, I don't think the selling part is the most offensive part of
 the concept of an app store. It's the one-way nature of the
 transactions carried out with them.

That's an interesting aspect I need to think about.  Currently it
conflicts with my observation at work were people payed a fortune for
shitty-crappy software (and I can *prove* from the error log that this
is really the case and non-FLOSS IT colleagues of mine agreed with me
perfectly).  But the users simply told me that they want it in the way
it is and I would be really stupid if I would blame the programmers
incompetent.  I'm not really sure that by simply avoiding the term app
store (and its admitted one-way connotation) we could teach those user
that some user response is somehow important for developing software.
The explicite refusal to report problems is way stronger than just
the usage of distinct terms.

Kind regards

  Andreas.

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Re: Geant321 and geant4 in science package

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Christophe,

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 03:18:41PM +0200, Christophe Hugon wrote:
 I'm very interested in debian since few years, in a good part
 because the science packages are not bad. But I think that it should
 even better with the geant4 package. I don't know why, geant3 is in
 packages since years.

Thanks for your interest into Debian and specifically science packages.
I'd recommend reading the debian-scie...@lists.debian.org mailing list
(I have set Reply-To to this list!) where question like these would
probably fit better.  Steffen has given some links to the Wiki and some
general hints which I'd subscribe as well.  I'd also recommend reading
the Debian Science policy document[1]

 Maybe I can start contributions for packaging by that (I'm
 physicist), but I don't know how to enter in contact with science
 maintainers, and how to start.

I hope these hints have given you some kickstart.  If you need further
help you are probably well advised to ask on Debian Science mailing
list.  You will find a lot of other physicists there and one of thems
(me ;-)) is constantly nagging about the idea to create a Debian Physics
Blend.  Perhaps actually you might increase the critical mass to a level
where this might attract enough people driving this effort.

Kind regards

Andreas.

[1] http://debian-science.alioth.debian.org/debian-science-policy.html 

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Re: Debian participation into GNOME Outreach Program for Women

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 04, 2013 at 07:52:18PM -0400, Brian Gupta wrote:
 OK from my reading of
 https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen#For_Organizations_and_Companies
 it seems that Debian can be a participating project, without also
 being a financial sponsor. IE: We provide mentors and help select the
 best project submissions. I think this sounds like a great idea, and
 we should definitely pursue it. (Assuming my understanding is
 correct.)

I agree that at least in my perception Debian is way better in terms of
providing knowledge rather than in providing money.  So we should rather
provide in what we are good in (mentoring, programming skills) and not
what we are no experts in (dealing with money) to external projects.  I
do not have trouble personally in spending the money on OPW but I would
also see a similarly fair use of the GSoC org money to keep on
sponsoring DebConf newbees and explicitly prefer women who apply for the
support.  IMHO this fullfills the same intention to lower the entrance
barrier for women into the Free Software world.

In short: This is no veto against OPW support rather a slight reminder
whether we are just jumping enthusiastically on a train (which
admittedly goes in the right direction) before we have sorted out all
ways to spend this Debian money to support women inside Debian.

 Please let me know if I am misunderstanding how their program works.

Dito. 

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: I caught up with debtags patch reviews

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Enrico,

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 02:33:28PM +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
 ... The situation has now greatly
 improved \o/

Many thanks for your work on this (and for propagating DebTags in
general)!

I would like to attract your attention to some ongoing discussion at the
Debian Blends list[1].  I'm always wondering how we could make better
use of DebTags in the Blends scope but I'm lacking really good ideas.
Since I know you as a continuous inspiring source of good ideas I wonder
whether you could give some hints how we could do better to merge
DebTags into the set of Blends utilities.

Kind regards

  Andreas.


[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-blends/2013/03/msg00020.html
(and following in thread)

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Bug#701533: project: UDD can not access PET database on wagner.debian.org

[Andreas Tille]

Package: project
Severity: normal

Hi,

since PET moved from a private machine to wagner.debian.org.  This had
the side effect that the UDD job was not able to access the PET database
any more.  A solution was proposed on the Debian QA mailing list[1]
which should be an entry into pg_hba.conf:

# access as guest to pet from udd.debian.org
hostpet guest   206.12.19.141/32trust
hostpet guest   
2607:f8f0:610:4000:6564:a62:ce0c:138d/128 trust

Several weeks ago I contacted alioth admins on IRC and they explained
that this solution will not work because of some firewall admin
implemented by some hoster.  Alioth admins were unable / unwilling to
give some honest / helpful time estimation when this can be solved.

It might make sense to consider different means to inject PET data into
UDD than relying on the direct postgresql connection (some intermediate
data file copied via rsync comes to mind.)

I just intend to record this issue here in BTS to enable reasonable
handling of the problem.

Kind regards

Andreas.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2012/10/msg00048.html

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Re: Young people and computers

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 09:23:54PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
 Now, it seems to be a long and comparatively difficult
 process that involves demonstrating a relatively high level of
 technical competence.  I wonder whether young people find this
 intimidating.

I do not want to discuss the need for proving technical skills (which is
IMHO evident) but rather like to stress the fact that it is also some
proof of the person to be engaged and dedicated to some project to spend
enough time into it to gather the needed knowledge.  

If you look at

   http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Developers

those DDs who injected yes in the column DD because Debian Med
exists you find examples of people who in the first place were not
considered to become Debian developers but were given a certain reason
to learn all the stuff needed to build packages.  In outher words: If
you have a strong reason to join Debian you *will* require the high
level of technical competence.  Inside the Debian Med team this intend
is supported by the Mentoring of Month[1] effort.

In short: I do not think that the technical requirements are a blocker
for young people.  It is rather a selection according engagement of
people.

Kind regards

  Andreas.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM

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Re: Young people and computers

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

just stumbled upon some quite related article

   http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3158

which sounds like a good step.  In a German news article[1] you can read
that teachers union is not amused about this hardware donation because
it is considered plain advertising for the company donating the hardware
but IMHO it is the right way to go.  (Formerly those teachers did not
blame the software company that usually donates software to schools ...)

Kind regards

  Andreas.

[1] 
http://www.heise.de/hardware-hacks/meldung/UK-Google-spendet-15-000-Raspberry-Pis-fuer-Schulen-1794017.html

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For those who care about statistics created by the team metrics GSoC project

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

I've just updated the latest stats about selected teams inside Debian
now including full 2012.  Feel free to visit

   http://blends.debian.net/liststats/

Some more convenient interface for this graphs was developed in GSoC
of 2012.  Please stay tuned until this will be finished.

Kind regards

 Andreas.

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Debian branded electric water boiler made from ceramic

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

just stumbled upon

   
http://www.waschbaer.de/catalog/largeImage.html?img=pictures/articles/large/2117210.jpg

which is also available with red swirls on white ground but the webform
has just this image.  For those who would like to make Debian tea ... :-)

Have a nice Christmas

  Andreas.

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Re: Debian branded electric water boiler made from ceramic

[Andreas Tille]

Ahh, here comes the proper image:

http://static.triaz.de/0120/pictures/articles/large/2117200.jpg

and also a non-blury view about the technical details (German only)


http://www.waschbaer.de/Wasserkocher-aus-Keramik-Spiralmotiv--608d1p378131.html?exclude=1

Kind regards

 Andreas.

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 08:28:10PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
 Hi,
 
 just stumbled upon
 

 http://www.waschbaer.de/catalog/largeImage.html?img=pictures/articles/large/2117210.jpg
 
 which is also available with red swirls on white ground but the webform
 has just this image.  For those who would like to make Debian tea ... :-)
 
 Have a nice Christmas
 
   Andreas.
 
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Re: [Debconf-discuss-discuss-discuss-and-keep-discussing] ...

[Andreas Tille]

Dear Giacomo,

On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 08:27:18AM +0100, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
 On 12/04/2012 10:36 PM, Josselin Mouette wrote:
  Is the “outsiders” word also meaning to describe people who were asked
  for sponsorship and discovered later that the brochure they were sent
  had almost nothing to do with what’s actually going on?
 
 For a lot of people, your writing seems out of context.

Sure it is.  Josselin was refering to outsiders as people who neither
read the brochure nor have visited the location and neither were
involved deeply in the organisation of a DebConf (so people as himself).
There is no point in answering such mails if the subject implies we
should try to finish the discussion.

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: A media type for the machine-readable copyright format ?

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 04:45:53PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
 
   - About security, the discussion on debian-devel leads me to think that
   there is no need to worry.  I included a short comment suggesting that
   field values should be sanitised as usual.  Does anybody see other
   potential security issues ?
 
 No, your security considerations seem reasonable to me.

While it is probably very reasonable to do sanity checks as usual the
as usual is a hint that the phrase might be redundant.  It somehow has
the value as People parsing debian/copyright should know their job. As
I said in a previous mail the attacker is the same person (group of
persons) who writes debian/copyright *and* all the other packaging stuff
- so he would attack himself.

Just my 2 Eurocents

 Andreas.

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Re: Review of personal information sources in Debian

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Enrico,

I needed to escape the problem that UDD has sometimes several different
spellings for the name of the very same person.  I hacked around a bit
and finally settled with

  
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=teammetrics/teammetrics.git;a=blob;f=maintain_names_prefered.py;hb=HEAD

It is not in official UDD code because it needs manual intervention from
time to time and is hackish and dirty anyway.  But when using it on
blends.debian.net to create statistics abput uploaders and bug reporters
for certain teams it is definitely helpful.

Just to let you know

Andreas.

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Re: Planned changes to Debian Maintainer uploads

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 01:57:49PM +0200, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
 
 The ftp team wants to change how allowing Debian Maintainers to upload
 packages works.  The current approach with the DM-Upload-Allowed field
 has a few issues we would like to address:

I have read three responses to this mail which were somehow asking for
any abuse.  The fact that you are introducing restrictions to the
current procedure implies that it is not good as it is.  Could you please
give some reasons why you are considering such changes?

Kind regards

  Andreas.

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Re: Planned changes to Debian Maintainer uploads

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 09:21:36PM +0200, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
  This is slightly annoying but given that maintainership changes
  involve an upload too, it hardly seems fatal.  Has this been a problem
  in practice ?
 
 I think this has been answered by Gerfried's[2] and David's[3] mails.
 
   [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/06/msg00038.html
   [3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/06/msg00037.html

Hmmm, I do not think that it needs specific notice that DMUA flag is
set.  The sponsor should check *all* packaging details and I see no
point in giving a specific one an extra warning - so I can not buy this
argument.  I also can not see a real problem in handing over the DMUA
flag from one DM to another DM as long there is not practical evidence
that there is a clear misuse.  If I as a sponsor trust a DM to maintain
a package properly this includes the ability to decide who might be
involved in the packaging as an additional maintainer.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 01:32:18PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
 Steffen Möller wrote:
  The problem I see is with a
  competition with upstream. If we  in any way lower the impact firefox
  has for google, then this has a direct effect not only on firefox but
  also on our relation with them and other upstreams.
 
 That is what I came here to say. It needs to be considered carefully.

Sidenote:  Do we really have a good relation to firefox?  We do not have
a package with this name and I have heard people that *exactly* this
would be the reason not to use Debian.  Not that I would agree upon this
opinion, just mentioning it.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

PS: Perhaps I should have changed the subject - but I do not intend to
say more in this firefox/iceweasel discussion.  In case you mind
answering about this topic please change the subject.

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Re: DEP11 is CANDIDATE now!

[Andreas Tille]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:42:25PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
 Together with Andreas Tille, we are finalising the first proof of principle of
 using debian/upstream files in YAML format to store additional metadata.  Our
 current approach is only tracking the latest version of a package (in Sid), 
 and
 only tracking source packages that are managed in a VCS, so it may not be
 compatible with your project.

Remark:  The fact that we currently only respect packages managed in a
VCS is not really a requirement (at least as far as I do things) but
rather a because it makes fetching those files quite easy in the current
infrastructure of Debian.  I perfectly could imagine some mechanism in
parallel to the process which creates Contents-arch.gz which parses
Debian source archives and creates some Contents-Source.gz files which
could have a lot of interesting other uses.  Once this might exist it
could be easy to obtain such information.  To continue the raw thinking
a bit further I could imaging

  Contents-OrigSource.gz  (containing all the content of original sources)
  Contents-Debian.gz  (containing everything in debian/)

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: DEP11 is CANDIDATE now!

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 04:04:55PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
 
   Contents-OrigSource.gz  (containing all the content of original sources)
   Contents-Debian.gz      (containing everything in debian/)
 
 Half way there:
 
 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/Contents-source.gz

Cool!  I was not aware of this.  Charles, IMHO this

  $ zgrep debian/upstream[^/^.] Contents-source.gz

is a quite interesting reading.  We should check whether some upstream
files are hidden from our VCS approach.  We also know which packages
should probably uploaded in the next couple of monthes to make the
upstream-metadata.yaml move complete.  And finally we should probably
make sure that debian/upstream is a reserved name because some packages
are using debian/upstream/ (thus the exclusion of '/' in the regexp
above).

Paul, thanks for the useful hint

  Andreas.

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Re: Your biggest achievement during past DebConfs (aka new DebConf promoting campaign)

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:32:41AM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
 and may be also Mark S -- I believe U. was kinda conceived at debconf
 2003 or so ;-)

I can confirm that at DebConf03 in Oslo I have heard rumors about a
company with no name intending to base a distribution with no name upon
Debian.

Kind regards

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Re: Your biggest achievement during past DebConfs (aka new DebConf promoting campaign)

[Andreas Tille]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 01:16:05AM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote:
 On Montag, 13. Februar 2012, Andreas Tille wrote:
  I can confirm that at DebConf03 in Oslo I have heard rumors about a
  company with no name intending to base a distribution with no name upon
  Debian.
 
 sure that wasn't DebConf4 which had a session with that very topic?

Pretty sure because I was not attending DebConf4.  I very clearly
remember the discussion because it was originally about finding a new
name for debian internal projects which turned out to become CDD.  It
happened when sitting on the stair of the entrance hall in the venue in
Oslo.

Kind regards

 Andreas.

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Re: How about using national flags instead of text in debian.org?

[Andreas Tille]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 12:12:34PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
 to try to follow a recognized international standard as closely as
 possible.  Issues around nationality, language, and countries are
 political landmines, and it's very easy to blunder into an argument that
 one never intended and cause significant offense.

Besides all this and the arguing here about one language spoken in
several countries which at least could create bad feelings another fact
was missing in this thread:  There are several countries (if not the
majority of countries??) where more than one language is spoken - to
what language do you want to link in such cases?

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Report from Debian Med sprint

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

as you might have noticed the Debian Med team has organised its second
sprint in Southport last weekend[1].  I would like to give a short
report about this from my personal perspective.  I added a short version
of my agenda to the Wiki page[2].


 1) Ensembl packaging specifically working on installation in unstable without 
any conflicts (=trying to solve libwww issue)
One main item for this meeting on my agenda was fixing the Ensembl
package to finally enable a migration from experimental to unstable.
One of the big showstopers is #636923.  However, unfortunately the
to persons who I urgently needed to discuss this topic did finally
not attend and I was only able to determine, that the problem can
be stripped down to the problematic package is actually
liblwp-parallel-perl.  I'll try to keep on working on this.

 2) The Beast-mcmc[3] finishing
This package is on my agenda since about one year and I was able to
iron out nearly all included binary JAR files.  However I get struck
on the last problematic JAR mtj.jar is a mess of other included JARs
based on f2j blas/arbapck JARs.  I reached a state where I got a hint
from upstream to the sources for the last JAR in this chain and I
need to see whether I will be able to compile.  I'll give this a try
in the next couple of weeks if not I will push the package to non-free
first and leave the final freeing to some later point in time.
As usual, any help is welcome.

 3) Continuing with current MoM[4]; presenting MoM to the audience to gather
more potential students
I kept on mentoring the student and there is further progress with the
package we are focussing on.  Moreover it might be that some participants
from the workshop might step in for later Monthes

 4) Finishing sofa-framework which needs to be updatet to new version
Nothing done on this front

 5) Bug squashing of Debian Med team maintained packages
Two bugs fixed by new upstream version of GinkgoCADx (#657827, #648167)

 6) If time permits work on some Beast related phylogeny packages
Uploaded phy-spread package 

 7) Checking status of Debian Med tasks
The attempt to check the tasks was completely spoiled when noticing that
the tools are broken because of technical changes in Debian
infrastructure[5].  Sorting this out and enabling regularly
updated tasks pages is now on highest position in my priority list.

 8) Spontaneous mentoring of people
I gave a spontaneous introductional talk about Debian and Blends structure
Moreover I was mentoring Quyen, Laszlo and others about gpg keys

 9) Working on Blends sentinel bugs overview
This was terribly blocked by non-functional fetching translations from
ddtp.debian.net which is down. Caring for alternatives to at least get
tasks pages updated again but no success so far. (see also item 7) above)

10) Helping others packaging and sponsoring
 * Sponsored chado (gmod suite) prepared by Olivier Sallou
 * Helped Charles getting snappy-java using Debian packaged library (see 
below external wishlist)
 * Worked with Ivo on copasi
 * Helped Martin with Python packaging
 * Dived a bit into a Ruby package together with Quyen with no
   certain outcome - needs further negotiation with Quyen and
   other upstream how to proceed
 * Checking the work of Piero on three Python packages
 * Had a look with Toni into OpenMicroscopy noticing that it is a beast
   containing  800 binary JAR files inside the source and will take a
   talented and very patient Java expert to copy with all this stuff
   The good news is that upstream was quite supportive to provide a
   downloadable versioned archive which simplifies obtaining the source
   Needs (a lot) of further work which I'm unable to do myself

11) License checking
I was suggesting an ePetition to free Phylip and wrote a first draft
for it[6]

Thanks to al participants who joined the workshop and made it a
success (again).  Looking foreward to next Debian Med workshop.

Kind regards

Andreas.


[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Southport2012
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Southport2012#Andreas_Tille
[3] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/packages/beast-mcmc/trunk/
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2012/01/msg00078.html
[6] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Southport2012/ePetition_Phylip

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Re: 1 year release good enough.

[Andreas Tille]

On Sun, Jan 01, 2012 at 01:40:36PM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
 Well put Russ!!!

Fully ACK.
 
 Relative percentage is not that important as long as absolute number is
 positive, which means that fun goes on and our efforts are of
 benefit ;)
 
 And depending on the audience (field of endeavor, habbits etc)
 statistics might vary [e.g. 1] ;-)
 
 [1] http://neuro.debian.net/blog/2011/2011-06-27_software_survey.html

I can perfectly confirm this.  From a Debian Med perspective I can say
that while there are some comparable initiatives in Fedora and SuSE
these do not really fly.  Today I had a discussion with a Fedora GSoC
student who sees his work in danger of becoming orphaned because nobody
really cares about his packages of medical software and also SuSE
medical seems to make more annoucements rather than packaging work.  So
my idea is (and sorry for repeating myself over and over) that we can
perfectly dart into specific fields because we are involving experts in
those fields.

The Fedora Medical guy mentioned that there is a lack of management
work.  And I can confirm that this is perfectly what I'm observing in
several Debian internal projects.  To boil it down to some specific
projects I have observed in the last time: Debian Games, Debian
Multimedia, Debian GIS and Debian Enterprise - all these projects (while
potentially targeting at a much larger user base than Debian Med) are
lacking what I would call project management in the sense that people
claim to be busy enough with packaging and do not have time for other
things (like talking to people - upstream and users, telling them how to
become involved and setting specific standards and goals).

I'm pretty sure that if I would have kept on packaging only from the
beginning Debian Med would have way less than 1/3 of its current number
of packages, way less than 1/3 of ist current number of active team
members and way less of users.  Finally it is fun to work in a healthy
team.  So please keep in mind that enhancing Debian is not only adding
packages to a pool but also how to form strong teams around a set of
packages to make the packaging sustainable.  I'm quite convinced that
this strategy will lead to an increasing number of users and that it
is even more important than the frequency of releases.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: Security guidelines for Debian people

[Andreas Tille]

On Sat, Nov 05, 2011 at 11:51:33AM +0100, Andreas Schuldei wrote:
  This thread reminds me of a Dutch management book entitled Managing
  Professionals? Don't do it![1].
  
 i agree, rules like that become silly, quickly. but if someone
 explains good best practice to me and motivates why it is
 better then the alternatives, and how to integrate it into your
 workflow and life, i certainly would be interested.

I do also agree with the general principle to not try to manage
professionals mentioned by Thijs but I would also welcome some
best practice document.  I was tempted to write a similar mail
as the other Andreas, but now just give a +1.
 
  Indeed, I oppose the assertion that such guidelines are 'a lot better than
  just having a vague and ineffable thing called trust'. Trusting DD's to
  do the right thing is an important value for Debian.
 
 i agree 112%.

I agree 99%. (100% is to much because we are human and I do not even trust
myself 100%.)

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: Linuxtag Germany (Berlin) 2011 -- recap

[Andreas Tille]

On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 09:43:33AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
 I plan to start some game-related blends at some stage. I need to dig
 a bit more into the technical side of blends first though.

IMHO it would be a good idea to use Debian Jr as template for what you
are planing.  We should agree to sit together at DebCamp (if you will
join) to push this together.

Kind regards

 Andreas.

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Re: Better visibility of what can you do with Debian on the Debian main page

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 12:06:33AM +0200, Jérôme wrote:
 Small Apple Apps provide 1 contents and not 1 task, this is redundant
 programming ( a browser for parents, a browser for children, a browser
 for cat...). It's like ou must use vim for editing scripts emacs for
 editing configs and gedit for editing latex... and pay for each! it's
 not the same case, it's not the traditionally Unix approach at all!

Sorry, I can not buy this argument.  The fact that somebody else is
using a name for something what is done not properly does not mean that
the name is wrong.  We are also using the name Operating System and
there are others who are interpreting this word the wrong way (as we
think).

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: Better visibility of what can you do with Debian on the?Debian main page

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 08:14:47AM +0200, Adrian von Bidder wrote:
 And what is wrong with just plain Applications?
 I think the whole app 
 store thing is blown out of proportion by the marketing teams of a few 
 companies, we do not need to join he hype on this.

I'm personally against hypes and I do not like commercial marketing
strategies.  But this shouldn't make us blind about the fact that it
just works.  Refusing to learn strategies which work is not sane.  We
are living in one world and if we want to be successful we need to
follow some rules (whether we like them or not).  Otherwise we will not
leave the geeky corner.  IMHO Ubuntu is doing a proper job in this
field.

And regarding evolvement of names:  At some point in time the verb to
google made its way into dictionaries.  So the action to search the web
using a specific search engine is used as a more general word than it
was intended (and even if I do not like it personally - it is real).  So
why not using the name app store for a large set of applications where
you can cherry pick from?

If people (specifically non-geekish ones) have accepted this word, are
using it and have some immediate imagination what it is - why not using
it?  Only because it is used in the proprietary world?  Would you
consider stop using English language just because the most commercial
advertising is done in this language (even in non English speaking
countries - and it is perfectly understood there as well)?

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: Better visibility of what can you do with Debian on the?Debian main page

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 09:10:47AM +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
 I tried to post about it yesterday, but it doesn't seem to have been
 noticed: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2011/04/msg00054.html

I perfectly noticed your posting and I completely agree with your point
that it should be listed on a popular place.
 
 There is already a name: AppStream. It comes with code and standards:
 http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream
 
 It's as good as any other, and I don't see the need to invent another
 one.

I did not understand your mail in a way to use the term AppStream in
front of non-geeks to explain what Debian means.  My intend was to use a
commonly used word to explain what Debian is.  I know that the meaning
of this word is stretched a bit - but that's the fate of words sometimes
...

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: Better visibility of what can you do with Debian on the?Debian main page

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 11:49:14AM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
 To google only means to search the web using one specific service 
 which happens to be very popular.  Just as (at least in Denmark) 
 non-geeks since long use the term Word to mean word processor even 
 though it only means one specific word processor which happens to be 
 very popular.  I have tried fighting it in public schools where 
 teachers are supposed to teach generic skills, not train for a 
 particular environment (which is anyway outdated when the kids finish 
 school).

I agree that my example to google was perhaps not perfect.  Probably
the term Excel sheet instead of spreadsheet, or PowerPoint
presentation instead of overhead presentation or something like this
would have been a better example.
 
 When my brother and I - back in the dark ages when only geeks had heard 
 of the term Linux - tried persuade some public schools to adopt use of 
 Linux, he made an observation: Don't say that it is similar to Windows 
 because then they will always treat it as a (cheaper) imitation of the 
 real thing.
 
 Similar is my reasoning that we should not use a term which non-geeks 
 have adopted as meaning members-only shop for commercial and freeware 
 applications.

I got your point.  That's why I pointed out in at least two of my mails
that the real thing in fact was just invented *here*.  Thus I would
rather try to turn around the argument:  Those propriatary app stores
just use what we are doing since a long time.
 
 It does not matter if Debian was here first.

IMHO this does matter.

 As you mention yourself it 
 is very important how our users comprehend the terms: our store do not 
 fit the modern use of the term, so embracing it confuses and devaluates 
 more than it helps our users in understanding what we offer them.

At first I had my doubts about this.  However Ben (as a native speaker)
explained that this is not necessarily true.  BTW, aren't there app
stores that contain some free (as in beer) apps as well?  We just have
everything for free (and will explain the beer versus speach in the
next lession).

Kind regards

 Andreas.

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Re: Better visibility of what can you do with Debian on the?Debian main page

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 12:41:49PM +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
 
 Sorry, I think I misunderstood the thread, I thought you wanted to
 redesign the current web views of Debian packages so that it is somehow
 more trendy/modern, but I now realised you only want to find it a
 trendier/more modern name.
 
 I stand corrected.

Ahh, cool provocation. :-)
I admit I changed the topic a bit - sorry for this.
 
 However, if after finding it a new name you'd like to keep going and add
 things like ratings, comments, tag clouds and whatnot, you can go back
 to my messages in this thread and know where to start :)

I admit there is no reason to wait putting AppStream on the web pages
nowish.

The topic whether we might be able to find some apropriate way to
describe Debian for mere mortals should be moved to a different thread.

Kind regards

 Andreas.

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Re: Better visibility of what can you do with Debian on the Debian main page

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 07:22:36AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
 
 We might justify this on the basis that “store” doesn't necessarily mean
 a place where you buy things, only a place where things are stored for
 later use; e.g. a farm's grain store or a hospital's medicine store.

Ahh ...
 
 People new to free software are going to have untold assumptions about
 terminology; the “no, it's a store where we store things for you, you
 don't have to pay to use them” hurdle seems trivial in comparison to the
 overall “free software” concept.

Definitely!
If there is some consensus about this we should probably move this idea
to our web pages soonish.

  +1 for the right line of thinking -- I kept using appstore analogy to
  regular mortals for a while to describe what Debian brings to their
  desktops.
 
 Yes, the concept is one that people apparently understand easily, so we
 should exercise it to make Debian's nature better understood.

Yes.  And by the way: Didn't we used (invented?) this kind of app store
(as one of the) first? 

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: Better visibility of what can you do with Debian on the Debian main page

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 09:54:40AM -0700, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
 I think a case could be made for Debian's apt system being the original
 app store

Yes.  That's what I wanted to say in my previous mail!

And because there was a mail about not accepting the term app store
because repository is such a good name:  I have no idea whether
repository is such a good name for native speakers.  For non native
speakers it is not.  A store became somehow internationalised and
everybody understands this term.  I would bet that 90% of non-geeks
non-english speakers will perfectly understand the term application
store but have problems to understand application repository.  In
the circle of my friends I would say it tends to 100%.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: Better visibility of what can you do with Debian on the Debian main page

[Andreas Tille]

[#622274 in CC]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 05:47:18PM +0200, Adrian von Bidder wrote:
 Yodel!

DiDu!
 
 ...
 
 Linking to blends and/or subprojects would be addressing target groups, 
 which would probably be useful.

I do really like this suggestion!

 My proposal (which is orthogonal) is linking to applications, just to show 
 that Debian is not just an operating system as defined on our title page 
 (set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run.)

I recently wondered if we should use the (buzz word) application
store.  I do not really like buzz words but we are de facto what people
understand behind this word.  I have no idea if we might be able to do
better with the wording because usually you *buy* something in a store,
but Debian is some place where you get things for free.
 
  * a new page, prominently listing the top applications (tbd - but the 
 target group is the average user, so this would probably include stuff 
 like libreoffice, iceweasel, apache/php/mysql and other web stuff etc.; then 
 mention kde and gnome and perhaps point to their application pages, and 
 possibly include a more stuff link, pointing to a package db browsable by 
 debtags/categories (does this already exist? Offline right now, can't 
 check.)
  * obviously needs to link to how can I install this stuff information
  * should not be a wall of text like so many of our pages are. all the 
 applications I've mentioned above have a logo...

Sounds good.  When reading the first items I was thinking: This might
become a longish page with a lot of text before we might come to the
Blends / subgroups point.  But using somehow graphic representations
might make this suggestion quite interesting. (But we should make sure
that target users for Debian Accessibility can also understand this
page.)

 Should I do a draft of such an applications page? Let's not get into 
 fights on which application should be listed (yet) - we can always make it a 
 dynamic page and list a random selection of applications... :-)

Yes, please do.

BTW, what about a Tag Cloud of applications regarding to popcon (and I
really mean applications not libraries and basic system requirements).
 
 Again: maybe we also could/should link to subprojects/blends/... that 
 address specific target user groups - it's just a thought I had after 
 reading that discussion.

Thanks for pushing things foreward

 Andreas.

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Re: blends linked from the main debian page

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 03:10:45PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
 Sure, that's a relevant question. But after all, it's a policy question
 as many others that the -www team has to do when deciding what should go
 on the first page and what should not. So let's proceed one bit at a
 time.

Fine.
 
 [1] BTW, for that to become a reality, it would be better if the Blends
 team at large (+ other relevant subprojects) consider turning into a
 proper WML page the index currently at
 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends

That's a good point.  I put Blends list in CC to ask for volunteers.  I
actively would like to ask for volunteers here.  I would really love if
somebody would pick up this task.  After having written a  80 pages
documentation[1] (with the help of some others for sure) I would love to
lean back a bit and leaving the task of turning the Wiki content into
some reasonable WML for somebody else.

Kind regards

  Andreas.

[1] http://blends.alioth.debian.org/blends/

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Re: Report from Med@Tel

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 08:15:06AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
 
 Thanks for the report, I've added it to the TODO list for the next DPN
 and bounced your mail to debian-publicity.

Thanks - I missed that list.
 
 A lot of the more popular social media in use today are at odds with
 free software principles and the culture that surrounds the FLOSS
 movement.

While I agree here I really wonder whether this should stop us to tell
about our good work there.  It makes no sense to build a parallel free
world without telling others that such a thing exists.

Kind regards

   Andreas. 

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Re: Report from Med@Tel

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 09:29:49AM +0200, Olivier Sallou wrote:
 regarding Twitter, it is very network related, you register to a feed and 
 possibly forward to your followers. I am not sure this would finally 
 touch/ping the final user. Either you already know Debian(Med), and this 
 could be usefull as simple informational feed, or you don't know it and I am 
 not sure Twitter will help...

Sure.  I imagine having a talk like at Me@Tel and tell people in the end
of the talk:  Now subscribe #DebianMed and I guess some people will grab
their smartphone and just do so.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

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Re: blends linked from the main debian page

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 04:50:14PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
  3.  In Debian we have a number of great sub-projects which are not properly
  exposed even within Debian itself.  I have once suggested to float all
  the blends up to the main Debian page to make it at once look appealing
  and specific to a broad range of specialists.  But I failed to generalize
  the proposal, so it hasn't worked out yet.
 
 I like a lot the idea of providing links to blends from the Debian
 homepage [1], thanks for proposing (and revamping) the idea!  However,
 from the above paragraph I do not understand what you needed to
 generalize and why it is blocking the implementation of the proposal.
 Can you be more specific about that?

As you can probably assume I'm in favour of making Blends more popular
and thus I in principle support the idea to make them visible on the
main Debian page.

However, my concern is of a bit different nature than yours (web page
design).  The problem we have is that while three Blends are working
nicely and fully adopted the idea (namely Debian Edu, Debian Med and
Debian Science) and people are actively working with the existing tools
as well as having understood the idea we have currently projects which I
would call potential Blends.  There are for instance Debian Jr
(actually the first Blend) which is orphaned - my regular pings at
relevant places were not answered by anybody and currently the only sign
of Debian Jr is SPAM on its mailing list.  (Well, OK, I updated the
metapackages if needed - but that's no project work.)

We also have Debian Lex which is more or less a stub.  It would not be
really helpful if you would direct lawyers onto this project - except if
it will be made really clear that this is a place for developers but not
for users.

We have Debian Accessibility which is using the tasks pages but do not
want to use the metapackages and do not really identify itself as a
Blend.  As long as the main drivers of a project do not adopt the idea
(see below) I'm hesitating to advertise them as Blends.

Than we have those projects which are rather packaging projects which I
tried to convince adopting the ideas of a Blend.  These are Debian GIS
(just convinced them to do conversation on a list named debian-gis
rather than pkg-grass), Debian Multimedia (some people there consider
the idea of Blends cool but there is not much effort done to really
maintain a complete Multimedia system but rather a set of single
packages),  DebiChem (where one main supporter is happy about the Blends
approach but has time constraints), Pkg-Games which did not even started
working on Blends stuff, but IMHO would have great potential becoming
a Blend (and could even copy / adopt Debian Jr).

So the question is: What Blend is actually worth beeing mentioned on the
main page?

From my point of view the point of Blends is that we technicans
understand that it is not enough to simply add technically perfect
packages one after the other to a flat package pool.  We need some
substructure and this substructure needs to be organised and actively
maintained.  If we approach this we can reach much more in the following
real live cases:

  1. Contacting upstream authors (perhaps about fixing their licence):
 a) Single maintainer:
Hi, I'm Joe Random Debianpackager and would like you to ...
 b) Blends maintainer:
Hi, I'm writing you on behalf of Blend name.  The Blend has
the purpose to establish your software into a complete framework
with programs covering the field Blend-field.  If you think
your program fits well into this Blend amongst ... could you
please ...

  2. User asks you: If I want to do the following task, what software
 should I install?
 a) No substructur via Blend:
I would suggest to install packages a, b, and c.  Furthermore
it might be useful to install d or e as you want.  Also f is
interesting. ...
 b) Blend:
Just install metapackage x and your system is ready prepared.

  3. Some journalist asks you as an outsider of a specific field about
 solutions in this field.
 a) No substructure:
Well, I have heard that there should be some packages amongst
those 29.000 Debian packages which might be useful.
 b) Existing Blend:
I'm no expert in this field but I know there is a team inside
Debian which actively cares exactly for these issues.  Please
contact this team (via Mailinglist) to get more detailed
information.

There are a lot more examples why such a substructure is helpful.  IMHO
it is one way to advertise Debian.  I would go that far that Debian can
grow dendritic into different fields and spreads over different fields
into the masses (and thus is the last final step for total world
domination - to quote Enrico).  We could even declare Debian as an
application store for applications in the fields covered by Blends.

You know that 

Re: blends linked from the main debian page

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 05:47:34PM -0400, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
 Although Debian blends coincide with the quantization level I foresaw
 for Debian sub-projects to be mentioned on the main page, it does not need
 to be a blend.  E.g. the NeuroDebian -- we contribute to both
 DebianScience and DebianMed, but I think it is worth pointing to
 NeuroDebian as a separate entity (Debian sub-project) ;-)

I perfectly agree that NeuroDebian qualifies to be listed there as well.
Even if it does not use those Blends techniques the project fully acts
in the manner I demanded in my mail and does a lot to make Debian more
popular in the field of neuro science.

Thanks for your good work

 Andreas.

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Report from Med@Tel

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

I would like to give a short report about my presence at Med@Tel in
Luxembourg.  This conference for medicine informatics had some Open
Source track and the organisers invited me to give an introduction about
Debian Med.  The slides of my talk are available as well as the paper I
submitted for the abstract book[1].  The audience were about 20 people
somehow connected to some medical Open Source project and the talk was
well received.  (For instance I've got a warm handshake: Thanks for
what you are doing afterwards.)

What always astonishes me is that people in all circumstances I'm
reporting about Debian Med immediately agree with me that this is
something which is really helpful and needed.  However, even if I'm
traveling through the world since eight years to talk about this concept
- not only for the topic of medicine, also for other fields - people
consider it brand new and they were not aware that such a thing really
exists.  The obvious conclusion is that I (or rather we Debian people)
somehow failed in advertising it.

We could even say that Debian could serve as (buzz-word alarm)
application store for different fields of work.  While we probably are a
bit nervous about such kind of buzz words it actually fits to some
extend to what we are doing (at least I came to this conclusion when
talking to other conference participants).  More advertising adictive
people than we would sell Debian as this.  While I'm hesitating to sell
Debian as something we probably need to adapt to the language our
potential users are speaking to let them understand what we are doing.
In times where importand people pronounce Debian was a pointless 
exercise[2] we should not trust that users simply find their way to
Debian just by evaluating its technical brilliance.  We (at least the
Debian Med team) are now targeting at other user groups as well.

For instance I talked to an engaged Fedora user who liked the support of
medical software inside Debian.  When I told him that there is also
support for Education, Science, Multimedia, GIS, Games, etc. he could
not even believe this.  (I think I finally got this guy convinced when I
explained him that we even support kFreeBSD which enables him to use ZFS
and it took me about 5min to make sure he really understood what we
provide - at first he believed in certain hacks, chroots, VMs whatever.)

But this guy made an important point:  If we obviosely fail in
advertising the cool stuff we just have, what about using social media
like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.  I'm personally quite ignorant of
all this stuff.  However, if I look over the shoulder of some of my
friends and see with what pieces of information they are poluting the
byte space by using twitter so that I'm convinced that it is a
reasonable thing to ignore this medium - I could perfectly imagine to
twitter any uploaded Debian package.  Something like

  Uploaded pkg version - shortdescription

and in the case of Debian Med enriched with '#DebianMed' could do a
reasonable job.  Once implemented this could serve as a quite cheap way
to get some attention amongst potential users.

What do you think about this and what other chances do you see to make
use of social media to make the things we are doing right more popular?

Kind regards

 Andreas.


[1] http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/201104_luxembourg
[2] 
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/01/our-exclusive-interview-with-linus-torvalds-lca2011/

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Debian Med presentation at Health care event in Luxembourg

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

I'm please to announce that I will present Debian Med (and thus Debian)
on an international health care conference Med@Tel[1] in Luxembourg (6-8
April 2011).  The talk will be on 7th April in Conference Room 4 in the
track Benefits of Free/Libre Open Source Software in Health Care
(FLOSS-HC): Communities, Collaboration, Development Issues, Technology
Transfer (1) (see schedule[2]).

The talk is based on a paper that was written by the Debian Med team with
main contributions by Steffen Möller, Michael Hanke, Yaroslav Halchenko and
Charless Plessy[3].  I'll keep you informed about the resonance of the
audience and were to download the slides.

I'll ask for Debian support for coverage of the conference fee and half
part of my expenses for traveling.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

[1] http://www.medetel.eu
[2] http://www.medetel.eu/index.php?rub=educational_programpage=program#Floss1
[3] http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/201104_luxembourg/paper/

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Re: Report from this years CeBIT

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Alex,

thanks for your report and thanks even more for holding the booth that
bravely (for sure this is also valid for the other booth stuff).

On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 01:00:14PM +0100, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl wrote:
 To make a long story short:  Quite a lot people came by simply to thank
 us.  I tried to count them, but somehow lost overview on the third day,
 when we reached 198.

Some kind of Thank you counter comes into mind - either just on paper
or on a screen. :-)
 
 I also noted down, that there where requests for official Debian
 packages for scratch (a programming environment for kids; might be
 interesting for DebianJr or DebianEdu),

It would be *really* cool if Debian Jr would get some new blood.  There
is a lot of work just done and I can assure help with technical stuff.
So there is actually not much technical stuff to do for keeping it alive
but rather working on updating the list of packages and doing some more
advertising work.  So if there is an *honest* request in the sense of
I'm honest about it to spend even 2-4 hours of time per week into this
cute project this would be a really nice thing.

 about) and Zarafa and zpush (quite big groupware suite).  We showed them
 how to report wnpp bugs, but I also promised to look at them myself, as
 some upstream developers already provide Debian packages on their own.

Sponsoring those packages - provided that they are policy compliant
would be a good thing to do.  I learned in the past that some upstream
just not expected that this is possible at all ...
 
 I'd also got in contact with my former University, who a) just created a
 nice library for machine learning and would like to package it and b)

Contacting debian-scie...@lists.debian.org when doing the packaging for
this seems like a reasonable idea.

 screenshot service [9].  Especially the later one was well received,
 when I showed them, that screenshots turn up in packaging tools like
 synaptic or packages.debian.org.  I hope that this will boosts the
 number of available screenshots a bit :)

Cool!
 
 So... I think that's about it.  Again I'd like to thank our sponsors
 Univention [10] and Deutsche Messe AG; as well as the Debian folks who
 did booth duty -- most of them on a kind of forced volunteer basis ;)

Forced volunteer - LOL.

Thanks

 Andreas. 

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No good user experience of Debian (Was: Packaging r-bioc-simpleaffy)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Tony,

I would like to discuss this topic in a separate thread on
debian-project where it might belong to.

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 12:55:58AM +, Tony Travis wrote:
 it would not be a good user experience at all running it under Debian with  
 Iceweasel instead of Firefox, for example, and lots of non-free things  
 missing. These things do matter, even though we all know that the two  
 Linux platforms are almost identical underneath the GUI...

 The vast majority of biologists use M$ Windows on their desktop, and  
 don't care about the server. However, to encourage biologists to use  
 Linux on the desktop as, presumably Debian-Med wants to, the user  
 experience needs to be at least as good as M$ Windows and preferably  
 better. I've just tried Debian 6 - It really is NOT better than M$.

Could you please be a bit more verbose on this.  The only hard facts
I can make out from your mail are these:

 - Iceweasel instead of Firefox
   Debian does not rename Firefox just for the fun of it.  We just
   had a longish discussion about it with lawyers involved and they
   came to the conclusion that we have no other chance than renaming
   Firefox.  Please do not blame Debian for other projects unusual
   licenses.

 - lots of non-free things missing
   Can you please be a bit more verbose what exactly you are missing
   (in general and specifically for your work as biologist).
   I think I remember your unhappyness about Gnash.  Anything else?

I personally admit that I simply have to trust your opinion that Debian
is not better than M$ because I do not know any M$ operating system well
enough to make a knowledgeable decision.  My frustration when I touched
such systems were most probably based on my beginner status I have on
these but I would really like to hear some points which make me
understand your statement.  (This is really an honest question.)

 This thread is a total turn-off for me about Debian-Med. Even though you  
 were joking about me going back to Debian, I can tell you that I never  
 will because in trying to win hearts and minds of ordinary users Debian  
 has already lost the fight. This sort of internecine conflict between  
 two very similar Linux distributions is pointless.

I personally do not see a conflict between Debian and Ubuntu neither is
there any sign of a internecine one.  I take your comment really
seriosely but to fully understand what you would expect (except Mozilla
changing its license and some better replacements of non-free tools).
For my perception criticism is the best way to progress and I really
hope that we will be able to meet your user experience in the future
better than in the past.

 It is what Debian and Ubuntu have in common that attracted me to  
 Debian-Med. The people here have been very helpful indeed, but the  
 Debian politics I've witnessed recently are a wake-up call to me. What  
 is the big deal about the fact that we set up two Bioconductor repo's?

I think this was clarified and that there is no politics involved here.
Debian packages are simply handcrafted.  There are people out there who
explain Debian as: Ubuntu but tested.  I do not want to overstress this
polemic argument but there is some truth in it and hopefully makes you
understand that this has nothing at all to do with politics but rather
with quality and technical perfectness.

[I think your other questions are answered on the Debian Med mailing
list.  I simply wanted to share some negative user experience in
contrast to several good critics on debian-project list.  For the
readers here:  I highly regard Tony's opinion.  Please do not start
a flamewar about his opinion.]

Kind regards

 Andreas.

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Re: Results of the App Installer Meeting

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

thanks for the report and the fine work which the report is basing upon.
A view remarks:

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:13:38PM +1000, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
 We do not want the end users we target here to
 have to learn about packages: they already know what an application is,
 and this is what they actually care about (I want Inkscape).

Cool.  I think it is not even precise enough.  Considering xapian is
involved it could rather be: I want to draw vector graphics.

 - Access apps metadata through xapian

Very cool!

 - Access additional metadata through OCS (Open Collaboration
   Services)
 - Access screenshots, possibly through screenshots.debian.net (using
   a per-distro proxy) or similar services

For Debian todo list:  A service as important for Debian and obviosely
for other should definitely moved under DSA control and should be
screenshots.debian.ORG !
 
 b) The Debian tagging system (debtags)
Tagging applications can help users find the applications they look
for. The meeting was too short to think about reaching a full
agreement on this, but there was interest in the debtags system. If
most distributions are interested in adopting this system, we will
integrate debtags into the overall architecture.

Similarly here: DebTags is currently at debtags.alioth.debian.org.  I
have noticed that debtags.debian.net Works :-) and there is no
debtags.debian.org.  IMHO this would increase the visibility of a
technique which is underestimated and to less known / used even inside
Debian.
 
What I'm missing in the summary and what was probably not discussed is
another user oriented service:  ddtp.debian.net.  Translating
descriptions of packages^Wapplications is IMHO quite important to do the
last final step to complete world domination.  As I know from some
discussion on debian-i18n list[1] DDTSS is severely broken and needs
definitely some love.  Some effort to put it under DSA control is
somehow stalled and the technique behind needs some more love by a
gifted and dedicated programmer.  Please do not forget:  Those users who
say I want to draw vector graphics. will say it in their mother tongue
and we geeks to frequently forget that this is not necessarily English.
The availability of translated descriptions is IMHO crucial for the
success of the App-Intaller attempt.  The DDTP project is quite there
where we need to go but it needs more love.

Kind regards

   Andreas.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2011/01/msg00044.html

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Re: Results of the App Installer Meeting

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:55:36PM +0100, David Kalnischkies wrote:
 If I remember correctly, DDTP got a short mention and the result was:
 Wow, debian really has translations for package descriptions?!?
 Other distributions seem to have only failed (=very outdated) tries if any.

IMHO this does show two things:
  1. Debian is cool (people here know this). ;-)
  2. Debian fails to communicate this coolness. :-(
 
 AppStream focuses on translations of the name, keywords and (short)
 summary managed by upstream. We talked shortly about longer descriptions
 (possibly with markdown) but this would easily blow up the currently
 rather small app-data.xml similar to how the long descriptions are quiet
 a big part of our Packages files currently - beside the problem: Who will
 write these descriptions: Upstream is not necessarily the best author…

The question is: What is a short summary.  From my packaging
experience the first shot what we call long description is an snippet
from the homepage of a project (by stripping of some redundancies and
pure advertising stuff).  It ends up in a one to three paragraphs text
which easily can be turned into Markdown formatted text.  I'm using this
on the Debian Blends pages (see example below [1]) and because the
translations are in the same format they can be easily plugged in (the
example [1] is using translations into more than 10 languages ... if
available in DDTP)

For the content itself: I agree that upstream is not necessarily the
best author but I assume that maintainers in other dists are doing it
quite similar to waht we do in Debian: Revise a text from upstream or
try to invent one.  So the descriptions are there - we just need to
define what a good (short) description is (there are bad examples
as well[2])
 
 So translated long descriptions are currently out of the (shared) scope,
 as we simple can't discuss everything in two and a half days, but to add
 another quote: It's xml, so we can add anything we like/need later.

Sure.  My point was:  We (as in Debian) should increase our translation
infrastructure to put it on a solid and reliable basis so once the
App-Store effort comes to the point of seeking translations for including
in their format we can simply provide the content.
 
 I guess the DDTP project will be part of follow-up discussions as it is
 similar to debtags and screenshots - its more or less the only working
 solution - and you are right: all of them are badly needed.

Yes.

Kind regards and thanks for the App-Store effort and cross-distro
discussion

  Andreas.
 

[1] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/bio 
[2] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/typesetting

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Svgtune (Was: Report from Debian booth at SfN2010)

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 05:07:43PM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
 
 unfortunately to build neurodebian logo without hassle from original
 inkscape file you would need our little svgtune [1] (which was rejected
 from Debian); otherwise all sources are there
 
 [1] https://github.com/yarikoptic/svgtune

Any link to the rejection message to learn about the reasons?  Sounds
like a cool tool.

Kind regards

   Andreas. 

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Re: Svgtune

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 12:38:53PM +0100, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl wrote:
 Am 26.11.2010 11:47, schrieb Petter Reinholdtsen:
  [Andreas Tille]
  Any link to the rejection message to learn about the reasons?
  Sounds like a cool tool.
  Searching on Google for wnpp svgtune sent me to
  URL: http://bugs.debian.org/544071 .

Says: due to its tiny size.  Hmmm, I was aware that large packages
might be detected until we have solved the issue of data.debian.org.
Rejection because of to tiny package is new for me.  Any docs about
where the borderline might be?
 
 If I remember correctly (to lazy to dig the rejection out myself),
 ftp-masters also proposed to create a svg-tools package as a collection
 of such scripts instead.

While collecting some nice svg-tools sounds like a good idea I always
see two problems here:

   - How to consistently create the tarball and its version?
   - How to handle new versions of these tools (watch file)?

Kind regards

Andreas.

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Re: [DEP5] Asking for common wisdom on new field(s): References*

[Andreas Tille]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 09:57:32PM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
  I really think that this information should be in another file...
 
 well, in general I do not mind; but yet 'another file' might introduce
 more cons than pros

This another file is probably used for  one year and was discussed
several times.  However,  it was not adopted outside Debian Med and
Debian Science as far as I know.
 
  Would you be interested in this approach ?
 
 Well, I would adopt any approach really which would be somewhat
 transparent and easy to use for us (debian maintainers):
  
  * easy to embed existing references
  * not necessary to duplicate information across multiple files
  * maintain ability for 2 liner debian/rules ;)

These are reasonable requirements and they are fullfilled.
 
 and for the users:
 
  * reference should be in 'ready to use' format and ideally readily
available (so no cp, or cut/paste necessary for each individual
reference)

The only ready to use format is IMHO BibTeX.  *Conversion* to BibTeX
is cheap, but a conversion between yaml and BibTeX will be necessary
(but easy to do with a script).

  * so may be we could even compile for them easily the
Debian upstream references bibliography
 
  as a consequence, complete pipeline should avoid too much of
  conversion, i.e.

While conversion is needed I think it is not what I would call too
much.
 
  COMMON_REFERENCE_FORMAT1 (used by upstream) - UNIFIED_DEBIAN_FORMAT (used 
 by us) - COMMON_REFERENCE_FORMAT (used by users)
 
  especially if  there is an existing dominant 
  COMMON_REFERENCE_FORMAT1 == COMMON_REFERENCE_FORMAT2
 
  should ideally be avoided

As far as I know there is no such thing like a common format between
different upstream sources.  The most references I have found were more
or less free text information on web pages, sometimes in README files.
I did not yet found a BibTeX file inside an upstream source.  So IMHO
we rather has the situation:

  unstructured information (used by upstream) - UNIFIED_DEBIAN_FORMAT (used by 
us) - COMMON_REFERENCE_FORMAT (used by users)

So we definitely have

  unstructured information != COMMON_REFERENCE_FORMAT (used by users)
 
  packages in our archive that contain it in debian/reference, 
  debian/references
  or debian/upstream-metadata.yaml.
 
 please point me to the representative package so I could have a look,
 especially for debian/upstream-metadata.yaml in regards to the
 wishes stated above.

If you like to have a view into Debian Med SVN:

$ find trunk/packages -name upstream-metadata.yaml | sed 
's?^trunk/packages/[R/]*\([^/]\+\)/.*?\1?' | sort | uniq | wc -l
56
$ find trunk/packages -name upstream-metadata.yaml | sed 
's?^trunk/packages/[R/]*\([^/]\+\)/.*?\1?' | sort | uniq | head 
acedb
adun.app
alien-hunter
altree
autodocksuite
ball
bioperl
bitops
bwa
clustalw

So there are some examples in an area close to your workfield ...
 
 I have ran into samstools, but that one has bulk of things duplicated
 among control and upstream-metadata.yaml, and upstream-metadata.yaml and
 reference

To compare with the same set as above we have

$ find trunk/packages -name reference | sed 
's?^trunk/packages/[R/]*\([^/]\+\)/.*?\1?' | sort | uniq | wc -l
18

which makes four times more upstream-metadata.yaml files than reference
files.  As far as I know the debian/reference file was used by some
maintainers before the suggestion
 
  http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata

was born and never widely accepted (because not properly published?) In
principle both files might fullfill the same purpose if we are talking
about references only.  In this case the BibTeX formated reference file
would be even better because it does not need further conversion.

However, to get widely accepted in more Debian packages than only
scientific packages with references and to become an accepted standard
in Debian the focus to only references is to narrow.  In this respect I
think upstream-metadata.yaml is the better choice.  Strictly speaking:
If you want to continue the discussion here on debian-project you should
talks about upstream-metadata.yaml.  If you want to talk about the
reference file you can rather move the discussion to debian-science list
because the general Debian maintainer / user will not be very
interested.

 In general  I like this idea, BUT unfortunately I do not see it being
 complete without avoiding duplication of information... unless
 automated...

That's the point.  If we would drop references and provide a script
   yaml2bibtex
which converts upstream-metadata.yaml to references (preferably in a
default location like
   /usr/share/references/package.bib
or something like this) and if we do this at package build time (or
postinst??) the upstream-metadata.yaml approach would probably the
most flexible idea.
 
 Let me elaborate:  due to the historical evolution of Debian
 packaging we have already other files which one way or another do
 contain 'UpstreamMetadata' -- control,