Re: [all candidates] Work balance and traveling

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-12 20:31, Arno Töll wrote:

Moray mostly answered my question already, but if he wants to extend
he's surely invited to elaborate. [...]
So I wonder, will you step back from
maintainer/team activities during your term?


For anyone reading who didn't yet memorise my platform, I wrote there:

"How would I have time to be DPL?

- On previous occasions I'd ruled out running for lack of time, but I 
am more flexible currently – and I might not have such flexibility any 
more in another couple of years, so am running now.
- I currently spend a large amount of time on DebConf, and would reduce 
this, while drawing on the experience I have gained there.
- I am self-employed, so can be confident that my employer will be 
flexible when required."


Of course, as DPL I would continue to interact with the DebConf team, 
press/publicity teams, etc., but in a different way from currently.


The great majority of my packages are already team maintained.

Moreover, I wonder how much time you intend to spend for 
representative
conference/summit work, where zack once again did an impressive job 
to

represent Debian in talks, press and presentations.


And for this point, I wrote:

"I would be willing, and available, to attend events and to give talks 
on behalf of Debian. But I don't think that this kind of role of 
representing Debian should be limited to the DPL, or to people in 
high-profile technical roles. Where Debian money is used to fund travel 
purely to give talks, the priority should be to send a good speaker who 
will present Debian well, taking into account travel costs for possible 
candidates. Where good speakers feel that they lack an appropriate 
Debian position from which to represent Debian and gain speaker slots at 
conferences (including because they previously held such a position but 
have retired), I would be happy to give them some appropriate title by a 
delegation."


I would expect to do a fair amount of travelling as DPL, but I would 
try to focus this on the events where it is most useful for the DPL in 
particular to be present.  And I currently travel internationally 
frequently for work, so if that continues I would hope to add some 
Debian activities onto those trips.


--
Moray


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[all candidates] Debian as an FSF Free Software Distribution

[Paul Tagliamonte]

Hello, DPL'ers,


What work will you be doing to continue Zach's efforts to negotiate with
the FSF over Debian's status as a Free Software Distribution?

Will you treat this issue as a priority? Can we expect continued open
dialogue with the FSF on this issue? Would you be willing to help find
the right concessions on both sides to collaborate?

What is your opinion on this matter?


Thanks!


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Re: [all candidates] DPL term duration

[Didier 'OdyX' Raboud]

Le jeudi, 14 mars 2013 13.00:09, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud a écrit :
> As I see it, one way to do that (which has certainly been proposed already)
> would be to have a sort-of "DPL guild"⁰. It would have these properties¹:
> (…)

Damn, I just realised all candidates already addressed the wider "board" idea 
in the thread starting at <20130311235436.gb18...@ftbfs.de> ⁰.

OdyX

⁰ http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00045.html


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[all candidates] on distribution-wide changes and scalability

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Folklore goes that performing distribution-wide changes in Debian is
hard and time-consuming, due to a couple of reasons: (1) the time needed
to make a decision that affects the whole archive (this is related to
our flat structure, which has many benefits, but surely not that of
providing a clear decision structure for cross-cutting concerns), and
(2) the time needed to deploy the needed technical changes in all
affected packages.

This "inertia" folklore is surely supported by past history of the time
it took us to deploy specific changes in large sets of packages.  But on
the other hand, in the last 5 to 10 years we have massively improved our
ability to decide and deploy large changes by the means of: (a) large
maintenance teams who are able to decide on "their" packages and deploy
changes using shared-access VCS, and (b) a more liberal use of NMUs than
in the past.

Questions for the candidates:

- on the judgement spectrum between "there is no inertia in Debian and
  that's good" and "there is a lot of inertia in Debian and that's bad",
  where would you put yourself?

- if you don't think that we're at our best on this front, what do you
  propose we change to improve?



As mere thought experiments, feel free to consider the following
possible "changes" as part of your answers:

- Debian should use the Technical Committee more proactively than we
  presently do, to decide on "any technical matter where Developers'
  jurisdictions overlap"; not only to solve conflicts (as we already
  do), but also to *design* forthcoming changes in an authoritative
  manner.  [ Many large FOSS projects out there have technical boards
  that work that way. ]

- Debian should decide to use a single VCS (say, Git), for all packages,
  uniform repository structure and work-flow, and give by default
  read/write access to all DDs. This would allow push-button changes to
  all packages in the archive.  We often speak about "reducing package
  ownership" during DPL campaigns, well, this is the ultimate step of
  it.  [ Ditto: I know no other large FOSS project out there allowing
  the extreme diversity in VCS, work-flow, and ACLs that we have in
  Debian at present. ]

- Debian should seek more direct involvement from companies whose
  businesses depend on Debian, so that their employees can help
  volunteers in pushing archive-wide changes (once they're decided).
  [ If you allow gatekeepers this would become, essentially, the Linux
  kernel development model. ]

Bonus point: if you think any of the above is good, how do you think we
can decide to go for it? (chicken and egg FTW)

Zack, provoker of the day, again,
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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Re: [all candidates] DPL salary

[Russ Allbery]

"Didier 'OdyX' Raboud"  writes:
> Le mercredi, 13 mars 2013 18.03:36, Russ Allbery a écrit :

>> For example, I live in the SF Bay Area.  Fair market compensation here
>> for the sort of senior IT person that we would elect DPL is *at least*
>> $100,000 US per year, and at $100,000, people would generally be taking
>> a substantial pay cut because they believed in the organization.

> "the sort of senior IT person that we would elect DPL" is the part that
> puzzles me: with both the extension of the DD status and the diversity
> statement, we made it clear that we welcome all sorts of contributions
> from all sorts of contributors: I, for one, would be very happy to elect
> a DPL who is not necessarily that "senior IT person". I'm not hereby
> saying that "senior IT persons" become bad DPLs or that other
> professions have lower "costs" than the above figures, just that I think
> it's very important to keep the "potential DPL"s set wide enough.

Sorry, I didn't phrase that very well.

What I was trying to get at is that the DPLs we select are skilled people.
We encourage our best developers to run, and then we try to select the
best person among that mix.  The bar is rather higher than being a Debian
developer.  It's not necessarily higher along the metric of technical
ability; it could be higher along the metric of people skills, or clarity
of expression, or financial management, or organizational skills.  But
clearly we're trying to select among our stronger members, and I consider
the general competence of DDs to already be quite high.  (For example,
when deciding whether to hire someone, knowing that they're a DD would be
a substantial plus.)

All of those skills, whether technical or organizational or social, are
worth money.  They make you a "senior" employee, which in US corporate
lingo doesn't mean that you've been doing it for a long time, but rather
is an indication of responsibility and pay grade.  Anyone with any of that
mix of skills that makes a good DPL could easily command a six-figure
salary here if they so choose, in some job or another.  (If their skills
are primarily social and organizational, it might be a management instead
of a technical position.)

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


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Re: [all candidates] on distribution-wide changes and scalability

[Steve Langasek]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 05:55:33PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> - on the judgement spectrum between "there is no inertia in Debian and
>   that's good" and "there is a lot of inertia in Debian and that's bad",
>   where would you put yourself?

Is this a trick question?  Where is "there is a lot of inertia in Debian and
that's good" on this spectrum? ;-)

(Being slow to implement technical consensus is a bad thing; but inertia
that prevents changes from being foisted on the project before there *is*
consensus is a *good* thing.)

-- 
Steve Langasek   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/
slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org


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Re: [all candidates] Debian as an FSF Free Software Distribution

[Wouter Verhelst]

Hi Paul,

On 14-03-13 17:21, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> Hello, DPL'ers,
> 
> 
> What work will you be doing to continue Zach's efforts to negotiate
> with the FSF over Debian's status as a Free Software Distribution?

For those of us who've been living with their head in the sand (or so
it appears), can you give some pointers towards those efforts?

> Will you treat this issue as a priority? Can we expect continued
> open dialogue with the FSF on this issue? Would you be willing to
> help find the right concessions on both sides to collaborate?
> 
> What is your opinion on this matter?

(not a candidate this year, but still:)

Personally, I think we shouldn't be worried about the FSF's opinion
regarding the freeness of our distribution any more than the FSF is
worried about our opinion of the GFDL.

But YMMV, of course.

-- 
Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy
requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once,
add a voucher, and save on postage.



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Re: [all candidates] on distribution-wide changes and scalability

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 11:05:14AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Is this a trick question?  Where is "there is a lot of inertia in Debian and
> that's good" on this spectrum? ;-)

Maybe it's a trick question, maybe not :-) But if the spectrum is too
shallow, by all means add to it as many dimensions as you please!

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »


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Re: Debian's relationship with money and the economy

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi,

On 12/03/13 at 12:06 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> my previous mail targeted the topic of using Debian's money
> (<20130312094330.ga30...@x230-buxy.home.ouaza.com>). But the topic
> of money in Debian does not have to be limited to that.
> 
> The Debian ecosystem includes many economical actors, be it companies
> or individuals, but we tend to hide those aspects as if they didn't
> exist.
> 
> Despite Debian's non-profit status, IMHO Debian's growth and success
> relies on the capacity of those "actors" to have some "economical
> success". And there are many ways to help those actors, without involving
> any direct flow of money from Debian to them, in particular at the
> press/publicity level.
> 
> When a project ultimately benefits to the Debian project, we should
> not fear to promote it even if that promotion helps the project
> initiator to make money (and IMO even more so when the project initiator
> is a Debian member).
> 
> Do you agree with this analysis and statement? If not, why?

I very much like the distinction between information and promotion that
Stefano made in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2011/10/msg00022.html

And then, different media have different tolerance level. For example,
as long as someone mostly uses his/her blog to provide high quality
informational content about Debian, I'm not opposed to the use of the
same blog to promote sponsorship of such activities, even if I
understand that some people might differ.

I think I would generally be fine about an informational message in
Debian Project News about an fundraising campaign for something that
clearly benefits Debian. Btw, in the specific example of your book, have
you considered creating a Debian package for it?

However, I don't think that making Debian press releases about such
initiatives would generally be a good idea.

In any case, that's my opinion, but we have a delegated press team
anyway. See
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/03/msg00011.html

Lucas


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Re: Debian's relationship with money and the economy

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 14/03/13 at 20:13 +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> Btw, in the specific example of your book, have
> you considered creating a Debian package for it?

Oops, I missed http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/debian-handbook
Excellent!

Lucas


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Re: [all candidates] DPL salary

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 13/03/13 at 11:56 +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 01:31:08PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > For example, I would question whether one could do the role of DPL with a
> > conventional full-time job in IT, at least if you want to keep any other
> > hobbies outside of those two jobs.  The amount of media and expected
> > travel to represent Debian is rather intimidating (particularly to an
> > introvert), as are the number of things that are relatively
> > time-sensitive and require a lot of effort.
> 
> Thanks for providing the background for a question I wanted to ask!
> 
> I totally agree with you and I'm worried about that. I've been lucky in
> having the flexibility needed to be DPL and I wish the same flexibility
> to the next DPL. But, in terms of Debian sustainability, I'm worried
> that we de facto rely on people having that kind of flexibility to be
> good DPLs. I believe we are losing, via preemptive self-selection, many
> good candidates (from IT or other fields) for precisely that reason.
> 
> The ground shaking question to all candidates is then: what do you think
> of providing a DPL salary using Debian funds?  I know it is a touchy
> topic, and I propose it on purpose :-P

In another mail:
> The broader question is than: what can we do to loose those blockers
> and profit more from the abilities that we do have in our community?

I think that providing a salary to the DPL would be an inefficient 
solution to a real problem.  Yes, we need to make the DPL position more 
"manageable". More DDs should be able to apply.  But there are many 
problems with this proposed solution (the implication that the DPL is 
supposed to work full-time and quit his/her job, for example).

I would rather prefer the DPL to share the load with others, using more 
delegations and relying on a "DPL helpers / Debian Driving Force" team.

Lucas


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Re: [all candidates] vote time?

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-14 17:10, MJ Ray wrote:
How much time do you think voters should spend reading these 
discussions?


I really don't think that voters should feel obliged to read them at 
all.



With the benefit of some hindsight, do you feel that you are being
concise enough to achieve that time?


I only expect people to read threads where they're interested in 
candidates' answers to the questions, and therefore won't want them to 
oversimplify answers to complex questions.  So, yes.


Would you change anything about the DPL or GR processes to help 
achieve that

time?


It's not something I've planned to try to change, but I think the 
election process is probably still too long (at > 10% of the year), 
despite

http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/vote_004

More immediately, I do wonder if all the questions being asked here are 
strictly ones that will help decide people's votes.


It appears to me that some DPLs^Wpeople may merely be asking questions 
that they find interesting and would like to see discussed.  While it's 
nice to see these polite discussions of big issues for Debian, I would 
suggest that some of them might be better started on the specific 
relevant lists, with participation from more people than the DPL 
election candidates!


--
Moray


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Re: [all candidates] vote time?

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 14/03/13 at 14:10 +, MJ Ray wrote:
> Dear candidates,
> 
> How much time do you think voters should spend reading these discussions?

Dear questioners,

How much time do you think DPL candidates should spend answering those
questions? :)

More seriously, I find most of the questions/discussions very
interesting, even if answering them is quite exhausting.
I think that the volume of questions clearly shows that people are
interested in discussing the project's politics (or, that DDs really
enjoy torturing DPL candidates).

Maybe we should try to have some of those discussions on a more regular
basis, outside DPL elections?

> With the benefit of some hindsight, do you feel that you are being
> concise enough to achieve that time?

Being concise is clearly an objective for me. Also, when writing my
platform, I tried very hard to focus on the most important things, and
excluded most of the rather obvious things.

> Would you change anything about the DPL or GR processes to help achieve that
> time?

I don't see anything that could be changed about that without very
negative consequences.

Lucas


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Re: [all candidates] Debian as an FSF Free Software Distribution

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 14/03/13 at 19:14 +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Hi Paul,
> 
> On 14-03-13 17:21, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> > Hello, DPL'ers,
> > 
> > 
> > What work will you be doing to continue Zach's efforts to negotiate
> > with the FSF over Debian's status as a Free Software Distribution?
> 
> For those of us who've been living with their head in the sand (or so
> it appears), can you give some pointers towards those efforts?

https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/07/msg00016.html
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/fsf-collab-discuss/

Lucas


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Re: Debian's relationship with money and the economy

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Thu, 14 Mar 2013, Moray Allan wrote:
> On 2013-03-12 14:06, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> >The Debian ecosystem includes many economical actors, be it companies
> >or individuals, but we tend to hide those aspects as if they didn't
> >exist.
> 
> I don't think that's quite the case.  Perhaps Debian's commercial
> partnership/sponsorship/supporter activities should be more active,
> but they are not intentionally hidden.

I'm not thinking of (financial|hardware) sponsors, but more of the
involvment of companies in Debian development. Quite a few DD do
contribute to Debian as part of their work, but we show it nowhere.

I never use my @freexian.com email even when my contributions are the
result of work for my customers. We have many DD working at Credativ,
I have never seen Credativ being credited anywhere. HP is recognized for
their hardware donations, but I don't remember having seen DD use their
HP email for contributions on hppa or other kernel work. Etc.

Put this in contrast with the Linux Kernel community. There must be a
reason why companies are so shy when it comes to Debian...

Speaking for myself, I believe it's a cultural issue. The values we defend,
and our strong roots as an independant distribution, some parts of our
history (for example the backslash against Canonical), (inadvertently?) give
out the message that we don't welcome companies in our development
community.

> >Despite Debian's non-profit status, IMHO Debian's growth and success
> >relies on the capacity of those "actors" to have some "economical
> >success". And there are many ways to help those actors, without
> >involving any direct flow of money from Debian to them, in particular
> >at the press/publicity level.
> 
> Indeed, this is fairly uncontroversial.  We already make press releases
> about, and otherwise publicise Debian's partners/sponsors/supporters.

It's uncontroversial for sponsors that provide money and hardware.
Would you do it for companies that contribute features? For example,
Linaro funded my work on multiarch. There are probably other examples
but as I said, they tend to be not advertised within our community.

> >For full disclosure, I'm speaking of experience here since I tried
> >to get
> >some Debian press coverage of the fundraising for the liberation of
> >the Debian Administrator's Handbook. See
> >https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2011/10/threads.html#1
> >for the discussion that happened.
> 
> It's not clear to me that this is closely related to the questions
> you asked above.

It is about promoting a project that benefits Debian but that also
implies someone making money out of it.

> In fact, if we want to keep good relationships
> with partners/sponsors/official supporters etc. we should probably
> restrict how much we allow the commercial activities of individual
> Debian members to be advertised through Debian media in an
> uncoordinated way, outside our formal programs.

How could this have been better coordinated and through which formal
program?

For reference, I contacted the press team which declined a press release
but said that a Debian Project News entry would be ok. Later, when someone
added the DPN entry, two other DPN contributors didn't like it because it
was a fundraising and because the money was not going to Debian, and
they got that entry removed.

The text mentionned 12% of the money donated going back to Debian because
I find it legitimate to give back something to Debian when Debian helps
the fundraising.

> Since you say it's just an example, I won't comment more on the
> specific case.

Feel free to reply privately on that part if you prefer.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

Get the Debian Administrator's Handbook:
→ http://debian-handbook.info/get/


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Re: [all candidates] Debian as an FSF Free Software Distribution

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi,

On 14/03/13 at 12:21 -0400, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> Hello, DPL'ers,
> 
> 
> What work will you be doing to continue Zach's efforts to negotiate with
> the FSF over Debian's status as a Free Software Distribution?
> 
> Will you treat this issue as a priority? Can we expect continued open
> dialogue with the FSF on this issue? Would you be willing to help find
> the right concessions on both sides to collaborate?
> 
> What is your opinion on this matter?

That's a useful initiative, but a clearly a topic where I would welcome
help from others. For example, we will have a former DPL soon that sounds
quite motivated by this topic, and will have a lot of free time soon... :)

So, if elected, I would monitor progress, and intervene if needed, but I
would be unlikely to be on the front line.

A great achievement would already be to agree with the FSF on a detailed
list of disagreements. Some easy bugs are likely to be fixed in the
process, but I'm not convinced that we should go much further, and
negociate/compromise /make concessions with the FSF.

Lucas


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Re: Debian's relationship with money and the economy

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 09:34:10PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Put this in contrast with the Linux Kernel community. There must be a
> reason why companies are so shy when it comes to Debian...

In the Linux Kernel community there is a virtuous culture of measuring
company contributions, which incites companies to compete in
contributing. For example, LWN's regular stats on contributions to the
various Linux Kernel releases are based on email domains. So it seems
unfair to compare the two worlds on the basis of which email domains are
used when contributing, given that in only one case (Linux Kernel) there
is an explicit incentive to use the company's email.

I don't think that Debian is fundamentally hostile to companies
contributions. If you look at the various initiatives that Moray has
mentioned, some of them are recent, but some others (like the partners
program) are very old.  If there is a cultural issue, is in the
difficulty that a volunteer, mostly hacker project has in finding
volunteers to work on tasks that we tend to consider "boring": deal with
for commercial partners, stay in the OEM business, certify hardware,
etc.

> Speaking for myself, I believe it's a cultural issue. The values we defend,
> and our strong roots as an independant distribution, some parts of our
> history (for example the backslash against Canonical), (inadvertently?) give
> out the message that we don't welcome companies in our development
> community.

Note that you can still be independent (meaning that you can reasonably
think you're making decisions based on their technical merits, rather
than on the interest of specific companies) even in presence of
companies contributions. You "just" need to have enough diversity in
company contributions so that potentially conflicting interests balance
each other. That is the independence model of the Linux Kernel
community, which is entirely different from the current Debian model,
but not necessarily worse.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »


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Re: [all candidates] vote time?

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 10:39:17PM +0300, Moray Allan wrote:
> It appears to me that some DPLs^Wpeople may merely be asking questions
> that they find interesting and would like to see discussed.  While
> it's nice to see these polite discussions of big issues for Debian, I
> would suggest that some of them might be better started on the
> specific relevant lists, with participation from more people than the
> DPL election candidates!

Speaking for myself only, I've certainly asked a couple of broad, maybe
"vision", questions, but certainly not because I'd merely like to see
them discussed. Rather, it's because I haven't found answers to them in
the candidates' platforms and my vote actually depends on how the
candidates will both answer and approach them.  I suspect others might
be approaching the campaigning period with similar expectations.

In fact, campaigning period has always been an occasion to discuss "big
issues", as you put it, and it would be sad to pass on the occasion.

On the other hand, I don't think anyone here has any specific "quality
of service" expectation. Campaigning period is rather long, and in my
experience its intensity decreases substantially over time. No one is
expecting you people to answer within the hour or the day. Take your
time, and enjoy the discussion!

Hugs,
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
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Re: To Lucas: how do you plan to push your ideas

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-12 23:06, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:

On 03/12/2013 06:37 PM, Raphael Hertzog wrote:

That said, it's not clear to me how you plan to achieve them. Being
the DPL doesn't grant you more time to implement them yourself and
your influence as DPL is limited.
[...]
How do you expect to push your agenda for the project?


I do wonder why your question is for lucas specifically? It would be
interesting
to hear other candidates on this too.


I have tried to avoid basing my platform directly on anything that 
would require existing delegates to make specific actions with respect 
to delegated areas (or, equivalently, that would imply the replacement 
of delegates if they don't agree).


I do make statements about general ways that I would like delegates, 
and other members of Debian teams, to behave, as well as mentioning some 
areas for possible new delegations, or expansions of existing ones.  I 
give a few examples of things I'd like to see happen, as views rather 
than promises, in the "Specific ideas" subsection.


I have similarly tried to avoid including too much that would be nice 
but that isn't related to the DPL position or more generally to 
coordination of Debian.  For example, I think it would be nice to have a 
DVCS containing up-to-date source for all Debian packages, but I can't 
really state that me becoming DPL would make it happen more quickly.



Looking through my platform:

"Delegation and teams": in part constitutional powers, in part 
influence/persuasion, in part aspiration.


"External communications": delegation/recruitment.

"Coordination/mediation", "Internal communication", "Local 
communications", "Fundraising and spending", "Merging from the DebConf 
branch": in part directly related to DPL powers about delegations and 
money-handling; for other parts no special powers are required in 
principle, but these are much more likely to be successful with the 
DPL's voice behind them and backed up by delegations.


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Re: [all candidates] on distribution-wide changes and scalability

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 14/03/13 at 17:55 +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> Folklore goes that performing distribution-wide changes in Debian is
> hard and time-consuming, due to a couple of reasons: (1) the time needed
> to make a decision that affects the whole archive (this is related to
> our flat structure, which has many benefits, but surely not that of
> providing a clear decision structure for cross-cutting concerns), and
> (2) the time needed to deploy the needed technical changes in all
> affected packages.
> 
> This "inertia" folklore is surely supported by past history of the time
> it took us to deploy specific changes in large sets of packages.  But on
> the other hand, in the last 5 to 10 years we have massively improved our
> ability to decide and deploy large changes by the means of: (a) large
> maintenance teams who are able to decide on "their" packages and deploy
> changes using shared-access VCS, and (b) a more liberal use of NMUs than
> in the past.
> 
> Questions for the candidates:
> 
> - on the judgement spectrum between "there is no inertia in Debian and
>   that's good" and "there is a lot of inertia in Debian and that's bad",
>   where would you put yourself?

There is some inertia. Some of it is unavoidable due to the complexity
of what we do, some of it could be optimized away.

> - if you don't think that we're at our best on this front, what do you
>   propose we change to improve?

(see below)

> 
> 
> As mere thought experiments, feel free to consider the following
> possible "changes" as part of your answers:
> 
> - Debian should use the Technical Committee more proactively than we
>   presently do, to decide on "any technical matter where Developers'
>   jurisdictions overlap"; not only to solve conflicts (as we already
>   do), but also to *design* forthcoming changes in an authoritative
>   manner.  [ Many large FOSS projects out there have technical boards
>   that work that way. ]

I don't think that the TC should be be a place where changes are
*designed*. However, it could be used on rare occasions as a way to
decide on changes more effectively. But generally, I don't think we
have a problem with design.

> - Debian should decide to use a single VCS (say, Git), for all packages,
>   uniform repository structure and work-flow, and give by default
>   read/write access to all DDs. This would allow push-button changes to
>   all packages in the archive.  We often speak about "reducing package
>   ownership" during DPL campaigns, well, this is the ultimate step of
>   it.

We already have a single VCS: the Debian archive. Standardizing on Git
and on a Git workflow[1] would bring some benefits (easier to move
between teams, less documentation for each team), but I don't think that
the VCS in use is really that important. Standardizing on packaging
tools sounds a lot more useful.

[1] I started some work in that direction as mentioned in my platform,
see http://wiki.debian.org/GitPackagingWorkflow

However, about Git, I wonder if the "one repository per package"
practice is really a good idea. Of course, we have 'mr' to manage several
repositories, but it would be much more convenient if we had all
packages in the same repository (or at least all packages of a team). I
think that one of the big source of (useless) inertia, at least in teams
dealing with lots of small packages, is the fact that each package is
generally considered a separate project.

Regarding transitions, I generated a custom graph based on those on
http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=751 to compare the "transition
speed" of 3.0 (quilt), dh, and git: http://blop.info/pub/adoption.png
I have the impression that the faster transitions are also the easier
transitions.

>   [ Ditto: I know no other large FOSS project out there allowing 
>   the extreme diversity in VCS, work-flow, and ACLs that we have in
>   Debian at present. ]

On the other hand, Debian is about addressing diversity between other
free software projects. It's not too surprising that we have problems
suppressing some of that diversity.

> - Debian should seek more direct involvement from companies whose
>   businesses depend on Debian, so that their employees can help
>   volunteers in pushing archive-wide changes (once they're decided).
>   [ If you allow gatekeepers this would become, essentially, the Linux
>   kernel development model. ]

I'm not sure if you are trying to troll here, but we already welcome some
archive-wide changes (l10n, porting, etc.).

> Bonus point: if you think any of the above is good, how do you think we
> can decide to go for it? (chicken and egg FTW)

The Debian way, I would say. Incrementally. Using graphs to track
progress. When the to-be standard starts to become a de-facto standard,
add a lintian warning, then reprecate alternatives, then add as a
release goal, etc.

Lucas


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Re: Usage of Debian's Money

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-13 02:57, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
Since both of you want examples of possible uses of money, here you 
have

some that I quickly came up with:

1/ Grant some amount of money to the release team to offer as 
bounties on

release blocker issues that are not going forward.


I wouldn't be against experimenting with bounties, but like Lucas I 
would much happier about non-cash bounties, and also think that 
non-bounty "rewards" by people being public thanked for their work might 
be sufficient incentive in many cases.


2/ Have the ftpmasters write up a spec of what needs to be done to 
finally
have "ddeb support" (or "PPA" or ...) and use Debian's money to 
contract

with someone (unaffiliated to Debian?) to actually implement the spec
under the
supervision of ftpmasters. Copyright of the code written would fall 
under

Debian/SPI.


This doesn't sound fundamentally different to me from "pay someone to 
fix bugs in zsh"[1], or paying people for other normal Debian 
activities.  I could much more easily accept us e.g. paying an 
accountant or a lawyer for some work that is clearly not related to 
Debian volunteer roles, though even in those cases I would want us to 
try to find volunteers first.


(Also, if no one in the Debian community was interested enough to write 
code for the spec, I would wonder if there was a problem with it.)


3/ Buy advertising space on various media to recruit new contributors 
and

lead them into our (improved) mentoring infrastructure.


In principle, I don't think I am completely set against paying for 
advertising.  However, I cannot immediately imagine a case where we 
would expect sufficient benefit from normal media advertising for it to 
be worthwhile.


Note that we already get e.g. free magazine advertising for DebConf, 
and could surely get additional similar deals if we wanted; and you 
certainly know that e.g. Google gives free advertising credits to some 
projects:

http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2010-February/002832.html


Offer goodies as
rewards to new contributors who successfully played some game which
tricked them into contributing to Debian.


I would want to be persuaded that it wasn't too expensive -- the postal 
costs would likely outweigh the costs of cheap "goodies" in many cases.  
However, in principle it would be ok from my point of view, in the same 
way that a few non-essential costs at a Debian event are ok.



I suspect that I would be unconvinced by most ideas that suggested
that we spend spend money in ways that it would not be permitted for
SPI to spend money under relevant legislation and the SPI by-laws.


What kind of restrictions are you referring to?


(I answered that in another subthread.)

--
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[1] I'm sure there are no bugs in zsh.


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Re: Usage of Debian's Money

[Toni Mueller]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 12:00:48AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> On 12/03/13 at 10:43 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > To other candidates, do you believe that we could benefit from using money
> > for other things than hardware and meeting/travel reimbursment? If yes,
> > what kind of things?
> 
> [ I replied in https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00084.html ]

My personal favourite would be more, and likely more geographically
diverse, Mini-Debconfs ("Bar Camp" style?). I found the one in Berlin
very inspiring, and I was so far, unfortunately, unable to make it to
a real DebConf.

But I don't know whether that would be feasible.


Kind regards,
--Toni++


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Re: [all candidates] Debian as an FSF Free Software Distribution

[Michael Gilbert]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> What work will you be doing to continue Zach's efforts to negotiate with
> the FSF over Debian's status as a Free Software Distribution?
>
> Will you treat this issue as a priority? Can we expect continued open
> dialogue with the FSF on this issue? Would you be willing to help find
> the right concessions on both sides to collaborate?
>
> What is your opinion on this matter?

I am more curious what the candidates think should or can be done in
light of the FSF's absenteeism in that discussion (so far).  What (if
anything) can actually be accomplished without even a
partially-defined path from their perspective?

Best of luck!
Mike


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Re: [all candidates] DPL salary

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:03:36AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I know this question isn't particularly aimed at me, but I'll answer
> anyway: I really don't think that would help most of the time.

I'm clearly not particularly good at posing trick question to the
candidates; aj was much better than me at that! ;-) That said, given you
already unraveled part of the arguments I was interested in seen
discussed (and still am!, especially by the candidates), let me try to
enlarge the scope.

Due to time and travel demands, there are blockers in being DPLs. Most
of them are work related. Within that category of blockers, some could
be solved by a salary but many (according to your judgement) could not.
If we agree on this, it means that we are losing many potential good DPL
candidates due to those blockers.

The broader question is than: what can we do to loose those blockers and
profit more from the abilities that we do have in our community?

Maybe the answer is "nothing"; it's just the way it is, and we should
accept a "deficit" on that front wrt other communities. But maybe there
is something else we could do... what?

Cheers.
-- 
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Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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Re: [all candidates] DPL salary

[Moray Allan]

Stefano asked:
The ground shaking question to all candidates is then: what do you 
think

of providing a DPL salary using Debian funds?


Here are some comments on a few of the aspects that worry me about this 
idea.  Some could be addressed by making other changes, but some seem 
more fundamental.



Pool of candidates

I fear that this could in fact shrink, not increase, the pool of good 
candidates, by creating a new expectation that the DPL should work 
full-time on Debian.


- As Russ already noted, there are few employers where it is easy to 
take a year out.  Even where employers permit it, there will often be an 
associated step backwards in career progression.  Look at the number of 
laws written to attempt to protect women who take time out of a career 
to have children, but the apparent careeer disadvantage that still comes 
from it.


- Someone working freelance would be likely to lose most of their 
clients.


- An academic would suffer afterwards if they didn't continue to keep 
up with the latest research, and continue to help push forward 
publications or other projects that are already in progress.


- With the current one-year term, some people might have to use up a 
high proportion of the time to look for a job for afterwards.



Governance

The other organisations you mention as examples have more complex 
governance than the current Debian constitution.


- What happens if the new DPL isn't seen to be doing a good job, or 
goes MIA?  Who assesses if the DPL is doing a good job?


- How much time is the payment intended to be in return for?  Is the 
DPL allowed to take other paid roles during the year?  Does the answer 
to this change depending on how large the payment is compared to the 
DPL's usual outgoings?  Does the DPL needs to fill in timesheets to show 
that work is being done, even if the results are slow?


- If the DPL is full-time, it would make sense to schedule much more 
travel.  We would need constitutional changes first to avoid accusations 
of impropriety surfacing sooner or later.



Priorities

If cash is available, is this the best way to use it to benefit Debian?

- Could we get more benefit from spending it on sprints/DebConf travel 
sponsorship/buying hardware?  This isn't only a question of internal 
justification, but of persuading our donors that we are using their 
money well.  Maybe if we increased fundraising by 10x first, this aspect 
would be less of a concern.


- If we are paying roles, why choose the DPL role to pay first?  Why 
not e.g. a sysadmin, where availability for rapid response would be 
useful, as well as more time for projects that aren't currently 
interesting priorities for the individuals involved?  Why not pay a 
release manager?  I don't see that Debian is being held back by a lack 
of DPL time, but the release process does seem held back compared to if 
the same people had more time for it.  Why not pay for a professional 
fundraiser?



Practical

These questions would have to be resolved, creating different types of 
unfairness/problems depending on the answers chosen.


- How will we set the level of payment?  Will it depend on the country 
of residence?  Who will decide by how much it increases over time?


- Even within one country, different people can have very different 
recurring costs depending on their other circumstances, such as family 
life, number of dependents, previous salary level, whether they rent or 
are a property owner, previous propensity to spend or save, etc.


- Will the amount include e.g. office costs and healthcare costs, or 
will these be paid in addition?  If uninsured healthcare costs arise 
during the year, while a DPL has no other means of support, will we help 
with those from Debian funds?  What about healthcare/insurance costs for 
dependents?


- If the DPL doesn't have another job ready at the end of the term, 
will we do anything to help them meet their costs?


- Will Debian pay for the lawyers and accountants involved in sorting 
things out for each country, or will those costs come out of the 
payment?  What happens if the final answer from the lawyers after some 
time is that it's not possible for a given country?


- If there is a single predetermined level of payment, as seems most 
likely, this would presumably increase the number of young applicants 
from poorer countries, and discourage people with senior positions in 
richer countries from applying.  That might not be a bad thing 
necessarily, but it doesn't sound like it was what you intended?



Stefano asked later:
The broader question is than: what can we do to loose those blockers 
and

profit more from the abilities that we do have in our community?


It makes more sense to me to try to reduce the time required for the 
leadership role(s), whether by delegation, by having the DPL just do 
less and the rest of the project adjust, or by constitutional changes 
such as moving to a board of equals.


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Re: [all candidates] DPL salary

[Enrico Zini]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 08:50:33AM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> Due to time and travel demands, there are blockers in being DPLs. Most
> of them are work related. Within that category of blockers, some could
> be solved by a salary but many (according to your judgement) could not.
> If we agree on this, it means that we are losing many potential good DPL
> candidates due to those blockers.
> 
> The broader question is than: what can we do to loose those blockers and
> profit more from the abilities that we do have in our community?

To the problems with paying a DPL, I want to add another one: how does a
DPL know they're earning their keep? If I were elected DPL and given a
salary, I'd feel compelled to do stuff, or to care too much, even when
perhaps the best thing to do would be to do nothing and just trust
others to do their job.

We've definitely come to expect too much from a DPL, and we need to
break that up. It cannot be that we only have one person in the project
who holds the big picture, motivates everyone, monitors everything, and
does accounting.

The way out I can see is delegation. Delegation makes you more involved,
gives you responsibilities, holds you up to them. A delegated person can
be expected to have a vision of the future of their field, to know what
is going on, to ask for help when help is needed, to suggest successors
and step down if they become inactive.

A delegator's responsibility is to help maintain a high standard among
delegates, which doesn't only mean to undelegate them if they don't do a
good job, but also to thank them for a job well done, ask for bits from
$TEAM posts, have a chat every once in a while about the state of things
and give feedback from the outside.

A DPL who delegates means more people get involved and responsible.

A DPL who is good at all that also sets a nice example for others to
follow. We need that: doing delegation right is something that is hard
to learn. Count me among the ones who'd eagerly thirst to see a good
delegator at work, and take notes.

So, besides knowing how to delegate, a DPL would mostly need to be
someone who knows who does what in Debian, or knows who to ask in order
to find out. And who can tell when they're about to reach their limit,
or their day has been difficult enough already, and delegate the right
person to take care of that yet another urgent thing that popped up at
lea...@debian.org just while they were about to go wear some gloves and
clean their bathroom.

Or, if you reall want to invest money on this, perhaps we could consider
paying someone to do the DPL's housework instead :)


Ciao,

Enrico

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Re: [all candidates] DPL salary

[Didier 'OdyX' Raboud]

Hi Russ,

while I do agree with the rest of your post, there's one part which I'm not 
sure to understand correctly:

Le mercredi, 13 mars 2013 18.03:36, Russ Allbery a écrit :
> For example, I live in the SF Bay Area.  Fair market compensation here for
> the sort of senior IT person that we would elect DPL is *at least*
> $100,000 US per year, and at $100,000, people would generally be taking a
> substantial pay cut because they believed in the organization.

"the sort of senior IT person that we would elect DPL" is the part that 
puzzles me: with both the extension of the DD status and the diversity 
statement, we made it clear that we welcome all sorts of contributions from 
all sorts of contributors: I, for one, would be very happy to elect a DPL who 
is not necessarily that "senior IT person". I'm not hereby saying that "senior 
IT persons" become bad DPLs or that other professions have lower "costs" than 
the above figures, just that I think it's very important to keep the 
"potential DPL"s set wide enough.

Cheers,

OdyX


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Leadership in Debian (was Re: [all candidates] DPL salary)

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-14 13:10, Enrico Zini wrote:

We've definitely come to expect too much from a DPL, and we need to
break that up. [...]


Thanks.  Your message explains better what I've mentioned, that (even 
ignoring the associated problems) I don't see it as healthy for us to 
push for a DPL with more and more time, but rather to fix the job to be 
more possible on available time.


I don't say that because of my own situation, but because I want us to 
continue to be able to have a good set of DPL candidates to choose from. 
The more people see an expectation of a "full time" role, the fewer 
people will be willing to run -- in my view, this would be true for the 
most appropriate candidates even if we paid the DPL a salary.


I believe that Debian is at its best when it is a flat organisation 
where different groups and individual contributors work together 
directly as needed.  The DPL and others can help by following progress, 
speaking to delegates, suggesting help where it is needed, and so on.  
But in each case they should be aiming to nurture healthy teams that 
function well without intervention, not to make themselves continually 
indispensable in every area.


I think this type of leadership can be tricky for many of us, partly 
due to tendencies in wider geek culture.  When we see something 
non-ideal, we tend to be quick to think of solutions that seem better to 
us, and to want to share them, and it tends to be hard for us to leave 
things alone to be implemented once we have made some input that might 
be forgotten or misunderstood.  We tend to think in terms of the 
elegance of a correct solution, and be suspicious of lessons on social 
leadership for being too often expressed in pop psychology.[1]


I used to take more of a "do everything" approach myself as a student, 
but I learnt from seeing an society where I'd taken on most of the work 
run into immediate problems when I had to step back from it.  In recent 
years in DebConf, since I know that I have limited time, I have tried 
not to over-commit myself with too many specific tasks, but to be a good 
coordinator by following overall progress and allocating my time to the 
specific needs at each moment, and finding people to help look at 
problems where needed rather than trying to push my own solutions.  If I 
am elected DPL, I will continue the same approach in that position.


The same factors encourage us to hold on as long as possible to other 
roles in Debian, in the fear that if we give them up someone might mess 
up all the work we've put in or neglect important tasks.  However, the 
best way to ensure that our work carries on well is to train up 
successors and pass on tasks to them early, and to make sure that there 
is a real team of people working on a task rather than only one 
indispensable person.  For both the DPL and other Debian roles, we need 
turnover of people to bring in new ideas, and teams which pool ideas 
rather than just listen to top-down leaders.


--
Moray

[1] Of course, there is also some academic literature on leadership 
that's at least as rigorous as non-theoretical computer science.



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Re: [all candidates] DPL term duration

[Didier 'OdyX' Raboud]

Hi Moray, hi all,

Le mardi, 12 mars 2013 21.24:15, Moray Allan a écrit :
> In my view, if we want to lengthen the term of office for our
> leadership roles, which could have beneficial aspects, we should do that
> as part of a wider reform that reduces the concentration of roles/power
> in a single person.

As I see it, one way to do that (which has certainly been proposed already) 
would be to have a sort-of "DPL guild"⁰. It would have these properties¹:

- "enough" members
  (start with 3 for example, but a fixed number set in the constitution)
- fixed-length terms ("18 months" for example)
- renewable terms
- overlapping terms (more by coincidence than by enforcement)
- resignation is possible per-member, at any time
  (so if one member resigns, a new one is elected ASATCP²)
- leadership/chairman role (if needed) rotated between the elected members on
  a regular basis³

What do the candidates think of such a system; would it be something you would 
push, not push, why?

Thanks in advance, cheers,
 
OdyX

⁰ Team / Board / Committee / Whateva, the name isn't the core of the idea.
¹ Which are quite alike those of the swiss federal government
² As Soon As The Constitution Permits
³ Could also be done by decision of the "guild", for example; or not at all.


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[all candidates] vote time?

[MJ Ray]

Dear candidates,

How much time do you think voters should spend reading these discussions?

With the benefit of some hindsight, do you feel that you are being
concise enough to achieve that time?

Would you change anything about the DPL or GR processes to help achieve that
time?

Thank you for your attention and I await your reply with interest.

Best wishes,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/


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Re: Debian's relationship with money and the economy

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-12 14:06, Raphael Hertzog wrote:

The Debian ecosystem includes many economical actors, be it companies
or individuals, but we tend to hide those aspects as if they didn't
exist.


I don't think that's quite the case.  Perhaps Debian's commercial 
partnership/sponsorship/supporter activities should be more active, but 
they are not intentionally hidden.


For example:

http://www.debian.org/partners/
http://debconf13.debconf.org/become-sponsor.xhtml
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-sponsors-discuss
https://lists.debian.org/debian-companies/

As with many areas of Debian, we would benefit from having more 
volunteers to work on these.



Despite Debian's non-profit status, IMHO Debian's growth and success
relies on the capacity of those "actors" to have some "economical
success". And there are many ways to help those actors, without 
involving

any direct flow of money from Debian to them, in particular at the
press/publicity level.


Indeed, this is fairly uncontroversial.  We already make press releases 
about, and otherwise publicise Debian's partners/sponsors/supporters.



When a project ultimately benefits to the Debian project, we should
not fear to promote it even if that promotion helps the project
initiator to make money (and IMO even more so when the project 
initiator

is a Debian member).

Do you agree with this analysis and statement? If not, why?


Yes, I am happy for Debian to promote things that it would otherwise 
promote, irrespective of whether they make someone money, but instead 
based on our own priorities of our users and free software.


I don't think that we should promote something through Debian media 
purely because the project initiator is a Debian member.  But I 
recognise that in borderline cases something may be more interesting to 
people around Debian because it involves a Debian member.


For full disclosure, I'm speaking of experience here since I tried to 
get

some Debian press coverage of the fundraising for the liberation of
the Debian Administrator's Handbook. See
https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2011/10/threads.html#1
for the discussion that happened.


It's not clear to me that this is closely related to the questions you 
asked above.  In fact, if we want to keep good relationships with 
partners/sponsors/official supporters etc. we should probably restrict 
how much we allow the commercial activities of individual Debian members 
to be advertised through Debian media in an uncoordinated way, outside 
our formal programs.


Since you say it's just an example, I won't comment more on the 
specific case.


--
Moray


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