not being elected?

[Paul Wise]

Candidates,

What do you plan to work on if you are not elected?

Will not being elected de-motivate you?

Will you work on the things in your platform even if you are not
elected? Most of the things mentioned there are not DPL specific tasks.

Gergely Nagy, was not being elected in 2012 de-motivating? In 2004, how
did you feel about getting votes after running as a joke candidate?

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pabs

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various ideas

[Paul Wise]

Candidates,

I maintain a wishlist[1] of ideas of various levels of craziness I would
like to see implemented and directions I would like Debian to go in.
Some of these should be moved to bugs, but at least they are somewhere
more public than the previous location (a damp dark corner of my brain).

Would becoming DPL increase the chance that you would work on any of
these ideas?

Would not becoming DPL increase the chance that you would work on any of
these ideas?

What ideas for Debian are lurking in the corner of your brain?

 1. http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise#wishlist

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Re: mentoring programs in Debian

[Russ Allbery]

Ana Guerrero  writes:

> I see your point. In these cases, the "mentor" was more treating the
> GSoC program as a bounty program or a way to have "contractors" paid at
> the expense of somebody else. It wasn't a real mentoring scheme.

Ah, yes, that's certainly a problem.

> This kind of mentoring "let's package this new software stack" (and
> create a team to maintain it, when it doesn't exist) doesn't need to
> happen inside the GSoC, it can happen already in Debian. In fact, some
> Debian teams already do this, but fail to announce it clearly. When an
> interested user ask, we tend to say: "if you want new version of X in
> Debian, we need help" instead of "we welcome new contributors. If you
> don't have a lot of experience, don't worry, we'll mentor you! Please
> take a look at this and if you can questions mails us to X and/or join
> us in IRC" or something along these lines :)

Indeed.

Of course, some of that problem is that mentoring can be a lot of work!
This is always one of the challenges for free-time activities; people like
doing things that are fun and simple and directly personally rewarding.
While mentoring can be that, it isn't always.

I've been spending the day poking around on video game forums since one of
the tracking sites I'm particularly fond of just redid part of how they do
one of their statistical score calculations, and there's a lot of
resulting discussion.  That prompts me to wonder if mentoring is an area
of Debian that would benefit from some sort of gamification
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification).  I do all sorts of things in
video games that I might not otherwise do, and even things that aren't
particularly fun, because I get rewarded with an achievement or score of
some kind.

I think there was some prior discussion of badges and awards inside
Debian.  I'm not sure if that project ever reached fruition.  But I do
think that one very effective way to provide an incentive is to reward
action with some sort of collectable or score, thereby engaging people's
joy of accumulating.

The hard part of a good sceme is figuring out what to measure to award
badges or score or what have you, since mentoring is somewhat fuzzy and
difficult to measure with a computer.

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


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Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status

[Gergely Nagy]

Arno Töll  writes:

> On 17.03.2013 00:01, Gergely Nagy wrote:
>> We have close to two hundred entries in the debian-maintainers-keyring,
>> that's a respectable number, which reaffirms my recentish change of
>> heart, that the DM status is a good thing, and while it does not solve
>> all problems, it is, nevertheless, a useful thing to have.
>
> although I'm deliberately ignoring all the good reasons you provided,
> JFTR, many people feel obliged to become DM these days before applying
> as a DD and even many DDs understand the DM concept as a probation to
> test potential NM candidates.
>
> In fact, even the wiki says "Becoming a Debian Developer: You should be
> a Debian Maintainer for six months before applying to the Debian New
> Member Process" [1]. That's somewhat different to the original idea of
> the DM status and not really a direction we should endorse.
>
> Thus, the sheer number of DMs is not a really a resilient number per se,
> although I agree that the DM status itself is a good procedure.

Indeed, the number alone is of little value, it is merely one of the
data points.

I do wholeheartedly agree with you too. One of the reasons it took me so
long to change my opinion on the whole DM status was those few lines
from the wiki you quoted. (It delayed my return to Debian by at least
half a year - whether that's a good thing or bad is to be decided by my
dear readers.)

Thank you, for reminding me of that. I haven't looked at that page since
I re-applied, and almost forgot those words. We really should reconsider
that paragraph, and preferably kill it with fire (post-wheezy, of
course).

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Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status

[Vincent Cheng]

Hi,

Just throwing in my $0.02 as one of the ~200 DMs we have...

On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 4:37 PM, Arno Töll  wrote:
> although I'm deliberately ignoring all the good reasons you provided,
> JFTR, many people feel obliged to become DM these days before applying
> as a DD and even many DDs understand the DM concept as a probation to
> test potential NM candidates.

I think it's natural for the DM concept to have evolved into an
interim DD position, a stepping stone if you will. It's a great way
for DDs to give a certain amount of autonomy to the DMs they wish to
sponsor, and an opportunity for candidates to demonstrate their
technical skills and trustworthiness. It's also (at least from my
perspective) a lot easier and quicker to become a DM first instead of
applying directly through the NM process to become a DD, so that's
another point in favour of becoming a DM first and then applying to be
a DD only when you're sure of your commitment to the project.

> In fact, even the wiki says "Becoming a Debian Developer: You should be
> a Debian Maintainer for six months before applying to the Debian New
> Member Process" [1]. That's somewhat different to the original idea of
> the DM status and not really a direction we should endorse.

While I wouldn't make DM-ship an absolute requirement of the NM
process, I think that it's generally a good idea to encourage
contributors to become a DM first. My own experiences with it have
been positive, and it's always nice not to have to spam my sponsor
DD's mailbox everytime I'd like to upload something (that becomes
extremely tedious after a while, especially if one is maintaining a
few dozen packages).

Regards,
Vincent


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Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status

[Arno Töll]

Hi,

On 17.03.2013 00:01, Gergely Nagy wrote:
> We have close to two hundred entries in the debian-maintainers-keyring,
> that's a respectable number, which reaffirms my recentish change of
> heart, that the DM status is a good thing, and while it does not solve
> all problems, it is, nevertheless, a useful thing to have.

although I'm deliberately ignoring all the good reasons you provided,
JFTR, many people feel obliged to become DM these days before applying
as a DD and even many DDs understand the DM concept as a probation to
test potential NM candidates.

In fact, even the wiki says "Becoming a Debian Developer: You should be
a Debian Maintainer for six months before applying to the Debian New
Member Process" [1]. That's somewhat different to the original idea of
the DM status and not really a direction we should endorse.

Thus, the sheer number of DMs is not a really a resilient number per se,
although I agree that the DM status itself is a good procedure.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper
-- 
with kind regards,
Arno Töll
IRC: daemonkeeper on Freenode/OFTC
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Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hello,

while reviewing the vote that introduced the Debian Maintainer status
in 2007 (http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/vote_003_tally.txt) I noticed
that Lucas voted in favor and that Moray voted against it.

Moray, why did you vote against? Does that still hold or did you change
your mind in between?

To all, what's your opinion on the DM status? Has it been effective?

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

Get the Debian Administrator's Handbook:
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Re: Debian's relationship with money and the economy

[Toni Mueller]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 01:01:25PM +0300, Moray Allan wrote:
> Though, for clarity, I wouldn't want DPN to turn into some kind of
> Slashdot clone that just happens to be run by Debian people -- I

We have planet.debian.org for that, right?


Cheers,
--Toni++


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Re: All candidates - quotes for the press if you win

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-13 14:13, Neil McGovern wrote:

Could you provide a couple of sentences (no more) for the below?


Here are some answers, intended to be appropriate for a press release, 
as requested.



* How do you feel about having won the election?


"Following Stefano as Debian Project Leader feels a huge 
responsibility.  I want to thank him for the huge amount of work he's 
put in over the last three years, and I hope I can show a little of the 
wisdom that he's shown in the role."


* What is the main thing you're looking to change in your first 100 
days?


"I plan to start by working on some internal topics that can help us 
grow and advance our goals better in the future.  In particular I want 
us to agree on some good practice guidelines for teams and leadership 
positions within the Debian community."



* What do you view Debian's greatest challenge in the coming year?


"I hope that we release the next version of Debian, codenamed 'wheezy', 
without major delays.  I look forward to seeing the burst of activity 
and new technical ideas that always follows each release, when we open 
up the development process to major changes again after some months of 
focusing on fixing bugs."


* How important is Debian directly, now that Ubuntu and Linux Mint 
have grown so popular?


"We now have many derivatives, each with a different character, and 
each of them makes Debian a more important part of the free software 
community – we have many users who don't even know they are using 
Debian's work.  Debian itself is easy to install these days, and 
incredibly reliable, but I'm happy about the success of these 
derivatives and keen that we make it easy for them to integrate their 
work back into Debian."


Of course, I expect these could be improved in the review process.

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

[Gergely Nagy]

Paul Tagliamonte  writes:

> 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?

I do not plan to be on the front line, but it is an important effort
that must be continued. If elected, I'll make sure that the appropriate
people are empowered to continue the effort, and I will be available for
mediation, support and any other task that may arise.

I will not, however, wish to become a driving force, because there are
others who do that much better in this case than I would, and I'm more
than happy to let people do what they're passionate about.

> 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?

Yes, yes and yes.

> What is your opinion on this matter?

While getting debian recognised by the FSF as a Free Software
Distribution would be useful for both parties in my opinion, I see
little hope for that to happen, because while we generally agree in
principle, and our goals align quite well, there are subtle differences.

That, however, is not a bad thing. I do not wish neither the FSF, nor
Debian to compromise in either of our ideals, for that would be
disastrous.

It would still be useful to agree on what exactly we're disagreeing on,
and why, and treat those disagreements respectfully and
openly. Recognising that our goals align, and the differences are really
just in the details would already be a great step forward.

-- 
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Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-16 17:47, Gergely Nagy wrote:

...and this highlights another issue I have with our infrastructure:
wnpp can be quite an intimidating mess, with over a thousand packages 
in

ITP and RFP state. That's a lot. I get scared just by looking at the
number, and I'd like to think I'm not the only one.


Yes.  I think the RFP list is one area that could do with volunteer 
curators.  If a few interesting/important/easy packages were 
highlighted, we could avoid as many people spending hours looking 
through the list, then giving up without finding anything, or giving up 
due to inability to decide.


Though, as a related matter, I would like people who have an ITP bug, 
or who look seriously at at RFP requests, to post more updates and 
comments to the bug reports -- even when the comment is about a lack of 
progress.  For example, if you look at an RFP bug then decide it's 
uninteresting/worthless/difficult, or have a doubt about the licensing 
status, please send a short message to the BTS to help save time later 
for others who look through the list.


--
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Re: Usage of Debian's Money

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-15 02:39, Toni Mueller wrote:

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.


Yes.  While I think it is valuable to have a "main" conference to allow 
maximum interchange between people from different regions, we should 
also encourage more regional events.  Events which last a day or two do 
not take a lot of organiser time.  (Somehow the organiser time required 
seems to grow exponentially with the scale of the event.)


Not everyone can justify the travel time or cost of attending a distant 
event.  I think this is especially relevant for encouraging new 
contributors, or people who are just thinking about starting to 
contribute to Debian.  Only the most enthusiastic will consider 
attending a DebConf far away from them; many more would attend a shorter 
local event.


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

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-16 12:13, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

The current NMU guidelines[1] discourage fixing cosmetic issues or
changing the packaging style in an NMU.  The reason for that is that
such changes are often a matter of taste (though there are 
exceptions,

such as the standardization of debian/control fields - going from
X-Vcs-* to Vcs-*).


I only intended to include distribution-wide changes that have already 
been agreed as goals.  Even where everyone has agreed on a change, we 
are often quite slow to adapt all packages.  The classic example is the 
/usr/doc transition, but I don't think we've really solved the problem 
since then, just made it less bad by more use of helpers.


My suggestion was only sometimes to accelerate further our existing 
methods.  Pushing more "standardisation" could be worthwhile in some 
cases, but is a separate debate.


Could you give examples of specific distribution-wide changes that 
you

think we should authorize via NMUs?


I am not trying to push specific technical changes, only to suggest 
that we shouldn't assume that distribution-wide changes need to wait for 
the slowest maintainers.  (And I don't think that people really assume 
this currently, in fact; already for each such change a few NMUs would 
be likely eventually.)


For example, would that apply to debhelper -> dh conversions? To 1.0 
->

3.0 (quilt)?


Only if we had already reached agreement that these are goals we were 
moving towards.  At that point, they would stop being merely matters of 
taste/cosmetic.



Specifically, how do you think we can decide to authorize NMUs for a
specific distribution-wide changeover?


Changes should be decided in the same ways we already decide about 
transitions and policy.


The NMU-encouragement aspect itself I would expect to be linked to the 
release team.


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Re: Usage of Debian's Money

[Gergely Nagy]

Lucas Nussbaum  writes:

> On 13/03/13 at 00:57 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
>> 3/ Buy advertising space on various media to recruit new contributors and
>> lead them into our (improved) mentoring infrastructure.
>
> I think that we have other, better ways, to improve the project's
> visibility than to use paid advertising. For example, do cool stuff, and
> get it covered by the press. ;)

Let me disagree a bit here. While it may not apply to all kinds of
press, my impression so far is that waiting for press to happen is a
nice dream. To achieve maximum effect and reach, you have to influence
the press, and just doing cool stuff will not be enough for that. Quite
likely, they won't even realize cool stuff happened, or only when it's
already old news. But even if they do, will they consult us? Will they
paint a correct picture, that does us good?

I would not be so sure, and would rather avoid this whole problem by
delegating the task to OUR press team whom we do trust, and then
persuade the media to use our press team's material, in exchange of some
green bills or virtual coins. Everybody wins.

Mind you, I'm not saying that accidental press is bad - it surely
isn't. All I'm saying is that we can benefit from both.

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Re: Usage of Debian's Money

[Gergely Nagy]

Raphael Hertzog  writes:

> 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.

While such one-off bounties would help the release further along, would
it be worth it? As far as I see, our releases are slow, because we're
terrible at dealing with RC bugs, we have tons of packages lingering
in a sorry state, and there's no bounty that'd fix any of these.

It's a bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but bounties for release blocker
issues sounds like pulling a tooth. It makes the pain go away, but if
you don't wash your teeth, it doesn't help much in the long run.

> 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.

The problem with this approach is that writing the spec and supervising
the person or people implementing it is no small task, either. I dare
say it is actually harder than writing the code itself. Therefore, I
would find it unfair to spend money this way, unless ftpmasters are
getting paid for their part too.

I find the GSoC model reasonably acceptable for these kinds of things,
however.

> 3/ Buy advertising space on various media to recruit new contributors and
> lead them into our (improved) mentoring infrastructure. Offer goodies as
> rewards to new contributors who successfully played some game which
> tricked them into contributing to Debian.

This, on the other hand, does sound like a reasonable idea. However, I
think that our primary goal should not be the recruitment of new
contributors (not directly, anyway), but to increase our visibility, and
to show the wider world, that we're more than a group of geeks who do a
distribution.

I won't go into details right now (too many other questions to answer,
sorry!), but feel free to prod me, if you want me to explain
further. (Although, I probably touched the subject partially elsewhere -
but not quite in this context, so.. if you want me to explain, let me
know, and I'll happily do so.)

-- 
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Re: Usage of Debian's Money

[Gergely Nagy]

Raphael Hertzog  writes:

> On Tue, 12 Mar 2013, Moray Allan wrote:
>> If there was general support then we could look at organising a
>> funded program, but I would need a lot of persuasion before wanting
>> to get into the question of Debian picking specific individuals to
>> pay for their work while everyone else is unpaid volunteers.[2]
>>
>> [2] Some of you will remember Dunc-Tank.
>
> Despite the above statement, your platform mentions “I would seek
> suggestions on how we could try to advance Debian's goals by spending
> money in ways we're not currently doing. While I think we should be
> careful with money, I would be willing to authorise spending to try out
> new ideas from others, where goals can be defined and the success of an
> initiative can be judged.”
>
> What kind of new ideas would be acceptable? Feel free to invent some
> hypothetical examples to illustrate.
>
> 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?

Yes, I believe we would benefit from using money for other things than
hardware and meeting/travel reimbursment. We already use money in other
ways (sprints come to mind, for example, but one can argue that these
fall under meeting/travel reimbursment).

As I mentioned a few times here on -vote@ already, one of the things I'd
like to see is more events, that are not strictly Debian related, but
rather Debian sponsored. The intent there is to meet people who are not
yet interested in Debian, may not even heard about it, and learn from
them, to help us better understand how we could lure them towards
us. All this under the disguise of doing something completely different.

I'll give you an example!

Imagine a CodeRetreat[1], a day long, intensive practice event (a great
way to learn a lot, meet people, and for a lot of other things
too). This is often done by having ~45 minute sessions, where during
each session, people work in pairs (or well, together with others, does
not need to be only two - point is, never alone) to solve a particular
problem. Each session adds a new twist, and after each session, the
participants discuss the previous one: what they learned, what they
found interesting, how far they got - and so on. Then change pairs, and
proceed.

 [1]: http://coderetreat.org/about

This, so far is nothing earth-shaking, but meeting with new people,
potential contributors is already a big win: the power of corridor-talk
is not to be underestimated.

However, there is more! We can twist and turn the goal of the sessions,
the problems to solve in many ways, and therefore, we can bend it to our
will, too. We can prepare sessions where participants solve a particular
issue we have (or had) within Debian. Obviously, these need to be
lightweight ones, with whih one can progress far enough within 45
minutes, and where the CodeRetreat facilators can help. So one idea
would be to pick an issue we already solved one way or the other, and
let the participants have at it. In my experience, when this is done
well, participants will sooner or later (and often sooner) dive deeper,
and by seeking more knowledge, contribute in the process. The various
teams (be them packaging teams or other kinds) are in the perfect
position to benefit from these kinds of events.

I will do whatever is in my power, to help them use the opportunity, to
help them organise (and I'm counting on local teams here too - a
project-wide collaboration, whee!).

Another idea - which falls somewhat under travel reimbursment - would be
to have Debian people give guest lectures at universities. When I was
attending a technical university, I loved the guests (that was pretty
much the only thing I loved about it, to be honest, which is one of the
many reasons I never finished one :P), for they showed how things go in
the real world, how even one person can make a difference - and that was
very inspirational. Add to this, that we have able speakers, we have
university connections, we have people from a vast amount of
technological - and non-technological - fields. We should use these to
our advantage, and support those among us who like to speak, and do that
well, so they can do what they do best.

There are countless people out there we could reach, if we only took the
effort to find them and talk to them. Not just at technological
conferences, or as guests lecturers on a programming class - there's
much more to Debian than that.

I'd like to think that money spent on making Debian being known for
something more than a mere distribution (no matter how awesome we are at
that), is money well spent.

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Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 16/03/13 at 15:31 +0100, Serafeim Zanikolas wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 11:21:05AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]:
> > But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is 
> > quite
> > difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a
> > good-enough idea).  it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to
> > identify and suppress potential blockers.
> 
> If you refer to university students in some software-related discipline:

(yes)

> have
> you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in
> native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)?

YMMV, but due to the way student projects are organized in France, the
following problems are often blockers:

- Tasks are not long enough. Typically, what you need is something that
  would take an experienced DD about 40 hours (for part-time projects
  with groups of 2 to 4 students). Many of tasks are much
  smaller than that, and you can't just aggregate several tasks, because
  then, the project loses interest in terms of "project management".

- I don't know the software, and there's no one willing to act as
  backup-mentor on the Debian side, in case I cannot answer the
  students' question.

- (for infrastructure) setting up a development instance is not
  documented, impossible, or extremely difficult.

- The amount of learning required to be able to do the project, compared
  to the amount of work to do, is too high.

- The project is not motivating enough for the students (it does not
  result in exposing the students to sufficiently-interesting
  technologies, for example).

Have others thought about that/tried to organize such university
projects?

Lucas


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Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian

[Gergely Nagy]

Serafeim Zanikolas  writes:

> On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 11:21:05AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]:
>> But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is 
>> quite
>> difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a
>> good-enough idea).  it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to
>> identify and suppress potential blockers.
>
> If you refer to university students in some software-related discipline: have
> you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in
> native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)?

That doesn't really help, in my opinion. It will be a 'forced'
contribution, one which will not continue past the assignment. That's
not really what we should aim for. Unless you make it interesting and
worthwhile for them to continue contributing, they will not do anything
more than strictly required, simply because that's not what they find
satisfactory.

Prove them that it's worth it, that having significant contributions to
Debian (or any other bigger free software project for that matter) on
their resume is a good thing, and  you're much closer to the
goal. Simply telling people to do this and that, because you have the
power to tell them will have the exact opposite effect. Instead, we must
find a way to make these tasks not only visible and known, but
interesting and worthwhile to pursue too. (Which also means we need
people on the Debian side too, to help and mentor the students - without
that, it's an exercise of futility.)

> More generally, I think that our needs for native development are not nearly
> as well advertised as are those for packaging-related work (WNPP).

...and this highlights another issue I have with our infrastructure:
wnpp can be quite an intimidating mess, with over a thousand packages in
ITP and RFP state. That's a lot. I get scared just by looking at the
number, and I'd like to think I'm not the only one.

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Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian

[Serafeim Zanikolas]

On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 11:21:05AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]:
> But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is 
> quite
> difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a
> good-enough idea).  it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to
> identify and suppress potential blockers.

If you refer to university students in some software-related discipline: have
you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in
native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)?

More generally, I think that our needs for native development are not nearly
as well advertised as are those for packaging-related work (WNPP).

-- 
Every great idea is worthless without someone to do the work. --Neil Williams


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Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian

[Gergely Nagy]

Hi!

Instead of answering Timo's question directly, I'll answer to Gunnar
instead, in the hopes that I can answer both of them in a satisfactory
manner.

Gunnar Wolf  writes:

> Timo Juhani Lindfors dijo [Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 05:34:58PM +0200]:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'd like to have each DPL candidate briefly discuss the challenges of
>> getting new people to Debian.
>
> Riding on Timo Juhani's question (and not yet having read the two
> answers that it has already): There was an interesting discussion
> (sadly, in a private forum I cannot quote here, but the fact of having
> had the discussion does not disclose private information, yada
> yada...) that had as one of its interesting points the current age
> distribution, based on the entered data in Debian's LDAP entries. It
> shows the project as a whole is aging, and not only in the sense that
> Moray describes in his platform, but in the sense that we developers
> are getting older — When I joined the project I remember being happy
> and proud to be slightly under the (perceived) average age (among
> DebConf attendees). Today, I am 36 years old, and my age is... I don't
> remember whether the mode or the average.
>
> At the same time, now that I have started teaching at a university, we
> have a once very active LUG (complete with a meeting laboratory and
> all!), and it has gone almost deserted. My friends at the Faculty told
> me we need a way to attract younger people into Free Software
> development - It's not as easy to do it as it was ~10 years ago.

There is another additional fact that makes this all the more worrysome:
we have far more technically apt young people now, than we had ten years
ago.

I see people around me teach their children to use and control
computers, to build things with them, even before they learn to
write. They have their toys, they build stuff, sometimes they
unknowingly write programs - before the age of eight. I find that
astounding (I used to be so proud at writing my first program before I
could write - now it isn't all that rare, and that's a good thing, that
people have the opportunity to do that).

The thing is, Debian is often not available on the devices younger
people start off with - and even if it is, not by default. Someone who
just began to experiment, to play, will not install a whole new world
onto his/her device. That's advanced stuff.

Debian is also not impressively different, so to say. We have a distinct
culture, we have great technical solutions, but those are hardly enough
to impress someone who just casually looks. We need to reach out and
show them that there is much more under the hood than they may imagine,
that we can, and we do provide something unique.

And we need to impress them. That's a very, very hard thing to do, and
something that we'll need lots of help to accomplish, and not
necessarily from technical folk. (Which is why one of my primary aims is
to reach and and recruit non-technical contributors to Debian.)

> So, do you think this demographic shift towards older developers is
> harmful to the project, or that it is just a fact and we should not
> worry?

Harmful? No, not necessarily. We should be aware of it, nevertheless.

> How would you intend to attract more young, interested, talented
> people?

This is briefly mentioned in my platform, but, see below too.

> What do you think we, DDs spread all over the world, mostly working on
> a professional setting (and not anymore mostly students enjoying heaps
> of free time) should do to bring in more, younger contributors?

Share the knowledge, share the culture, the stories. I've attended a
couple of code retreats recently (they seem to be quite popular, and for
a good reason), and found that they're a great forum not only to meet
others, learn and teach, but to spread the word too, to evangelise, so
to say. Much like DebConf, but for the not yet initiated.

What I think would help, are more local events - not always strictly
Debian related, as you'll only reach a tiny fraction of people with
that. But things where the attendance can be impressed, to bring them
closer to our culture, to our ideas. Once interested is sparked, we can
proceed further, but it is a gradual process: we won't win anyone for
the project overnight.

We need to impress the young. We won't be able to do that with technical
feats alone (though those do help, and are required, and we have much to
improve there too, at least in the being readily available for all kinds
of fun devices department).

Most of the younger people I talked about Debian with in recent years
were in their early 20s, and what they seemed most impressed about is
not our technical feats, not our quality, not anything like that. But
the culture.

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Re: All candidates: Development and technical issues and challenges

[Gergely Nagy]

Lars Wirzenius  writes:

> Gegerly, Moray, and Lucas:
>
> We're currently in the middle of a freeze for the next release. We've
> been in this release since June 30. That's over eight months. That's a
> long time, even for a project the size of Debian. Releasing when we're
> ready is all well and good, but it's a problem when it takes us so long
> to get ready.
>
> In your opinion, what are the fundamental reasons the release freeze is so
> long, and so painful, and what do you propose to do, as DPL, to fix them?

The fundamental reason is that fixing bugs isn't all that rewarding in
many cases, and considerably harder than doing packaging, especially in
cases where one can't rely on upstream help either (for any of the
million reasons).

What we could and should do (and this includes everyone, not just the
DPL) is to make upstreams, downstreams and everyone else involved
realise that if we work together, we'll release faster, and if we
release faster, we'll have more up to date software, which benefits
everyone.

I've heard many an upstreams (and users of downstreams too) complain
about how old packages in Debian are. I myself am annoyed too about this
from time to time, when I'm wearing my syslog-ng upstream hat, for
example. But the only proper way to make things better if we combine our
knowledge.

To do this effectively, we need to learn another thing: we are not our
packages. There is no shame in asking for help, or even giving up a
package. There is no shame in joining a team. There is no shame in
working together. All these things make us better, make the packages
better, make Debian better, make the world better.

Why we need to learn this? Because there are many half-abandoned
packages in the archive, that make the release a lot slower than it
needs to be. These should be found and taken care of *before* the
freeze, and we should be doing this continously. We have a lot of data
points that help us recognise these cases, we need to solve the social
issues if we want to avoid these problems in the future.

For that to happen, we all need to realize that we're not our packages.

> What other development process problems do you see, ones that do not
> directly affect the freeze, but make the development of Debian less
> productive or less interesting?

I feel the collaboration between Debian and downstreams is far from
perfect, and that is usually a fault of both sides. Tiny little speckles
of dust in the machinery some of these problems are, but if enough dust
accumulates, the machinery will suffer.

We need to figure out if - and how - we could work together more
closely, to reduce the workload on all sides, as that also reduces the
annoyance we may have with one another.

> Finally, what are the main technical challenges you see for Debian in
> the next five years and what should we, as a project, do about them?

Most of the challenges I foresee in our immediate future are
non-technical. We're fairly good at solving technical problems, so no
particularly huge challenge there. At least, not anything we haven't
seen before.

Nevertheless, what I do find worrysome, is that there seems to be a
trend of upstreams bundling third-party components (often slightly
patched) into their zillion-component, big and complex
solution. Untangling this mess, packaging it, and keeping it functioning
is very challenging, to say the least. Persuading upstreams to not do
that is - sadly - simply impossible, so we need to either work around
this, or bite the bullet and package the forks too, either separately,
or bundled with the application (yuck).

Another - at least partially technical - challenge would be to improve
our own infrastructure and processes, in order to attract more (or at
least, drive away less) potential contributors. (See
https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00157.html for more
details)

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Re: [all candidates] vote time?

[Gergely Nagy]

MJ Ray  writes:

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

Enough time to make an informed decision - or throw a dice, whichever
they prefer. Noone's required to read all (or any) of -vote@, it is
entirely up to them how much time they want to spend on it.

Myself, I enjoyed reading -vote@ in the past (and still continue to do
so, albeit answering everything is much harder than reading only,
especially when there's overlap and noise involved too).

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

Yes and no. Yes, because people have the ability to stop reading me
anytime they want. No, becuase my intention is not to shorten the
campaign period. I could do that, by saying "I suck, vote for NoTA over
me!", or just link my platform to every second question, but that would
not really do me anything good (and it would be quite dishonest too).

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

Once thing that I thought about was a pre-arranged questionnaire for the
candidates: collected the week after platforms are published, before the
campaign period, then posted, with the candidates having a week to
answer. Once answered, further questions are collected and organised
again, and posted in a followup questionnare - you get the idea.

This would eliminate overlapping questions, and would make it easier for
the candidates to answer.

On the other hand, it would be a lot of work, would be terribly boring,
and I'd hate it. So lets not do that. I do like the element of surprise
in our current campaign process.

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Re: All candidates - quotes for the press if you win

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 13/03/13 at 11:13 +, Neil McGovern wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> This may be a thinly veiled attempt to get some work out of my way
> before the election, rather than after it. However, it may also be
> useful for voters in determining their ballots!
> 
> Could you provide a couple of sentences (no more) for the below?
> 
> * How do you feel about having won the election?

It's difficult to answer that question now, and if I won, I'd rather
update my answer after that ;) But I suspect that I would feel a mix of
honored, frightened by the upcoming job, and eager to start working.

> * What is the main thing you're looking to change in your first 100
> days?

I like to keep an open mind. I find the -vote@ discussions very
interesting, and it's still possible that the "main thing I'm looking
to change" has not been mentioned yet.

> * What do you view Debian's greatest challenge in the coming year?

Release wheezy, and start the next cycle on good bases.

> * How important is Debian directly, now that Ubuntu and Linux Mint have
> grown so popular?

Debian is the rock-solid basis on which Ubuntu and Linux Mint are built.
Ubuntu and Linux Mint would not exist without Debian. Or at least, they
would be very different.

(I partially answered that question in my platform:

   Debian should aim at reinforcing its position in the center of the
   Free Software ecosystem. It should be the main active intermediary
   between upstream projects and final users. Of course, providing a
   good basis for derivatives is important, because derivatives users
   are Debian users, even if some of them do not acknowledge that. But
   we should also aim at reinforcing the visibility and the impact of
   Debian itself, because the extremely important values we fight for as
   a project are often neglected by our derivatives.

Lucas


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Re: Are there problematic infrastructure or processes in Debian?

[Gergely Nagy]

Raphael Hertzog  writes:

> Debian's infrastructure and processes have grown organically over the
> years, with all the strengths and weaknesses that it implies. Sometimes
> it's a good idea to step back and look whether some of those need
> to be amended/replaced/dropped/etc.
>
> Based on your own experience, which infrastructure(s) or process(es) would
> benefit from significant changes?
>
> Are there infrastructures or processes that we're (still) lacking and that
> could make a significant difference in the work of Debian's contributors?

As far as infrastructures go, what I find a bit troublesome is that our
tools are sometimes too diverse: too many languages, too few people to
understand and improve them. This is also a project-wide problem of not
being able to make use of our human resources better.

This, in turn, leads to situations where some of our tools look like
they're stuck in the past millennia, which is quite a bummer when it
comes to attracting new contributors, especially when said tool is
something they'll see early on. (Yes, I'm talking about the BTS, which
is a terrific thing, and I wouldn't trade it for anything else, but from
a usability point of view, it is behind times. It would help
tremendously if we had more people working on it, as one person can't
cover all aspects.)

To attract new people, we need a bit more than technical excellence, we
need to impress them, and impress them fast. This - as blasphemous as it
may sound - may require our user-facing tools to look nice, and be
friendly to newcomers. A big problem with parts of our infrastructure is
that this is not the case.

On the topic of processes, I'd emphasize mentoring & sponsoring. This is
where we're... well... I'll be honest: we suck at it, in general. We do
have some amazing teams that do this well, we have a lot of it going on
in the background, hardly visible. BUT, we also have a lot of problems,
and they are sadly far more visible, which can easily drive off new
contributors.

In my experience, mentoring and sponsoring over the internet rarely
works effectively, due to a whole lot of things, including but not
limited to language barriers, lack of knowledge (on both sides, but in
different areas), noise, lack of time, impatience and so on. What does
work, as far as I saw is meeting and talking in person. Things can go a
lot smoother and faster in real life, as there is the personal
connection.

If we could have "mentoring sprints", that would be very useful, in my
opinion. (Encouraging & empowering local teams to help this cause
further would be an important thing.)

Another area we're lacking in is recruiting non-packaging
contributors. I believe that local events, much similar to the
aforementioned mentoring sprints would be a great way to reach out to
more people, be them technical or not. Show them how Debian makes a
difference, *impress* them, and we're halfway there.

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Re: [all candidates] DPL salary

[Gergely Nagy]

Stefano Zacchiroli  writes:

> 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?

First, we need to know those blockers. We can figure some of them out on
our own (travel time, work, etc) - but the best way would be to ask, as
I said so in my earlier reply too.

Once we have more input, we can try to find a solution. Most likely you
have way more information about the matter than I do, but right now, I
don't feel we have enough knowledge to start thinking about how to
remove the blockers.

> 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?

One thing that does come to mind, is that people need to realize that
the DPL is not a one man army. The DPL does not need to do everything
alone, and is not expected to do that, either. (Or if so, we're doing
something terribly wrong)

The DPL must know his or her limits, and - with the help of the project
- find ways to counter them, be that delegations or something else. It
is not, and should not be a one man show.

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Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi Toni,

You quoted my mail by taking only one sentence of each of my paragraphs, so my
answers look much less subtle in your email than they were in my email. ;)

On 15/03/13 at 22:46 +0100, Toni Mueller wrote:
> Hi Lucas,
> 
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 03:43:16PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > First, I don't think that age matters that much.
> 
> imho, age does matter. See Bulbullle's notice why he doesn't run. I've
> seen people leaving other projects by eg. way of heart attack or traffic
> accident, too. Younger people tend to have less of the health problems,
> as well as more spare time.
> 
> > You write about attracting people to free software. I'm not sure that we
> > have a problem here.
> 
> I think we have. In my opinion, many users don't realise the value of
> "free as in free speech", and only see the value of "free as in free
> beer". Although I have tried to campaign in that direction, I have
> utterly failed to explain this issue to many people (esp. business
> people).
> 
> > The number of free software users increases. Free
> 
> ... mostly by way of accident, eg. by getting Ubuntu after their
> umpteenth computer breakdown due to a virus attack.

Yes, I addressed that in my platform:
  
   But we should also aim at reinforcing the visibility and the impact of
   Debian itself, because the extremely important values we fight for as a
   project are often neglected by our derivatives.

> > So we need to get more free software users to use Debian, more Debian
> > users to contribute, more contributors to become regular contributors,
> > etc. But I think I addressed that in my answer to Timo in
> > https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00014.html
> 
> Your roadmap feels quite natural, but it's not yet a plan because the
> devil is in the detail: *How* do we get more people to use/... Debian?
> Simply saying "we need help" may easily make us look like beggars,
> yielding the opposite effect.

"we need help" is about getting people to *contribute* to Debian.

To get more people to *use* Debian, we need to reach out to people not using
Debian yet (obviously). One way to do that is to get involved in local
movements/events where it's possible to talk about Debian to people who, while
not really familiar with Free Software, are quite likely to be interested.
Usually, participation in such events leads to articles in the local press,
more participation to such events, etc.

How can we contribute to that on the project level?
By encouraging the debian events initiative (http://www.debian.org/events/), so
that setting up a booth will be much easier. Also, by being more open to non-DD
representing Debian at such events.

> Imho, a large part of the answer is in getting the cool back into
> Debian. In my discussion with other developers, I get the impression
> that Debian is viewed a huge bureaucratic monster, and you almost have
> to have a Ph.D. before you can reasonably expect to contribute. Which
> would preclude the participation of younger developers, if it were true,
> but I am convinced that it deters talent.
> 
> Imho, we have to change that, somehow.

I fully agree (and I addressed that in my platform).

> At the next level of education, it would be great if people could
> establish Debian related projects as parts of coursework in high school
> or academia.

One thing I have done and that could be generalized is to ask students I
managed to provide a Debian package for software they use or develop during a
project.

But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is quite
difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a
good-enough idea).  it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to
identify and suppress potential blockers.

Lucas


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

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi,

On 15/03/13 at 19:41 +0300, Moray Allan wrote:
> In my platform I suggested that we might make distribution-wide
> changes quicker by more vocally authorising NMUs to help with
> changeovers.

The current NMU guidelines[1] discourage fixing cosmetic issues or
changing the packaging style in an NMU.  The reason for that is that
such changes are often a matter of taste (though there are exceptions,
such as the standardization of debian/control fields - going from
X-Vcs-* to Vcs-*).

[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#nmu

Could you give examples of specific distribution-wide changes that you
think we should authorize via NMUs?

For example, would that apply to debhelper -> dh conversions? To 1.0 ->
3.0 (quilt)?

You also missed one interesting question in Stefano's email:
> 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)

Specifically, how do you think we can decide to authorize NMUs for a
specific distribution-wide changeover?

Lucas


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