Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
Gergely Nagy wrote: Wouter Verhelst wou...@debian.org writes: Arno Töll a...@debian.org writes: 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. [...] Note that, first, the NM frontdesk has always been willing to fast-track someone who is obviously skilled (with obviously being vague on purpose) and, second, that the DM step is not required for emeritus developers returning to Debian. This is exactly why I think it is such a bad idea. Because it is too easy to make it sound like DM is a stepping stone to becoming a DD. It is not. It is *one* of its aspects, a useful one, but in my opinion, far from being the most important one. I do not even agree that it is useful as a stepping stone. DM privileges recognize that a contributor should not have to wait on a DD to apply improvements within a specific domain where the DM has shown she can be trusted. This can be a good way for a new contributor to become useful to the project and to make daily maintenance less painful while waiting for recognition as a DD, sure. With the specific goal of preparing to be a Debian Developer as quickly as possible in mind, though, it mostly hurts: * Becoming a DD means gaining familiarity with how a variety of procedures affect the entire archive. DM privileges create a temptation to work only on your own packages and not pay attention to others'. * Becoming a DD means gaining an understanding of how other developers work and think and how to interact with them. DM privileges create a possibility of working (and contributing usefully!) without needing to interact with other people, and losing an exposure to mentors' styles and insights. (In packaging teams like the perl team, DM status means something different. It is purely good there. :)) The DM process is an excellent answer to new contributors asking the question Why must I wait so long for my improvements to be incorporated in Debian? On the other hand, I think it is a bad answer to I want to be a Debian Developer. What is the first step? Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318074919.GA6059@elie.Belkin
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
On 16/03/13 at 22:13 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: 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? Hi, A lot has been said in this thread. Moray did a very good summary in https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00200.html. Regarding my own position: the DM status is a compromise, but I think that it is a good compromise, that has been a success. I like the fact that we can offer an official status to people who contribute to Debian that can be obtained more easily and earlier than the DD status. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318085622.ga11...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
On 18/03/13 at 00:20 +0300, Moray Allan wrote: I am not happy that: - People have gone for DM status because it's easier to get, but then not gone on to become project members, in many more cases than because they actively don't want to have full rights. Or because the perceived difficulty of going through NM was too high. We need to advertise more that the NM process, for existing contributors, has become a lot less time-consuming. - People have been told not to become project members but to be happy with DM status, if they don't strictly need the full technical rights that currently come with being a member. Nor am I happy that, though it's comparatively less of a worry to me compared to those two: - People are regularly told that they should get DM status before applying for NM. Well, I think that it's reasonable to expect from people involved in packaging that they are already DM when they start the NM process. But as Gergerly said in https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2013/03/msg00192.html, it should be a recommended but optional step, and the 6-month delay should only be mentioned as an example of what is generally expected, not as a requirement. Also, the wiki has pages for http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper but also for http://wiki.debian.org/DebianProjectMember that says: Debian Developers are Debian Project Member with uploading rights During the discussion on DDs without upload rights[1], an important point was that such DDs should not be second-class project members, and thus should not have a separate name[2] (it was in the original proposal, but an amendment changing that was accepted). This wiki page reintroduces that. [1] http://www.debian.org/vote/2010/vote_002 [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2010/09/msg00054.html DAM / NM FD, is that simply a bug in the wiki pages, or something where you feel that discussion should be reopened? Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318085616.ga11...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 09:56:16AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: Also, the wiki has pages for http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper but also for http://wiki.debian.org/DebianProjectMember that says: Debian Developers are Debian Project Member with uploading rights As observed in the past, the Debian Constitution treats members of the project and Debian Developers as synonyms. So, no matter DAM/FD opinion, the claims on those wiki are not correct and should be amended. Thanks for pointing this out. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
Jonathan Nieder jrnie...@gmail.com writes: Gergely Nagy wrote: Wouter Verhelst wou...@debian.org writes: Arno Töll a...@debian.org writes: 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. [...] Note that, first, the NM frontdesk has always been willing to fast-track someone who is obviously skilled (with obviously being vague on purpose) and, second, that the DM step is not required for emeritus developers returning to Debian. This is exactly why I think it is such a bad idea. Because it is too easy to make it sound like DM is a stepping stone to becoming a DD. It is not. It is *one* of its aspects, a useful one, but in my opinion, far from being the most important one. I do not even agree that it is useful as a stepping stone. I'll have to disagree, I'm afraid. DM privileges recognize that a contributor should not have to wait on a DD to apply improvements within a specific domain where the DM has shown she can be trusted. This can be a good way for a new contributor to become useful to the project and to make daily maintenance less painful while waiting for recognition as a DD, sure. ...therefore, it can be useful as a stepping stone. With the specific goal of preparing to be a Debian Developer as quickly as possible in mind, though, it mostly hurts: * Becoming a DD means gaining familiarity with how a variety of procedures affect the entire archive. DM privileges create a temptation to work only on your own packages and not pay attention to others'. On the other hand, working on your packages only at first is still useful: you get to learn how to deal with bugreports; getting ported; how your package may affect others (if there's any that depend/build-depend on yours); how other packages and transitions affect you. These are all useful things to learn, and available for DMs too. (Yes, all of these are available opportunities even if one's not a DM, but gets sponsored - but it's very different when you experience these on your own, than when through a sponsor.) * Becoming a DD means gaining an understanding of how other developers work and think and how to interact with them. DM privileges create a possibility of working (and contributing usefully!) without needing to interact with other people, and losing an exposure to mentors' styles and insights. Both issues you listed are things that 'may' happen. Some bad things that may happen will not make the entire idea for that domain useless. Every DM-uploaded package had a DD grant the DM permissions for it, every DM has had an advocate - I would expect these people to have a rough idea what the DM wants to achieve: does she want to become a DD eventually? If so, help her. If not, leave her to her packages. DMs should not be left out in the cold, so to say, once they have their status. DM-ship is an opportunity, in a sense. If one does not use the benefits it provides, it will, indeed, not be much of a help in preparing one to become a DD. But it does give you the opportunity to get better prepared. That, in my opinion, makes the status useful as a stepping stone. The DM process is an excellent answer to new contributors asking the question Why must I wait so long for my improvements to be incorporated in Debian? On the other hand, I think it is a bad answer to I want to be a Debian Developer. What is the first step? It is a bad answer to the second question, yes. The correct answer is Start contributing.. Becoming a DM can be one step in that process (though, it will not be start). -- |8] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87sj3tawkf@galadriel.madhouse-project.org
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
Le Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 10:32:09AM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit : On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 09:56:16AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: Also, the wiki has pages for http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper but also for http://wiki.debian.org/DebianProjectMember that says: Debian Developers are Debian Project Member with uploading rights As observed in the past, the Debian Constitution treats members of the project and Debian Developers as synonyms. So, no matter DAM/FD opinion, the claims on those wiki are not correct and should be amended. Thanks for pointing this out. Hi, Perhaps the candidates can comment on the fact that this already been raised last year, and if they have something to propose in order to make discussions more productive on debian-devel. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/07/msg00716.html (On my side I am probably guiltly of not insisting for deleting these pages if nobody claims responsibility for what is written in). Cheers, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318094516.ga30...@falafel.plessy.net
[all candidates] lack of women in Debian
Hi, I would like to know your opinion about this graph (thanks Francesca!): http://blog.zouish.org/posts/dw/ Note that I'm not asking for a way to recruit women (there are already efforts on that). I would like to know if you think that this lack of women affects (or not) the Debian project and how. I also would like to know if you have any proposal related to this topic that you would like to do if elected. Thanks! signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: not being elected?
On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:41:05PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: Tasks I am quite sure I will do are: (...) - investigate the localization of -mentors@ and #-mentors. Language is often a barrier for new contributors. That sounds like a low-hanging fruit. Could you elaborate more since you seem to believe this is a low-hanging fruit? There are already resources in Debian by language. Some communities use it more than others. So far I haven't seen anybody being pushed away to ask a newbie development question in debian-devel-french@ or debian-devel-spanish@. I expect it to be similar in other languages mailing list. We have a few of them, see [1]. More list can be created if a group ask the listmasters and our policy to create IRC channels is totally non burocratic (As we have no policy). Mentoring works better when the mentor and the mentee are speaking in their natives languages, but ultimately to participate in Debian people need a minimal knowledge of written English... [1] http://lists.debian.org/devel.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318110313.ga19...@pryan.ekaia.org
[to all candidates] Accessible software in Debian
Hi. To make a rather complicated and long story short: Accessibility of graphical user interfaces in Debian has taken a slight step backward with the GNOME 3 rewrite. Squeeze was more stable regarding this. While discussing this topic on IRC with other Debian people I was kind of shocked to read that basically every feature can be dropped anytime, and since accessibility is for a very small user group, that user group suffering from big rewrites is normal and acceptable. I'd like to know your opinion on this. Are people with disabilities something that we want to support, or is it just luck if they get a working system. As a Free Software community, should we make sure that the digital divide is not going to increase, or is accessibility just margin topic which we as a community do not really care about? If you think we should make sure to provide maximum accessibility to our users, do you have any idea what to do to ensure that? I realize the provokativeness of this mail. However, I feel I really have to ask this question publicly. When I read the reactions quoted above on IRC, my heart felt heavy, and I was seriously considering for a moment to leave Debian, since the attitude I've read there was really very discouraging to me personally. Actually, I didn't expect a rteaction like this from fellow DDs. I realize that accessibility is suffering from the same lack of manpower issues that most other free software projects have. But I am still enthusiastic enough to hope for some sort of solution that will work around the small margin group problem in one or another way. Do you have any ideas what we could do to raise awareness of accessibility issues, and maybe motivate developers who are currently not into accessibiility work in any way, to start caring about various issues around accessibility for people with disabilities. After all, we will all grow old, and our eyes and ears will eventually start to fail slightly. I guess at least then people will enjoy if their favourite desktops on Linux would help them to still be able to do quality work with their computers. And I dont mean just reading and replying mail, I mean everything else that people without diminished vision or hearing or mobility would want to do. If you wait until your body fails you, it might be too late to catch up then. -- CYa, ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ppyxhrbo@fx.delysid.org
Re: not being elected?
Hi Moray, Le dimanche, 17 mars 2013 16.42:34, Moray Allan a écrit : Will not being elected de-motivate you? In many ways, not being elected would be a relief. I'd have more time to put into non-Debian parts of my life. However, if I am not elected, I would see that as a lack of agreement with my proposals, or at least a lack of interest in them, and I would be de-motivated from pushing those topics further against the apparent view of the project. Given that a) you nominated yourself and b) there are two other serious candidates¹, I must say I am quite surprised to read that you would see a non- election as a lack of agreement or interest in your proposals. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not voting between three distinct sets of proposals: as it's been apparent in other threads, there's quite a lot of overlap between the candidate platforms and their specific proposals. We are electing someone to stand in the DPL shoes: debating eachothers' proposals, views and stuff is obviously useful to decide, but at the end of the day, we can't all vote the three candidates equally. We're voting for concurrent persons, not concurrent proposals. So unless you end up being ranked below NOTA (which I certainly don't see happening for any of the three very good candidates), I wouldn't take not being ranked first as a dismissal of your ideas or proposals; and I'm surprised that you see it as such. Cheers, OdyX ¹ Which implies that you start with both a ⅓ chance of being elected and a ⅔ chance of not being elected. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: not being elected?
On 18/03/13 at 12:03 +0100, Ana Guerrero wrote: On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:41:05PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: Tasks I am quite sure I will do are: (...) - investigate the localization of -mentors@ and #-mentors. Language is often a barrier for new contributors. That sounds like a low-hanging fruit. Could you elaborate more since you seem to believe this is a low-hanging fruit? There are already resources in Debian by language. Some communities use it more than others. So far I haven't seen anybody being pushed away to ask a newbie development question in debian-devel-french@ or debian-devel-spanish@. At least for debian-devel-french@, I don't think that we advertise the possibility to ask questions there. I expect it to be similar in other languages mailing list. We have a few of them, see [1]. More list can be created if a group ask the listmasters and our policy to create IRC channels is totally non burocratic (As we have no policy). I'm not sure we need another list for that, given the low traffic (and spanish looks similar) Mentoring works better when the mentor and the mentee are speaking in their natives languages, but ultimately to participate in Debian people need a minimal knowledge of written English... Sure, but making one's first steps in Debian is also very difficult. So I think that every possible way to simplify that first step is a good thing. So, if I'm not elected, I will probably: - see if it's considered OK to direct french contributors to debian-devel-french@ (I guess it will be OK) - see if a few french contributors besides me would agree to answer questions on IRC, and create #-mentors-fr if that's the case (#-devel-fr is quite active, so it's better not to add more noise there) - advertise this (blog, packaging tutorial, etc.) - provide feedback to the project after a few weeks/months, so that others can possibly make the same move This sounds like a rather simple step to make, hence my low-hanging fruit qualifier. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318123028.ga26...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
Hi Jonathan, On 18-03-13 08:49, Jonathan Nieder wrote: [...DM status before entering NM...] I do not even agree that it is useful as a stepping stone. DM privileges recognize that a contributor should not have to wait on a DD to apply improvements within a specific domain where the DM has shown she can be trusted. This can be a good way for a new contributor to become useful to the project and to make daily maintenance less painful while waiting for recognition as a DD, sure. With the specific goal of preparing to be a Debian Developer as quickly as possible in mind, though, it mostly hurts: [...] The DM process is an excellent answer to new contributors asking the question Why must I wait so long for my improvements to be incorporated in Debian? On the other hand, I think it is a bad answer to I want to be a Debian Developer. What is the first step? Perhaps it would be useful to explain *why* I think it is a good idea. For full disclosure: I have been an AM off and on for a few years now, and was at one time also a member of the NM frontdesk. It is an unfortunate fact that there are occasionally people who apply to NM when they are not yet ready to do so. This may be because they underestimate what would be required, or because they overestimate their own abilities, or because their advocate overestimates their abilities, or because of any number of other reasons. When this happens, the result will be that the NM process of the person in question will take more time than is the case for the average NM process. This is bad for everyone involved: for the applicant (because they have to research a lot when answering the questions, which is boring and Not Fun(tm) in general), for the AM (because rather than looking at the work of the applicant involved for the tasks and skills step, they have to come up with interesting exercises and/or ask *more* boring questions), and for everyone in the NM queue after the applicant in question (because if an NM process takes, let's say, two months rather than one, that means everyone else needs to wait a month longer than they would have if the process would've been fast). Before this policy was in effect, the queue was fairly long, which had the unfortunate side effect that some people would apply (and be advocated) before they were ready, in the assumption that by the time it would be their turn, they would have learned more and be ready then. Except that didn't always turn out to be the case, so the result was more people needing more time to finish the NM process, which made the queue even longer, increasing the chance that people would apply before they were ready. There's a loop in there somewhere. This policy therefore exists to ensure that people who apply for DD-ship have, in fact, some expertise in Debian work, which will make sure that the NM process is as quick, easy, and painless as we can make it. It doesn't completely fix the issue of people applying before they're ready; but it does make it somewhat less likely to happen. That's a good thing for everyone; and it also explains why occasionally the NM frontdesk will waive this policy for people who are 'obviously' ready to become a Debian Developer *now* rather than in six months: if the goal is to weed out the people who are not yet ready, then if someone *is* ready, it doesn't make sense anymore, so it's waived. -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/51470bf9.2060...@uter.be
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
Hi, On 18/03/13 at 18:45 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: Le Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 10:32:09AM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit : On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 09:56:16AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: Also, the wiki has pages for http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper but also for http://wiki.debian.org/DebianProjectMember that says: Debian Developers are Debian Project Member with uploading rights As observed in the past, the Debian Constitution treats members of the project and Debian Developers as synonyms. So, no matter DAM/FD opinion, the claims on those wiki are not correct and should be amended. Thanks for pointing this out. Hi, Perhaps the candidates can comment on the fact that this already been raised last year, and if they have something to propose in order to make discussions more productive on debian-devel. One thing I have done on several occasions in to make summaries of large threads. However, I'm not sure that it would have helped in this case. In that case, I think that it just needed someone to fix the wiki pages, since it seems from the discussion that there was agreement on what needed fixing. And if people disagree, it can still be reverted. My patch would be: 1. move some useful content from DebianProjectMember to DebianDeveloper 2. update DebianDeveloper to mention non-uploading DDs 3. remove DebianProjectMember 4. redirect DebianProjectMember to DebianDeveloper 5. drop all references to DebianProjectMember I will implement it at a less busy time for me if nobody beats me to it. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318124750.gb26...@xanadu.blop.info
[all candidates] how to choose Jessie init system
Some of the longest -devel thread in recent years have been about Debian's (default) init system: SysV, SystemD, Upstart, OpenRC, etc. Despite folklore, I don't think those thread have been (entirely) trollish, they all hint at a concrete problem: How do we make an inherently archive-wide technical decision when multiple, possibly equally valid solutions do exist? (I think the latter part, the existence of alternatives, is particularly important here, as we have well-established approaches for other cases. For instance, when one of the alternative is clearly superior, we usually apply some sort of Debian's Darwinism: we wait for it to be popular enough, we make it increasingly more mandatory in Policy or the Release Team pick it as release goal, we do NMUs, etc.) I'd like to know how the candidates would approach the problem of *helping Debian* making a decision on this matter; decision which we will likely have to make at the beginning of Jessie's release cycle. Personally, I'm not particularly interested in candidates' opinion on the decision per se, but rather on how they think Debian should take similar decisions and which role, if any, the DPL should play in the decision process. Still, I picked a concrete example as it might help focusing our thoughts on how we would like similar important technical decisions to work in the future. 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 » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [to all candidates] Accessible software in Debian
Le lundi 18 mars 2013 12:37:15, Mario Lang a écrit : Hi. To make a rather complicated and long story short: Accessibility of graphical user interfaces in Debian has taken a slight step backward with the GNOME 3 rewrite. Squeeze was more stable regarding this. [SNIP justified rant about accessibility] (Note though that as a KDE user without disabilities, I can't judge for the special case you are doing against Gnome) As just said I don't have any peticuliar disabilities myself right now, but I wholeheartedly agree that accessibility is important and should be important for the project. Thanks a lot for this question to the candidates. Best regards, Thomas signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: not being elected?
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 01:30:28PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: At least for debian-devel-french@, I don't think that we advertise the possibility to ask questions there. Just start a discussion there, get a new wording and then ask listmasters to change it. Probably this update could benefit of having the list description in both English and French. I'm not sure we need another list for that, given the low traffic (and spanish looks similar) I meant new lists for other languages that don't have a list yet (when a group of people speaking that language ask for it, of course). Mentoring works better when the mentor and the mentee are speaking in their natives languages, but ultimately to participate in Debian people need a minimal knowledge of written English... Sure, but making one's first steps in Debian is also very difficult. So I think that every possible way to simplify that first step is a good thing. So, if I'm not elected, I will probably: - see if it's considered OK to direct french contributors to debian-devel-french@ (I guess it will be OK) - see if a few french contributors besides me would agree to answer questions on IRC, and create #-mentors-fr if that's the case (#-devel-fr is quite active, so it's better not to add more noise there) - advertise this (blog, packaging tutorial, etc.) - provide feedback to the project after a few weeks/months, so that others can possibly make the same move This sounds like a rather simple step to make, hence my low-hanging fruit qualifier. I see, it is not that easy. To sustain a mentoring community for a long time, it needs plenty of people around it. In Debian we currently struggle to keep our global community in English going running because the lack of mentors. That's why I exceptical about communities per language taking off. Some people pushed for a similar experiment to the one you describe some years ago in Spanish, they even added a round of talks: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianSpanish/Devel/IRCTalks But despite being a small group of people working a lot on it and the Spanish speaking community being big, it didn't last long. Ana -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318130013.ga23...@pryan.ekaia.org
Re: [to all candidates] Accessible software in Debian
Hi, On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 01:55:16PM +0100, Thomas Preud'homme wrote: As just said I don't have any peticuliar disabilities myself right now, but I wholeheartedly agree that accessibility is important and should be important for the project. Thanks a lot for this question to the candidates. +10 [OT] please note that accessibility starts with the ability to configure your system the way you need it. M-F'up to devel@? Kind regards, --Toni++ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318131615.ga30...@spruce.wiehl.oeko.net
Re: Debian's relationship with money and the economy
On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:07:39 +0100 Stefano Zacchiroli z...@debian.org wrote: 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. Just for the record, LWN's tracking is a bit more sophisticated than that. An awful lot of kernel developers post code from something other than a corporate email address, but we (try to) get it attributed correctly anyway. Not everybody thinks that the LWN statistics are a good thing, BTW. It is easy to measure things like changesets contributed or lines of code changed, It is far harder to measure actually useful work contributed. So we publish the things we *can* measure, at the risk of slighting the developer who slaved for a week over a five-line scheduler fix and encouraging companies to spew out a lot of relatively useless code-churn patches. But it's the best we can do and is still useful, so we persevere. jon Jonathan Corbet / LWN.net / cor...@lwn.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318080736.5696d...@lwn.net
Re: not being elected?
On 18/03/13 at 14:00 +0100, Ana Guerrero wrote: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 01:30:28PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: At least for debian-devel-french@, I don't think that we advertise the possibility to ask questions there. Just start a discussion there, get a new wording and then ask listmasters to change it. Probably this update could benefit of having the list description in both English and French. Yes, that was the idea. I'm not sure we need another list for that, given the low traffic (and spanish looks similar) I meant new lists for other languages that don't have a list yet (when a group of people speaking that language ask for it, of course). Mentoring works better when the mentor and the mentee are speaking in their natives languages, but ultimately to participate in Debian people need a minimal knowledge of written English... Sure, but making one's first steps in Debian is also very difficult. So I think that every possible way to simplify that first step is a good thing. So, if I'm not elected, I will probably: - see if it's considered OK to direct french contributors to debian-devel-french@ (I guess it will be OK) - see if a few french contributors besides me would agree to answer questions on IRC, and create #-mentors-fr if that's the case (#-devel-fr is quite active, so it's better not to add more noise there) - advertise this (blog, packaging tutorial, etc.) - provide feedback to the project after a few weeks/months, so that others can possibly make the same move This sounds like a rather simple step to make, hence my low-hanging fruit qualifier. I see, it is not that easy. To sustain a mentoring community for a long time, it needs plenty of people around it. In Debian we currently struggle to keep our global community in English going running because the lack of mentors. That's why I exceptical about communities per language taking off. I cannot guarantee that it will be successful. But we will never know if we don't try. Also, it's typically something that would be quite harmless to the project if it failed (if we reuse an existing mailing list, it's just about creating an IRC channel). Some people pushed for a similar experiment to the one you describe some years ago in Spanish, they even added a round of talks: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianSpanish/Devel/IRCTalks But despite being a small group of people working a lot on it and the Spanish speaking community being big, it didn't last long. [ after seeking clarification: it didn't last long because there were not enough people willing to do the mentoring ] So it means that there's actually some demand for this, which is great. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318145420.ga31...@xanadu.blop.info
Re: not being elected?
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 03:54:20PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: But despite being a small group of people working a lot on it and the Spanish speaking community being big, it didn't last long. [ after seeking clarification: it didn't last long because there were not enough people willing to do the mentoring ] So it means that there's actually some demand for this, which is great. Of course there are a lot of demand in mentoring. I do not think nobody has ever doubt that in previous emails! Some people have even tried doing different thinks in the past, like this: https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2010/10/msg5.html But mentoring and integrating new contributors requires a lot of time and efforts that you don't know if they will pay off or not. So yeah, go and try and I'm waiting you reach the same conclusions than me in some months :-) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318151157.ga28...@pryan.ekaia.org
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
On 2013-03-18 12:45, Charles Plessy wrote: Perhaps the candidates can comment on the fact that this already been raised last year http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/07/msg00716.html I didn't see this subthread at the time. From reading it, I can't understand why no one who took the time to read it and reply took the time to fix the wiki. I've fixed it now (and tried to improve the page a little), , and if they have something to propose in order to make discussions more productive on debian-devel. In this particular case I don't think the discussion belonged on -devel at all, it should have been on -project. More generally: I will make some comments about discussion productivity when I reply to zack's post about choosing an init system later. -- Moray -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/b4d52aff392393f4d3c28779dd64f...@www.morayallan.com
Re: not being elected?
Didier 'OdyX' Raboud o...@debian.org writes: As far as I'm concerned, I'm not voting between three distinct sets of proposals: as it's been apparent in other threads, there's quite a lot of overlap between the candidate platforms and their specific proposals. We are electing someone to stand in the DPL shoes: debating eachothers' proposals, views and stuff is obviously useful to decide, but at the end of the day, we can't all vote the three candidates equally. We're voting for concurrent persons, not concurrent proposals. So unless you end up being ranked below NOTA (which I certainly don't see happening for any of the three very good candidates), I wouldn't take not being ranked first as a dismissal of your ideas or proposals; and I'm surprised that you see it as such. +1 In an ideal world, I'd like to see the ideas of all three candidates put into practice. By and large they don't contradict each other, and they all sound pretty solid to me. We can only elect one person, and that's for a whole mix of qualifications that aren't just about their goals for the project. Please don't take selection of one person as lack of approval for the ideas of another. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87txo8a7r7@windlord.stanford.edu
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
Moray Allan mo...@sermisy.org On 2013-03-18 12:45, Charles Plessy wrote: Perhaps the candidates can comment on the fact that this already been raised last year http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/07/msg00716.html I didn't see this subthread at the time. From reading it, I can't understand why no one who took the time to read it and reply took the time to fix the wiki. Well, most email clients are pretty user-friendly but the wiki is not very user-friendly. It claims every page is an Immutable Page and I though you can find me forgetting more than once that it changes if one logs in - which isn't mentioned on http://wiki.debian.org/HelpContents And I've not fixed that second page because apparently the login details I have stored locally were not correct because apparently all user passwords were reset and when I just tried to recover it, I got told Your token is invalid! in nice friendly(!) red text with a big red X. I'm now asking debian-www and will keep moving it up, but surely most people just go and do something more fun instead when they get given a big red X? So, I feel if someone doesn't understand why people point out the wiki's bloopers without fixing them, they're not empathising with users. Even for stale old webwarts like me, the debian wiki feels pretty strange and a bit hostile. I wish I had the spare time to improve it, but there's so much else to do first (after all, why run for DPL rather than improve the wiki more? ;-) ) Hope that informs, -- 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/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e1uhfcf-00021s...@bletchley.towers.org.uk
Re: Your opinion on Debian Maintainer status
Wouter Verhelst wrote: That's a good thing for everyone; and it also explains why occasionally the NM frontdesk will waive this policy for people who are 'obviously' ready to become a Debian Developer *now* rather than in six months: if the goal is to weed out the people who are not yet ready, then if someone *is* ready, it doesn't make sense anymore, so it's waived. Oh, six months as a package maintainer certainly sounds like a good requirement in that spirit to me. And if the applicant is interested, becoming a DM can be a way to make those six months less painful. Given two otherwise equal candidates, one who had been a DM and another who had been a maintainer with sponsor for six months, I don't think that information makes the DM seem more qualified. Luckily the NM frontdesk tends to be reasonable about this in practice, as you've mentioned. Thanks for explaining, Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130318191148.GA4548@elie.Belkin
Re: [to all candidates] Accessible software in Debian
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:37 AM, Mario Lang ml...@delysid.org wrote: Hi. To make a rather complicated and long story short: Accessibility of graphical user interfaces in Debian has taken a slight step backward with the GNOME 3 rewrite. Squeeze was more stable regarding this. [snip] Slightly off-topic, but since you bring up GNOME 3 as a specific example of how Debian has regressed in terms of accessibility...how exactly has GNOME regressed? It still has AFAIK the same set of accessibility features [1] as it did previously with GNOME 2, and it is easily accessibly via an icon on the top bar of the shell (you can't even get rid of it without an extension), and the gnome-accessibility package is pulled in by a number of other gnome meta-packages in Debian. Admittedly I myself don't use any of those features, but I'm curious to know why you consider GNOME 3 not as accessible as GNOME 2 was (i.e. are they any specific features dropped in GNOME 3)? If this is about the fact that upstream has dropped support for non 3d-accelerated machines for use with GNOME, well, I don't think there's much that can be done about it. We can't force upstream to care about old hardware, after all. I disagree with the notion that being accessible means supporting old hardware. FWIW, Linux kernel 3.8 dropped support for i386, so the next stable Debian release is going to be even less accessible for users of ancient hardware. Regards, Vincent [1] https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CACZd_tBZu4C0iQ3a0QwN=OyY0V=seUmkXkUxR=OEt31=9d9...@mail.gmail.com
Re: [all candidates] lack of women in Debian
On 2013-03-18 13:23, Mònica Ramírez Arceda wrote: I would like to know your opinion about this graph (thanks Francesca!): http://blog.zouish.org/posts/dw/ It's disappointing for me that the numbers compared to men are still so low, and things are even worse if you look only at active project members. Note that I'm not asking for a way to recruit women (there are already efforts on that). I would like to know if you think that this lack of women affects (or not) the Debian project and how. I think it is negative for Debian yes, but personally as a feminist I also see exclusion of women, whether or not it's intentional, as bad in itself. To be fair to Debian, I think that much of the imbalance is from cultural attitudes about women and computers, and that any attempt to solve it properly would need to start in childhood education. As a mostly volunteer project, another part of the imbalance is from a cultural background that typically gives men time for hobbies but keeps women busy with housework and childcare. But I do think that part of the imbalance is also from how we behave and structure ourselves as a project. For example, if we depend on existing personal contact to recruit new contributors, without actively reaching out beyond our immediate circles, it is unsurprising that we tend to recruit people with similar backgrounds and gender to our existing ones, and similar ideas. For how it affects Debian, research appears to show that gender diversity makes organisations more successful. For example, research has looked at the composition of corporate boards, where women's representation is also very low, and found that companies whose boards include women do better, e.g. see this review that includes summaries of some more academic work https://infocus.credit-suisse.com/data/_product_documents/_shop/360145/csri_gender_diversity_and_corporate_performance.pdf (which includes discussion of whether this is causation or merely correlation, etc.) The list of possible reasons for correlation in Rationalizing the link between performance and gender diversity there could all be translated across to Debian as reasons to want gender diversity -- see my appendix below for a summary. I also would like to know if you have any proposal related to this topic that you would like to do if elected. I would love for more people to be active in Debian Women projects, and for Debian to be a positive example in this regard not only by positive intentions but by showing that a higher degree of representation of women is possible. If I am elected, I would like us try some more active methods to reach out to new contributors. It will be important for us to think about how we should structure this to try to reach groups who are not yet well represented in Debian, including women, and I would welcome your participation to look at how we can do that best. Moray Appendix. Here's a summary of their list of suggested reasons: 1. A signal of a better [organisation] it may signal greater focus on corporate governance and second because it is a sign that the company is already doing well 2. Greater effort across the board the majority group improves its own performance in response to minority involvement 3. A better mix of leadership skills For instance, women were found to be particularly good at defining responsibilities clearly as well as being strong on mentoring and coaching employees 4. Access to a wider pool of talent by 2010, the proportion of female graduates across the world came to a median average of 54% 5. A better reflection of the consumer decision-maker According to a book published by Boston Consulting Group in 2010, 73% of US household spending decisions are controlled by women. 6. Improved corporate governance more gender-diverse boards were more likely to focus on clear communication to employees, to prioritize customer satisfaction, and to consider diversity and corporate social responsibility 7. Risk aversion having at least one female director on the board appears to reduce a company’s likelihood of becoming bankrupt by 20%, and that having two or three female directors lowered the likelihood of bankruptcy even further -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/53f4d46a8862422e5b2a1ee48e5f2...@www.morayallan.com
Re: All candidates: Development and technical issues and challenges
On 2013-03-11, Moray Allan wrote: When to release: I would also note that we should continue to be flexible about -ignore tags where appropriate. In some cases leaving a package in the release with RC bugs is more useful to users than removing it altogether. Indeed, we always release with quite a large number of non-RC bugs, some of which make the packages in question unusable for large groups of users. At any point in the freeze we should ask not only about the state of the frozen release, but how it compares to the previous release. Maybe it doesn't even need to be a single date -- we could badge the new release as ready for the desktop before we close it off as final and suggest that people upgrade their servers. I think this is a great point, and I would like to push it a little further. When to release seems really important. As things stand right now, we have about 70 packages (assuming one package per RC bug) blocking the release of 38000 packages[1]. That is 0.2% of the archive. It's really small. About 0.1% if we look at the ones that don't have a fix yet (49). Shouldn't we be releasing 'as is' at some point and just accept that some bugs will be fixed in a stable release later? Shouldn't we release early, release often? I agree that releasing with, say, 1000 RC bugs is crazy, but maybe waiting forever for the last 100 packages is also nonsense. Maybe we could discriminate on the package's priorities. For example, about a third of the 49 packages *really* blocking the release (not waiting for a transition) are from extra[2]. Only 5 bugs affect required, important or standard packages. We could focus on those and tell the extra packages to hurry up or be shipped with packages that will need to be fixed in a point release... or simply removed. Maybe that's something that's already done by the release team too, in which case I am happy. :) A. [1] 38569, to be more exact, kudos to UDD: SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT(package)) FROM packages WHERE release = 'wheezy'; [2] I had trouble with my SQL there, I could only list the packages: SELECT distinct(packages.package), packages.priority, bugs.id FROM bugs LEFT JOIN packages ON bugs.package = packages.package WHERE severity = 'serious' AND NOT (id IN (SELECT id FROM bugs_merged_with WHERE id merged_with)) AND id IN (SELECT id FROM bugs_rt_affects_testing) AND id NOT IN (SELECT id FROM bugs_rt_affects_unstable) ORDER BY packages.priority; -- The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.- Friedrich Nietzsche pgplht1NeIOo3.pgp Description: PGP signature
[all candidates] beyond tech: how do you deal with humans?
On 2013-03-18, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: I'd like to know how the candidates would approach the problem of *helping Debian* making a decision on this matter; decision which we will likely have to make at the beginning of Jessie's release cycle. Personally, I'm not particularly interested in candidates' opinion on the decision per se, but rather on how they think Debian should take similar decisions and which role, if any, the DPL should play in the decision process. Still, I picked a concrete example as it might help focusing our thoughts on how we would like similar important technical decisions to work in the future. Following up on this with a more general question, to all candidates. You all have an impressive technical curriculum. Your deeds in Debian speak for themselves. However, the role of a project leader is unusually non-technical. In fact, you will have to abandon significant technical tasks to tend to more administrative or leadership tasks the DPL role requires. Why are you good candidates for that role? What social skills do you bring to the community in terms of mediation and leadership? How would you have dealt with the difficult decisions the previous DPL had to make regarding various conflicts or problems that occurred during his mandate(s)? Would you have intervened? How? Could you give an example of such a situation where you have successfully mediated a (potential) conflict? Which tools did you use to deal with the situation? Thanks, and best of luck to all candidates! -- À force de ne jamais réfléchir, on a un bonheur stupide - Jean Cocteau pgp1qmxkmGSIb.pgp Description: PGP signature
