Review of my Debian related goals for 2011

Last year I shared my “Debian related goals for 2011”. I tend to put more goals than what I can reasonably complete alone and this year was no exception. Let’s have a look.

1. Translate my Debian book into English: PARTLY DONE
   It took more time than expected to prepare and to run the fundraising campaign but it has been successful and the translation is happening right now.
2. Finish multiarch support in dpkg: DONE BUT NOT ENTIRELY MERGED YET
   Yes, multiarch support was already in the pipe last year in January. I completed the development between January and April (it was sponsored by Linaro) and since then it has mostly been waiting on Guillem to review it, tweak it, and integrate it.
3. Make deb files use XZ compression by default: TRIED BUT ABANDONED
   After discussing the issue with Colin Watson and Joey Hess during debconf, I came to the conclusion that it was not really desirable at this point. The objections were that debian-installer was not ready for it and that it adds a new dependency on xz for debootstrap to work on non-Debian systems. I believe that the debian-installer side is no longer a problem since “unxz” is built in busybox-udeb (since version 1:1.19.3-2). For the other side, there’s not much to do except ensuring that xz is portable to all the other OS we care about. DAK has been updated too (see #556407).
4. Be more reactive to review/merge dpkg patches: PARTLY DONE
   I don’t think we had any patch that received zero input. We still have a backlog of patches, and the situation is far from ideal but the situation improved.
5. Implement the rolling distribution proposed as part of the CUT project and try to improve the release process: NOT DONE

   We had a BoF during debconf, we discussed it at length on debian-devel, but in the end we did nothing out of it. Except Josselin Mouette who wrote a proof of concept for his idea.

   For me testing is already what people are expecting from a rolling distribution. It’s just a matter of documenting how to effectively use testing, and of some marketing by defining rolling as alias to testing.

6. Work more regularly on the developers-reference: PARTLY DONE
   I did contribute some new material to the document but not as much as I could have hoped. On the other hand, I have been rather reactive to ensure that sane patches got merged. We need more people writing new parts and updating the existing content.
7. Write a 10-lesson course called “Smart Package Management”: NOT DONE
8. Create an information product (most likely an ebook or an online training) and sell it on my blog: NOT DONE
   This was supposed to happen after the translation of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook. Since the translation is not yet over, I did not start to work on this yet.
9. By the end of the year, have at least 1/3 of my time funded by donations and/or earnings of my information products: NOT REACHED
   My target was rather aggressive with 700 € each month, and given that I did not manage to complete any information product, I’m already very pleased to have achieved a mean amount of 204 € of donations each month (min: 91 €, max: 364 €). It’s more than two times better than in 2010. Thank you! Note that those figures do not take into account the revenues of the fundraising of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook since they will be used for its translation.

That makes quite a lot of red (for things that I did not achieve)… on the other hand I completed projects that I did not foresee and did not plan. For instance improving dpkg-buildflags and then merging Kees Cook work on hardened build flags was an important step for Debian. This was waiting for so long already…