1. Finish the translation of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook

   The target is to have the book available in April. It would be nice to complete the liberation fund until then so that the book is immediately made available under a DFSG-free license.

2. Update the Debian Administrator’s Handbook for Wheezy

Translating the book in English is only the start of the journey. The real challenge is to keep the book up-to-date with each subsequent release of Debian. And Wheezy should hopefully be released in 2012 since the freeze is in June.

3. Design and implement the Debian Package Maintenance Hub

   It’s an ambitious project that aims to merge and replace the PTS, the DDPO and their respective mail variants. It should also standardize the flow of information directed towards package maintainers. I’m going to use the DEP process to drive this project.

   This could easily take most of the year, but hopefully I’ll motivate other people to chime in and help.

4. Implement dpkg --check-db and dpkg --repair-db

   While dpkg is fairly reliable, it’s not exempt of bugs and more annoyingly, harddrives/filesystems are not 100% reliable either, thus it happens that some internal database files get corrupted. Given that most files are text based, advanced users can manually fix them but many less skilled users are just left with a broken system that they tend to reinstall.

   To avoid this, we could provide a command that would try to automatically bring back the internal database to a sane state by looking for a working backup to restore (while at the same time marking some packages as requiring re-installation since we have some indications that they were present).

5. Implement storage of dpkg’s internal files in Git

   This would be an extension of the former idea. Installing a package dpkg-db-history (any idea for a better name?) would setup dpkg hooks that would record every database change in a git repository. This repository could then be used to restore the last working version of the database.

Besides those concrete projects, I want to do better than last year on the topic of funding my Debian work. I will thus reiterate some objectives:

1. Write useful articles for Debian users and Debian contributors.

   They should complete the pages Mastering Debian, Contributing to Debian 101, Debian Packaging Tutorials, and help me increase the audience of this blog.

2. Write at least one Debian-related ebook (different from the Debian Admin Handbook) and sell it.

   It could be an ebook targetting testing users since I believe that many more users could benefit from it if they had some better knowledge of the limitations and of the way to mitigate the problems that arise from time to time.

   Or maybe it could be an ebook for people who want to start contributing to Debian, it could even be bundled with a few hours of mentoring.

3. By the end of the year, have at least 1/3 of my time funded by donations and/or earnings of my information products.

   This means doing 3,5 times better than in 2011. It should be doable given that the sales of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook will contribute to this goal (once the translation is over).

That makes up lots of challenges for this year. Feel free subscribe to my newsletter to stay up-to-date with my progress and to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news. It’s also a good way to help me reach those goals since you will be informed of all my new projects.

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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…

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I’m not using it much yet but I like it in general. It’s interesting to see how Google transformed Joindiaspora‘s aspects into “circles”.

When Google will make an API available, I’ll probably setup it like my public Facebook page so that new blog posts are automatically announced. In the mean time, it’s going to be very quiet on my Google+ profile.

That said, I used it twice this week: the first time because I’m looking for a French developer with sysadmin skills, and the second time because I have a server to give away (Pentium IV 3Ghz, 4 Gb RAM, 200 Gb of diskspace in RAID1 Hard). If you take the server for a free software project, it can be hosted for free where it currently is (courtesy of Julien Danjou).

So if you’re also a Google+ user, feel free to add me to one of your circles.

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If you’re in Paris during those days, make sure to come by. I’ll be pleased to meet you, and we’ll be a bunch of Debian contributors ready to answer your questions. And if you feel like it, feel free to stop for a few hours and give us some help at the booth. It tends to be crowded and we’re never enough to answer the questions.

As usual, I’ll come with a copy of the book Cahier de l’Admin Debian (the one that I want to translate into English) to show, and I’ll be glad to dedicate the book to whoever brings his copy with him/her.

While speaking of conferences, this summer I’m going to Banja Luka for DebConf 2011. I’ve bought my plane tickets and I’ll be there the whole week (24-31 july).

Joining a DebConf is a completely different experience. DebConf is made by Debian people for Debian people. It’s an opportunity to meet many of the people that you mainly know over IRC/email.

And you don’t need to be a hardcore Debian contributor to join. In fact, it’s a great experience for anyone who just started contributing to Debian. Read this email of Asheesh Laroia as a proof. Note that the sponsored registration period has been extended up to the 17th of May. Register now!

I’m looking forward to DebConf11. On request of Stefano, I registered a Debian Rolling Bof. It will be a good occasion to see how far we are and to discuss future plans.

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That said it’s not that bad (except for the time I lost to have similar conversations in both places) because the debian-devel discussions included members of the release team and it looks like they are not fundamentally opposed to the idea.

Despite this, the introduction of a “frozen” suite branched off from “testing/rolling” is not really consensual (yet?). But the idea of officially supporting testing on a best-effort basis appears to have almost no opposition.

While some will undoubtedly believe that this is a useless exercise, I believe it would help if the project stated this in a somewhat official manner. My answer to the question in the title is thus:

I am thus considering to submit a general resolution to that effect. My current draft is below.

Title: Debian endorses usage of testing by end-users, and renames it to rolling

The Debian project recognizes that the Debian testing distribution—initially created to make it easier to prepare and test the next stable release—has become a useful product of its own. It satisfies the needs of users who are looking for the latest stable versions of software and who can cope (or even appreciate) a system that’s constantly evolving.

The Debian project decides to endorse this usage and will strive to provide a good experience to users of “testing”. To better communicate this policy change to our users, “testing” will be renamed “rolling”.

While we believe that this is a good move, we would like to remind our users that Debian is a volunteer project and that our resources are not infinite. Package maintainers are contributing to Debian on a best-effort basis. This means that they might not be able to properly support their package(s) in all distributions. In that case, the project recommends that maintainers apply the following priorities:

1. Support in stable (security updates, release critical bugs)
2. Preparation of the next stable release
3. Support in rolling

Note that this general resolution could have amendments with s/rolling/current/ and that would solve the bikeshedding over the name that started several times already.

I deliberately separated “Preparation of the next stable release” and “Support in rolling” so that priorities are clear even if we decide to not freeze “rolling” and to introduce a “frozen” distribution to finalize the next stable release.

I also did not go into too much details on the implications that it might have, it’s best to leave that up to each contributor/team/etc.

I hesitated to add a paragraph stating that we want to try to gradually improve the usability of testing but in the end I think it would be somewhat redundant. We’re always trying to do our best when we decide to take on something.

All comments welcome (even if you just agree and would be willing to second such a GR).

Update: I will tweak the draft included in this article when I get good suggestions. Thanks to Lucas Nussbaum for the first one.

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Possible consequences

It can divert developers from working on the release

No freeze means developers are free to continue their work as usual in unstable. Will it be more difficult to release because some people will spend their time working on a new upstream version instead of fixing RC bugs in the version that is frozen? Would we lose the work of the people who do lots of NMU to help with the release?

It makes it more difficult to cherry-pick updates from unstable

No freeze also means that unstable is going to diverge sooner from testing and it will be more difficult to cherry-pick updates from unstable into testing. And the release team likes to cherry-pick updates that have been tested in unstable because updates that comes through testing-proposed-updates have often not been tested and need thus a more careful review.

My responses to the objections

Those are the two major objections that we’ll have to respond to. Let’s try to analyze them a bit more.

It’s not testing vs rolling

On the first objection I would like to respond that we must not put “testing” and “rolling/unstable” in opposition. The fact that a contributor can’t do its work as usual in unstable does not mean that he will instead choose to work on fixing RC bugs in testing. Probably that some do, but in my experience we simply spend our time differently, either working more on non-Debian stuff or doing mostly hidden work that is then released in big batches at the start of the next cycle (which tends to create problems of its own).

I would also like to argue that by giving more exposure to rolling and encouraging developers to properly support their packages in rolling, it probably means that the overall state of rolling should become gradually better compared to what we’re currently used to with testing.

The objection that rolling would divert resources from getting testing in a releasable shape is difficult to prove and/or disprove. The best way to have some objective data would be to setup a questionnaire and to ask all maintainers. Any volunteer for that?

Unstable as a test-bed for RC bugfixes?

It’s true that unstable will quickly diverge from testing and that it will be more difficult to cherry-pick updates from unstable into testing. This cannot be refuted, it’s a downside given the current workflow of the release team.

But I wonder if the importance of this workflow is not overdone. The reason why they like to cherry-pick from unstable is because it gives them some confidence that the update has not caused other regressions and ensures that testing is improving.

But if they’re considering to cherry-pick an update, it’s because the current package in testing is plagued by an RC bug. Supposing that the updated package has introduced a regression, is it really better to keep the current RC bug compared to trading it for a new regression? It sure depends on the precise bugs involved so that’s why they prefer to know up-front about the regression instead of making a blind bet.

Given this, I think we should use testing-proposed-updates (tpu) as a test-bed for RC bug fixes. We should ask beta-testers to activate this repository and to file RC bugs for any regression. And instead of requiring a full review by a release manager for all uploads to testing-proposed-updates, uploads should be auto-accepted provided that they do not change the upstream version and that they do not add/remove binary packages. Other uploads would still need manual approval by the release managers.

On top of this, we can also add an infrastructure to encourage peer-reviews of t-p-u uploads so that reviews become more opportunistic instead of systematic. Positive reviews would help reduce the aging required in t-p-u before being accepted into testing.

This changes the balance by giving a bit more freedom to maintainers but still keeps the safety net that release managers need to have. It should also reduce the overall amount of work that the release team has to do.

Comments welcome

Do you see other important objections beside the two that I mentioned?

Do you have other ideas to overcome those objections?

What do you think of my responses? Does your experience infirm or confirm my point of view?

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Let’s start by defining my own objectives with Debian CUT. I won’t speak of the part of Debian CUT that plans to make regular snapshots of testing with installable media because that’s not where I will invest my time. I do hope other people will do it though. Instead I will concentrate on changes that would improve Debian testing for end-users. I consider that testing (in its current form) is largely usable already but there are two main obstacles to overcome.

Testing without freezes = rolling

The first one is that testing is no longer testing during freezes. The regular flow of new upstream versions—that makes testing so interesting for many users—is stalled because we’re using testing to finalize the next stable version. That’s why I’d like to introduce a new suite called “rolling” that would work like the current testing except that it never freezes. Testing would no longer be a permanent suite, it would only exist during the freeze and it would be branched off from rolling.

Rolling should be a supported distribution

The second obstacle is not really technical. We must advertise rolling as a distribution that ordinary people can use but we should make it clear that it’s never going to have the same level of polish that a stable release can have. And to back up this assertion, we must empower Debian developers to be able to provide good support of their software in rolling, this probably means using “rolling-proposed-updates” more often to push fixes and security updates when the natural flow of updates is blocked by transitions or other problems. Some maintainers won’t have the time required to provide the same level of support as they currently do for a stable release and that’s okay, it’s not worse than the current testing. The goal is to treat it on a best-effort basis and to try to gradually improve the situation.

My goal for wheezy

This is the the minimal implementation of CUT that I would like to target in the wheezy timeframe. Having testing as a temporary branch of rolling is not a strict requirement, although I’d argue that it’s important to not waste resources towards maintaining two separate yet very similar distributions.

Should Debian embrace those goals?

Ignoring all possible problems that will surface while trying to implement those goals, can we agree that Debian should embrace those goals because it means providing a better service to a class of users that is not satisfied by the current stable release?

I will come back to the expected problems in a subsequent post and we will have the opportunity to discuss them. Here I just want to see whether we can have broad buy-in on the principles behind Debian rolling and CUT.

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I asked Josselin Mouette (of the pkg-gnome team) when he expected it to be available and he could not really answer because there’s lots of work left. Instead Roland Mas gently answered me “Sooner if you help”.

First steps as a GNOME packager

This is pretty common in free software and for once I followed the advice, I spent most of sunday helping out with GNOME 3 packaging. I have no prior experience with GNOME packaging but I’m fairly proficient in Debian packaging in general so when I showed up on #debian-gnome (irc.debian.org) on sunday morning, Josselin quickly added me to the team on alioth.debian.org.

Still being a pkg-gnome rookie, I started by reading the documentation on pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org. This is enough to know where to find the code in the SVN repository, and how to do releases, but it doesn’t contain much information about what you need to know to be a good GNOME packager. It would have been great to have some words on introspection and what it changes in terms of packaging for instance.

Josselin suggested me to start with one of the modules that was not yet updated at all (most packages have a pre-release version—usually 2.91—in experimental, but some are still at 2.30).

Packages updated and problems encountered

(You can skip this section if you’re not into GNOME packaging)

So I picked up totem. I quickly updated totem-pl-parser as a required build-dependency and made my first mistake by uploading it to unstable (it turns out it’s not a problem for this specific package). Totem itself was more complicated even if some preliminary work was already in the subversion repository. It introduces a new library which required a new package and I spent a long time debugging why the package would not build in a minimalistic build environment.

Indeed while the package was building fine in my experimental chroot, I took care to build my test packages like the auto-builders would do with sbuild (in sid environment + the required build-dependencies from experimental) and there it was failing. In fact it turns out pkg-config was failing because libquvi-dev was missing (and it was required by totem-pl-parser.pc) but this did not leave any error message in config.log.

Next, I decided to take care of gnome-screensaver as it was not working for me (I could not unlock the screen once it was activated). When built in my experimental chroot, it was fine but when built in the minimalistic environment it was failing. Turns out /usr/lib/gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver-dialog was loading both libgtk2 and libgtk3 at the same time and was crashing. It’s not linked against libgtk2 but it was linked against the unstable version of libgnomekbdui which is still using libgtk2. Bumping the build-dependency on libgnomekbd-dev fixed the problem.

In the evening, I took care of mutter and gnome-shell, and did some preliminary work on gnome-menus.

Help is still welcome

There’s still lots of work to do, you’re welcome to do like me and join to help. Come on #debian-gnome on irc.debian.org, read the documentation and try to update a package (and ask questions when you don’t know).

Installation of GNOME 3 from Debian experimental

You can also try GNOME 3 on your Debian machine, but at this point I would advise to do it only if you’re ready to invest some time in understanding the remaining problems. It’s difficult to cherry-pick just the required packages from experimental, I tried it and at the start I ended up with a bad user experience (important packages like gnome-themes-standard or gnome-icon-theme not installed/updated and similar issues).

To help you out with this, here’s a file that you can put in /etc/apt/preferences.d/gnome to allow APT to upgrade the most important GNOME 3 packages from experimental:

Package: gnome gnome-desktop-environment gnome-core alacarte brasero cheese ekiga empathy gdm3 gcalctool gconf-editor gnome-backgrounds gnome-bluetooth gnome-media gnome-netstatus-applet gnome-nettool gnome-system-monitor gnome-system-tools gnome-user-share baobab gnome-dictionary gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-system-log gstreamer0.10-tools gucharmap gvfs-bin hamster-applet nautilus-sendto seahorse seahorse-plugins sound-juicer totem-plugins remmina vino gksu xdg-user-dirs-gtk gnome-shell gnome-panel dmz-cursor-theme eog epiphany-browser evince evolution evolution-data-server file-roller gedit gnome-about gnome-applets gnome-control-center gnome-disk-utility gnome-icon-theme gnome-keyring gnome-menus gnome-panel gnome-power-manager gnome-screensaver gnome-session gnome-settings-daemon gnome-terminal gnome-themes gnome-user-guide gvfs gvfs-backends metacity mutter nautilus policykit-1-gnome totem yelp gnome-themes-extras gnome-games libpam-gnome-keyring rhythmbox-plugins banshee rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder system-config-printer totem-mozilla epiphany-extensions gedit-plugins evolution-plugins evolution-exchange evolution-webcal gnome-codec-install transmission-gtk avahi-daemon tomboy network-manager-gnome gnome-games-extra-data gnome-office update-notifier shotwell liferea epiphany-browser-data empathy-common nautilus-sendto-empathy brasero-common
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 500

Package: *
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 150

The list might not be exhaustive and sometimes you will have to give supplementary hints to apt for the upgrade to succeed, but it’s better than nothing.

I hope you find this useful. I’m enjoying my shiny new GNOME 3 desktop and it’s off for a good start. My main complaint is that hamster-applet (time tracker) has not yet been integrated in the shell.

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1. Translate my Debian book into English.
   I will run a fundraising campaign with Ulule.com and if enough people are interested, I will spend a few months with Roland Mas to translate the book. Hopefully this project can be completed until the summer.
2. Finish multiarch support in dpkg.
   I’m working on this with Guillem Jover right now, thanks to Linaro who is sponsoring my work.
3. Make deb files use XZ compression by default.
   It’s a simple change in dpkg-deb and it would literally save gigabytes of space on mirrors. It’s particularly important so that single CD/DVD can have a more complete set of software. #556407 (on DAK) needs to be fixed first though and a project-wide discussion is in order. Some archs might want to have a different default.
4. Be more reactive to review/merge dpkg patches.
   While we welcome help, we have a backlog of patches sitting in the BTS and it happened several times that we failed to review/merge submitted branches in a decent time. It’s very frustrating for the contributor. I already tried to improve the situation by creating the Review/Merge Queue but nobody stepped up to help review and update the patches.
   As I am getting more familiar with the C part of dpkg, I hope to be able to jump in when Guillem doesn’t have the time or the interest.
5. Implement the rolling distribution proposed as part of the CUT project and try to improve the release process.
   I really want the new rolling distribution but it will inevitably have an impact on the release process. It can’t be done as a standalone project. I would also like to see progress in the way we deal with transitions (see discussion here).
6. Work more regularly on the developers-reference.
   Hopefully I will be able to combine this with my blog writing activities, i.e. write blog articles on the topics that the developers-reference shall cover and then adapt my articles with some docbook markup.

To the above list, I shall add a few supplementary goals related to funding my Debian work:

1. Write a 10-lesson course called “Smart Package Management”.
   It will delivered by email to my newsletter subscribers.
2. Create an information product (most likely an ebook or an online training) and sell it on my blog.
   The precise topic has not yet been defined although I have a few ideas. Is there something that you would like me to teach you? Leave your suggestions in a comment.
3. By the end of the year, have at least 1/3 of my time funded by donations and/or earnings of my information products.
   More concretely it means 700 € each month or a 9-fold increase compared to the current income level (around 80 €/month mostly via Flattr).

That makes up lots of challenges for this year. You can help me reach those goals, join my Debian Supporters Guild and you’ll be informed every time that I start something new or when you can help in specific ways.

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Translate my Debian book into English and get it published: NOT DONE

Or rather not yet done. It’s still an important project of mine and I will do it this year. When I wrote this last year, I expected to find a publisher that would take care of everything but we failed to find a suitable one so we’re going to do it ourselves.

Cleanup the dpkg perl API and create libdpkg-perl: DONE

libdpkg-perl has been introduced with dpkg 1.15.6.

Create dpkg-buildflags: DONE

dpkg-buildflags has been introduced with dpkg 1.15.7. It’s not widely used yet and it won’t really be until debhelper 7 supports it (see #544844). It would be nice to see progress on this front this year.

Ensure the new source formats continue to gain acceptance: DONE

The adoption rate has been steady, it clearly slowed down since the freeze though. I have implemented quite a few features to satisfy the needs of users, like the possibility to unapply the patches after the build, or the possibility to fail in case of unwanted upstream changes.

Design a generic vcs-buildpackage infrastructure to be integrated in dpkg-dev: NOT DONE

I believe it’s something important on the long term but it never made it to my short-term TODO list and it’s unlikely to change any time soon.

Continue fixing dpkg bugs faster than they are reported: PARTLY DONE

We have dealt with many bugs over the year, but we still have 20 more bugs than at the start of last year (370 vs 350). We’re not doing bad compared to many other Debian teams but we can still benefit from some help. Start here if you’re interested.

Enhance our infrastructure to ease interaction between contributors and to have a better view of how each package is maintained: NOT DONE

I am convinced that we need something to have a clearer idea of the commitments made by each contributor. I don’t put the same amount of care in maintaining smarty-gettext that I do on dpkg. If we had a database of the stuff that we know we don’t do well enough, it’s easier to point new contributors towards those.

Anyway, this project is still unlikely to come to the top of my priorities any time soon.

Work on the developers-reference: NOT DONE

We have switched the Maintainer field to debian-policy@lists.debian.org to have more review of the changes suggested through the bug tracking system but that has not changed much on the global situation.

I still hope to become more active on it sometimes this year. Maybe by trying to make it more fun and creating the text for some of the wishlist bugs as blog articles first.

Rewrite in C the last Perl scripts provided by the dpkg binary package: DONE

Dpkg 1.15.8 was the first version working without Perl, I announced it in July.

Integrate the 3-way merge tool for Debian changelogs in dpkg-dev: DONE

dpkg-mergechangelogs is part of dpkg-dev since 1.15.7.

I enjoy it regularly. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well for cherry-picks. Would be nice to see this fixed, anyone up to the task?

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