Since march the DSA team uses a request tracker to handle all the requests that they get.

Therefore you should no more use the debian-admin@debian.org alias (DSA members only). The debian-admin@lists.debian.org mailing list (DSA + local admins) is also scheduled for removal. Instead you should mail admin@rt.debian.org making sure to put “Debian RT” somewhere in the subject (crude but working spam prevention). By default, your ticket ends up in a private incoming queue. Up to now only DSA members had access to those queues. They moved most tickets in the public queue but it happened several times that this simple administrative burden took several weeks.

Since a few days, Matt Taggart and myself have been granted RT accounts with required privileges to handle tickets and move them between the various queues. So from now on, all tickets will be quickly moved in the public queue (when they don’t contain sensitive information of course). We’ll be able to do some triage and ping DSA members for urgent requests.

Matt and me have been trying to help out the DSA team for quite some time now, and while we’re not DSA with root rights, we’re in regular contact with the members (except Martin “Joey” Schulze who refuses to join the DSA IRC channel, who doesn’t use the request tracker and who doesn’t read the DSA mails either) and with several local admins. So if you have some troubles interacting with the DSA team, you can try to get in touch with us and we’ll see if we can help you.

In too many cases people contact directly individual DSA members (Joey in particular). Please refrain from doing so, other volunteers (who might help you) won’t notice your request. Furthermore systematic request tracker usage helps us identifying what is well handled and what’s not. And it’s not more complicated than a simple email for you.

Update: currently local admins are not subscribed to the request tracker. The RT setup will need some further adjustment for that, so the debian-admin@lists.debian.org list can still be useful if you want to reach them.

Sam is our new DPL. The margin with the second (Steve McIntyre again!) is very slim, 8 votes. And Steve only has 25 votes more than me. That’s not much either.

What we can learn from this election:

• the principle of a DPL board makes its way, I have been ranked well above NOTA and I have been mainly advocating this proposal (and this despite some votes anti-dunc-tank that I probably suffered from)
• my selection of board members was pretty good, the 4 candidates that I selected for the board are the top-4 of the election
• Debian developers are fed up by the various problems in some core teams (overwhelmed, not recruiting new members, not communicating enough, etc.). I’ll try to help Sam fix those issues, but it’s going to be a big challenge for us.

In the end, I really hope that sam is going to find a way to cooperate closely with the various candidates that are still highly motivated to work on improving Debian. I doubt that he will choose a board structure (although I would be glad to be proven wrong!), but I really hope that he will expand the 2IC principle (or something similar).

I once told sam that he would have my full support if he got elected, and I intend to stand up to this promise. I said that because I share many of his ideas. The few fears that I have are mainly on how he is going to try to address these issues. But I have no reason to believe that he’s not going to listen to what we (and I) have to say. That’s why he got ranked just after me on my ballot.

Good luck Sam, do not disappoint us!

Since the initial announce of the transition to the new Python policy, there has been some grumblings due to some unexpected last minute changes.

I spent a copious amount of time discussing with all parties involved (Matthias Klose and Josselin Mouette mainly), rewrote dh\_python 2 times to accomodate everybody’s needs (those who use the XS-Python-Version field, those who won’t) while still preserving backwards compatibility and went as far as NMUing debhelper to unblock the situation (Joey didn’t want to take an active role in the dh\_python update).

But this is now over and things have settled down. All the infrastructure is now in sid, the interfaces have been defined and won’t change anymore. It’s now really time to continue the transition. Update your python related packages by following the instructions here. Please help by providing patches and NMUing all the packages that have not yet been updated. Join #debian-python on OFTC if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone who gave a hand to update the infrastructure required for this new policy: Matthias, Josselin, Marc Dequènes for the CDBS class, Joe Wreschnig for the update of the policy, Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth for their advice as release managers.

I gave this morning a quick conference presenting how the PTS works internally. My hope is to attract some contributors like aj (Anthony Towns) managed to do with the BTS. He got impressive results in a few months, I hope I’ll get some too. 🙂

Anyway, for those of you who aren’t there in Darmstaadt at the Debian-QA conference, you can still check my slides. Of course, feel free to ask me some questions if you’re currently trying to hack on the PTS… I’d love to help you if you’re gonna help me maintain it in the long run.

We got some interesting ideas for improvements, I hope they’ll evolve in some patches.