Insider infos, master your Debian/Ubuntu distribution
My Debian DVD shop is now open for 2 weeks and I got a few requests to offer an official Debian image.
Some people like to have a DVD with the official theme and without the firmware. For them I have added the “Official Multi-Arch DVD” (i386/amd64/source) to my shop. You can get it here.
Christian is a figure of Debian, not only because of the tremendous coordination work that he does within the translation project, but also because he’s very involved at the social level. He’s probably in the top 5 of the persons who attended most often the Debian conference.
Christian is a friend (thanks for hosting me so many times when I come to Paris for Debian related events) and I’m glad that he accepted to be interviewed. He likes to speak and that shows in the length of his answers… 🙂 but you’ll be traveling the world while reading him.
My questions are in bold, the rest is by Christian.
Who are you?
I am a French citizen (which is easy to guess unless you correct my usual mistakes in what follows). I’m immensely proud of being married for nearly 26 years with Elizabeth (who deserves a statue from Debian for being so patient with my passion and my dedication to the project).
I’m also the proud father of 3 wonderful “kids”, aged 19 to 23.
I work as team manager in the Networks and Computers Division of Onera “the French Aerospace lab”, a public research institute about Aeronautics, Space and Defense. My team provides computer management services for research divisions of Onera, with a specific focus put on individual computing.
I entered the world of free software as one of the very first users of Linux in France. Back in the early 1990’s, I happened (though the BBS users communities) to be a friend of several early adopters of Linux and/or BSD386/FreeBSD/NetBSD in France. More specifically, I discovered Linux thanks with my friend René Cougnenc (all my free software talks are dedicated to René, who passed away in 1996).
You’re not a programmer, not even a packager. How did you come to Debian?
I’m definitely not a programmer and I never studied computing (I graduated in Materials Science and worked in that area for a few years after my PhD).
However, my daily work always involved computing (I redesigned the creep testing laboratory and its acquisition system all by myself during my thesis research work). An my hobbies often involved “playing” with home computers, always trying to learn about something new.
So, first learning about a new operating system…then trying to figure out how to become involved in its development was quite a logical choice.
Debian is my distro of choice since it exists. I used Slackware on work machines for a while, but my home server, kheops, first ran Debian 1.1 when I stopped running a BBS on an MS-DOS machine to host a news server. That was back in October 1996.
I then happened to be a user, and more specifically a user of genealogy software, also participating very actively in Usenet…from this home computer and server, that was running this Debian thing.
So, progressively, I joined mailing lists and, being a passionate person, I tried to figure out how I could bring my own little contribution to all this.
This is why I became a packager (yes, I am one!) by taking over the “geneweb” package, which I was using to publish my genealogy research. I applied as DD in January 2001, then got my account in July 2001. My first upload to the Debian archive occurred on August 22nd 2001: that was of course geneweb, which I still maintain.
Quite quickly, I became involved in the work on French localization. I have always been a strong supporter of localized software (I even translated a few BBS software back in the early 90’s) as one of the way to bring the power and richness of free software to more users.
Localization work lead me to work on the early version of Debian Installer, during those 2003-2005 years where the development of D-I was an incredibly motivating and challenging task, lead by Joey Hess and his inspiring ideas.
From user to contributor to leader, I suddenly discovered, around 2004, that I became the “coordinator” of D-I i18n (internationalization) without even noticing… 🙂
You’re the main translation coordinator in Debian. What plans and goals have you set for Debian Wheezy?
As always: paint the world in red.
Indeed, this is my goal for years. I would like our favorite distro to be able to be used by anyone in the world, whether she speaks English, Northern Sami, Wolof, Uyghur or Secwepemctsín.
As a matter of symbol, I use the installer for this. My stance is that one should be able to even install Debian in one’s own language. So, for about 7 years, I use D-I as a way to “attract” new localization contributors.
This progress is represented on this page where the world is gradually painted in red as long as the installer supports more languages release after release. The map above tries to illustrate this by painting in red countries when the most spoken language in the country is supported in Debian Installer.
However, that map does not give enough reward to many great efforts made to support very different kind of languages. Not only various “national” languages, but also very different ones: all regional languages of Spain, many of the most spoken languages in India, minority languages such as Uyghur for which an effort is starting, Northern Sami because it is taught in a few schools in Norway, etc., etc.
Still, the map gives a good idea of what I would like to see better supported: languages from Africa, several languages in Central Asia. And, as a very very personal goal, I’m eagerly waiting for support of Tibetan in Debian Installer, the same way we support its “sister” language, Dzongkha from Bhutan.
For this to happen, we have to make contribution to localization as easy as possible. The very distributed nature of Debian development makes this a challenge, as material to translate (D-I components, debconf screens, native packages, packages descriptions, website, documentation) is very widely spread.
A goal, for years, is to set a centralized place where translators could work easily without even knowing about SVN/GIT/BZR or having to report bugs to send their work. The point, however, would be to have this without making compromises on translation quality. So, with peer review, use of thesaurus and translation memory and all such techniques.
Tools for this exist: we, for instance, worked with the developers of Pootle to help making it able to cope with the huge amount of material in Debian (think about packages descriptions translations). However, as of now, the glue between such tools and the raw material (that often lies in packages) didn’t come.
So, currently, translation work in Debian requires a great knowledge of how things are organized, where is the material, how it can be possible to make contribution reach packages, etc.
And, as I’m technically unable to fulfill the goal of building the infrastructure, I’m fulfilling that role of spreading out the knowledge. This is how I can define my “coordinator” role.
Ubuntu uses a web-based tool to make it easy to contribute translations directly in Launchpad. At some point you asked Canonical to make it free software. Launchpad has been freed in the mean time. Have you (re)considered using it?
Why not? After all, it more or less fills in the needs I just described. I still don’t really figure out how we could have all Debian material gathered in Rosetta/Launchpad….and also how Debian packagers could easily get localized material back from the framework without changing their development processes.
I have always tried to stay neutral wrt Ubuntu. As many people now in Debian, I feel like we have reached a good way to achieve our mutual development. When it comes at localization work, the early days where the “everything in Rosetta and translates who wants” stanza did a lot of harm to several upstream localization projects…is, I think, way over.
Many people who currently contribute to D-I localization were indeed sent to me by Ubuntu contributors….and by localizing D-I, apt, debconf, package descriptions, etc., they’re doing translation work for Ubuntu as well as for Debian.
Let’s say I’m a Debian user and I want to help translate Debian in my language. I can spend 1 hour per week on this activity. What should I do to start?
Several language teams use Debian mailing lists to coordinate their work. If you’re lucky enough to be a speaker of one of these languages, try joining debian-l10n-<yourlanguage> and follow what’s happening there. Don’t try to immediately jump in some translation work. First, participate to peer reviews: comment on others’ translations. Learn about the team’s processes, jargon and habits.
Then, progressively, start working on a few translations: you may want to start with translations of debconf templates: they are short, often easy to do. That’s perfect if you have few time.
If no language team exists for your language, try joining debian-i18n and ask about existing effort for your language. I may be able to point you to individuals working on Debian translations (very often along with other free software translation efforts). If I am not, then you have just been named “coordinator” for your language… 🙂 I may even ask you if you want to work on translating the Debian Installer.
What’s the biggest problem of Debian?
We have no problems, we only have solutions… 🙂
We are maybe facing a growth problem for a few years. Despite the increased “welcoming” aspects of our processes (Debian Maintainers), Debian is having hard times in growing. The overall number of active contributors is probably stagnating for quite a while. I’m still amazed, however, to see how we can cope with that and still be able to release over the years. So, after all, this is maybe not a problem… 🙂
Many people would point “communication problems” here. I don’t. I think that communication inside the Debian project is working fairly well now. Our “famous” flame wars do of course still happen from time to time, but what large free software project doesn’t have flame wars?
In many areas, we indeed improved communication very significantly. I want to take as an example the way the release of squeeze has been managed. I think that the release team did, even more this time, a very significant and visible effort to communicate with the entire project. And the release of squeeze has been a great success in that matter.
So, there’s nearly nothing that frustrates me in Debian. Even when a random developer breaks my beloved 100% completeness of French translations, I’m not frustrated for more than 2 minutes.
You’re known in the Debian community as the organizer of the “Cheese & Wine Party” during DebConf. Can you tell us what this is about?
This is an interesting story about how things build themselves in Debian.
It all started in July 2005, before DebConf 5 in Helsinki. Denis Barbier, Nicolas François and myself agreed to bring at Debconf a few pieces of French cheese as well as 1 or 2 bottles of French wine… and share them with some friends. Thus, we settled an informal meeting in “the French room” where we invited some fellows: from memory, Benjamin “Mako” Hill, Hannah Wallach, Matt Zimmermann and Moray Allan. All of us fond of smelly cheese, great wine… plus some extra “pâté” home-made by Denis in Toulouse.
It finally happened that, by word of mouth, a few dozens of other people slowly joined in that French room and turned the whole thing into an improvized party that more or less lasted for the entire night.
The tradition was later firmly settled in 2006, first in Debconf 6 in Mexico where I challenged the French DDs to bring as many great cheese as possible, then during the Debian i18n meeting in Extremadura (Sept 2006) where we reached the highest amount of “cheese per participant” ever. I think that the Creofonte building in Casar de Cáceres hasn’t fully recovered from it and is still smelling cheese 5 years after.
This “party” later became a real tradition for DebConf, growing over and over each year. I see it as a wonderful way to illustrate the diversity we have in Debian, as well as the mutual enrichment we always felt during DebConfs.
My only “regret” about it is that it became so big over the years that organizing it is always a challenge and I more and more feel pressure to make it successful. However, over the years, I always found incredible help by DebConf participants (including my own son, last year… a moment of sharing which we will both remember for years, i think). And, really, in 2010, standing up on a chair, shouting (because the microphone wasn’t working) to thank everybody, was the most emotional moment I had at Debconf 10.
Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?
So many people. So, just like it happens in many awards ceremonies, I will be very verbose to thank people, sorry in advance for this.
The name that comes first is Joey Hess. Joey is someone who has a unique way to perceive what improvements are good for Debian… and a very precise and meticulous way to design these improvements. Think about debconf. It is designed for so long now and still reaching its very specific goal. So well designed that it is the entire basis for Joey’s other achievement: designing D-I. Moreover, I not only admire Joey for his technical work, but also for his interaction with others. He is not he loudest person around, he doesn’t have to….just giving his point in discussion and, guess what? Most of the time, he’s right.
Someone I would like to name here, also, is Colin Watson. Colin is also someone I worked with for years (the D-I effect, again…) and, here again, the very clever way he works on technical improvements as well as his very friendly way to interact with others…just make it.
And, how about you, Raphaël? 🙂 I’m really admirative of the way you work on promoting technical work on Debian. Your natural ability to explain things (as good in English as it is in French) and your motivation to share your knowledge are a great benefit for the project. Not to mention the technical achievements you made with Guillem on dpkg of course!
Another person I’d like to name here is Steve Langasek. We both maintain samba packages for years and collaboration with him has always been a pleasure. Just like Colin, Steve is IMHO a model to follow when it comes at people who work for Canonical while continuing their involvment in Debian. And, indeed, Steve is so patient with my mistakes and stupid questions in samba packaging that he deserves a statue.
We’re now reaching the end of the year where Stefano Zacchiroli was the Debian Project Leader. And, no offense intended to people who were DPL before him (all of them being people I consider to be friends of mine), I think he did the best term ever. Zack is wonderful in sharing his enthusiasm about Debian and has a unique way to do it. Up to the very end of his term, he has always been working on various aspects of the project and my only hope is that he’ll run again (however, I would very well understand that he wants to go back to his hacking activities!). Hat off, Zack!
I again have several other people to name in this “Bubulle hall of Fame”: Don Armstrong, for his constant work on improving Debian BTS, Margarita Manterola as one of the best successes of Debian Women (and the most geeky honeymoon ever), Denis Barbier and Nicolas François because i18n need really skilled people, Cyril Brulebois and Julien Cristau who kept X.org packaging alive in lenny and squeeze, Otavio Salvador who never gave up on D-I…even when we were so few to care about it.I would like to make a special mention for Frans Pop. His loss in 2010 has been a shock for many of us, and particularly me. Frans and I had a similar history in Debian, both mostly working on so-called “non technical” duties. Frans has been the best release manager for D-I (no offense intended, at all, to Joey or Otavio….I know that both of them share this feeling with me). His very high involvment in his work and the very meticulous way he was doing it lead to great achievements in the installer. The Installation Guide work was also a model and indeed a great example of “non technical work” that requires as many skills as more classical technical work. So, and even though he was sometimes so picky and, I have to admit, annoying, that explains why I’m still feeling sad and, in some way, guilty about Frans’ loss.
One of my goals for wheezy is indeed to complete some things Frans left unachieved. I just found one in bug #564441: I will make this work reach the archive, benefit our users and I know that Frans would have liked that.
After a private launch (with discounted prices) for my newsletter subscribers, it’s now time to open my Debian DVD shop to the public.
I did not want to become yet another DVD reseller, so my DVDs are different and better. Here’s why you want to get one (or more):
Click here to learn more about my DVD offer.
PS: Click here and join my newsletter to not miss other opportunities.
Maximilian, along with the other members of the Debian kernel team, has the overwhelming job of maintaining the Linux kernel in Debian. It’s one of the largest package and certainly one where dealing with bug reports is really difficult as most of them are hardware-specific, and thus difficult to reproduce.
He’s very enthusiastic and energetic, and does not fear criticizing when something doesn’t please him. You’ll see.
My questions are in bold, the rest is by Maximilian.
Who are you?
My name is Maximilian Attems. I am a theoretical physicist in my last year of PhD at the Technical University of Vienna. My main research area is the early phase of a Quark-Gluon Plasma as produced in heavy ion collisions at the LHC at CERN. I am developing simulations that take weeks on the Vienna Scientific Cluster (in the TOP 500 list). The rest of the lab is much less fancy and boils down to straight intel boxes without any binary blobs or external drivers (although lately we add radeon graphics for decent free 3D). Mathematica and Maple are the rare exceptions to the many dev tools of Debian (LaTeX, editors, git, IDE’s, Open MPI, ..) found at the institute, as those are unfortunately yet unmatched in Free Software for symbolic computations. The lab mostly runs a combination of Debian stable (testing starting from freeze) for desktops and oldstable/stable for servers. Debian is in use for more than 10 years. So people in the institute know some ups and downs of the project. Newcomers like my room neighbors are always surprised how functional a free Debian Desktop is. 🙂
What’s your biggest achievement within Debian?
Building lots and lots of kernels together with an growing uptake of the officially released linux images.
I joined the Debian kernel team shortly after Herbert Xu departed. I had been upstream Maintainer of the linux-2.6 janitor project for almost a year brewing hundreds of small cleanups with quilt in a tree named kjt for early linux-2.6. In Debian we had lots of fun in sorting out the troubles that the long 2.5 freeze had imposed: Meaning we were sitting on a huge diverging “monolithic” semi-good patchset. It was great fun to prepare 2.6.8 for Sarge with a huge team enthusiastic in shipping something real close to mainline (You have to imagine that back then you had no stable or longterm release nor any useful free tools like git. This involved passing patches around, hand editing them and seeing what the result does.)
From the Sarge install reports a common pattern emerged that the current Debian early userspace was causing lots of boot failures. This motivated me to develop an alternative using the new upstream initramfs features. So I got involved in early userspace. Thanks to large and active development team initramfs-tools got a nice ecosystem. It still tries to be as generic and flexible as possible and thus gains many nice features. Also H. Peter Anvin (hpa) gave me the official co-maintenance of klibc. klibc saw uptake and good patches from Google in the last 2 years. I am proud that the early userspace is working out fairly well these days, meaning you can shuffle discs around and see your box boot.
Later on we focused on 2.6.18 for Etch, which turned out to a be good release and picked up by several other distributions. Only very much later we would see such a “sync” again. With 2.6.26 for Lenny we got somehow unlucky as we just missed the new longterm release by one release. We also pushed for another update very late (during freeze) in the release cycle, which turned out to semi-work as too much things depend on linux-2.6.
For Squeeze 2.6.32 got picked thanks to discussions at Portland Linux Plumbers and it turned out to be a good release picked up by many distributions and external patchsets. The long-term support is going very well. Greg KH is doing a great job in collecting various needed fixes for it. Somehow we had hoped that the Squeeze freeze would start sooner and that the freeze duration would be shorter, since we were ready for a release starting from the actual freeze on. The only real big bastard on the cool 2.6.32 “sync” is Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise 6.0 is shipping the linux-2.6 2.6.32 in obfuscated form. They released their linux-2.6 as one big tarball clashing with the spirit of the GPL. One can only mildly guess from the changelog which patches get applied. This is in sharp contrast to any previous Red Hat release and has not yet generated the sharp and snide comments in press it deserves. Red Hat should really step back and not make such stupid management moves. Next to them even the semi-maintained Oracle “Unbreakable” 2.6.32 branch looks better: It is git fetchable.
What are your plans and those of the kernel team for Debian Wheezy?
Since 2.6.32 many of the used patches landed upstream or are on the way (speakup, Kbuild Debian specific targets, ..). The proper vfs based unionfs is something we’d be looking forward. We haven’t yet picked the next upstream release we will base Wheezy on, so currently we can happily jump to the most recent ones. There are plans for better interaction with Debian Installer thanks to generating our udebs properly in linux-2.6 source itself. Also we are looking forward to using git as tool of maintenance. We’d hope that this will also allow for even better cross distribution collaboration.
Concerning early userspace I plan to release an initramfs-tools with more generic userspace for the default case and finally also a klibc only for embedded or tuning cases.
What do you like most in Debian?
For one thing I do like the 2 year release cycle. It is not too long to have completely outdated software and on the other hand it gives enough time to really see huge progress from release to release. Also at my institute the software is is recent enough without too much admin overhead. For servers the three years support are a bit short, but on the manageable side.
I do enjoy a lot the testing distribution. For my personal use it is very stable and thus I mainly run testing on my desktop and work boxes. (Occasionally mixing in things from sid for unbreaking transition or newer security fixes).
Debian is independent and not a commercial entity. I think this is its main force and even more important these days. I enjoy using the Debian platform a lot at work thus in return this motivates me to contribute to Debian itself. I also like the fact that we strive for technical correctness.
Is there some recurrent problem that hinders the progress of Debian?
The “New Maintainer process” is a strange way to discourage people to contribute to Debian. It is particularly bureaucratic and a huge waste of time both for the applicant and his manager. It should be completely thrown overboard.
One needs a more scalable approach for trust and credibility that also enhances the technical knowledge for coding and packaging of the applicant.
NM is currently set in stone as any outside critics is automatically rejected. Young and energetic people are crucial for Debian and the long-term viability of the project, this is the reason why I’d consider the “New Maintainer process” as Debian’s biggest problem.
Note from Raphaël Hertzog: I must say I do not share this point of view on the New Maintainer process, I have witnessed lots of improvements lately thanks to the addition of the Debian Maintainer status, and to the fact that a good history of contribution can easily subsume the annoying Tasks & Skills questionnaire.
Another thing I miss is professional graphics’ input both for the desktop theme and the website. I know that effort has been done there lately and it is good to see movement there, but the end result is still lacking.
Another trouble of Debian is its marketing capabilities. It should learn to better sell itself. It is the distribution users want to run and use—not the rebranded copies of itself with lock-in “sugar”. Debian is about choice and it offers plenty of it: it is a great default Desktop.
Linus Torvalds doesn’t find Debian (and/or Ubuntu) a good platform to hack on the kernel. Do you know why and what can we do about this?
The Fedora linux-2.6 receives contributions from several Red Hat employed upstream sub-Maintainers. Thus it typically carries huge patches which are not yet upstream. As a consequence eventual userland troubles get revealed quite quickly and are often seen there first. The cutting edge nature of Fedora rawhide is appealing for many developers.
The usual Debian package division of library development files and the library itself is traditionally an entry barrier for dev on Debian. Debian got pretty easily usable these days, although we could and should again improve a lot more in this sector. Personally I think that Linus hasn’t tried Debian for years.
I have the feeling that the implication of the Debian Kernel team in LKML has been on the rise. Is that true and how do you explain this?
Ben Hutchings is the Nr.1 contributor for 2.6.33. He also is top listed as author of patches on stable 2.6.32. Debian is not listed as organization as many send their linux-2.6 patches from their corporate or personal email address and thus it won’t be attributed to Debian.
There is currently no means to see how many patches get forwarded for the stable tree, but I certainly forwarded more then fifty patches. I was very happy when Greg KH personally thanked me in the 2.6.32.12 release.
In the Squeeze kernel, the firmwares have been stripped and moved into separate packages in the non-free section. What should a user do to ensure his system keeps working?
There is a debconf warning on linux-2.6 installation. It is quite clear that the free linux-2.6 can’t depend on the firmware of the non-free archive (also there is no strict dependency there technically).
On the terminal you’d also see warnings by update-initramfs on the initramfs generation for drivers included in the initramfs.
The debconf warning lists the filename(s) of the missing firmware(s). One can then “apt-cache search” for the firmware package name and install it via the non-free repository. The check runs against the current loaded modules. The match is not 100% accurate for special cases as the one where the device might be handled well by this driver without firmware, but is accurate enough to warrant the warning.
The set of virtualization technologies that the official Debian kernel supports seems to change regularly. Which of the currently available options would you recommend to users who want to build on something that will last?
KVM has been a smooth ride from day zero. It almost got included instantly upstream. The uptake it has is great as it sees both dev from Intel and AMD. Together with libvirt it’s management is easy. Also the performance of virtio is very good.
The linux containers are the thing we are looking forward for enhanced chroots in the Wheezy schedule. They are also manageable by libvirt.
Xen being the “bad outside boy” has an incredible shrinking patchset, thus is fair to expect to see it for Wheezy and beyond. For many it may come a bit late, but for old hardware without relevant CPU it is there.
Many tend to overstate the importance of the virtualization tech. I’d be much more looking forward to the better Desktop support in newer linux-2.6. The Desktop is important for linux and something that is in heavy use. The much better graphics support of the radeon and nouveau drivers:
The performance optimizations thanks to dcache scalability work and the neat automatic task-grouping for the CPU scheduler are very promising features for the usability of the linux desktop. Another nice to have feature is the online defrag of ext4 and its faster mkfs. Even cooler would be better scalability in ext4 (This side seems to have seen not enough effort lately).
Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?
Hans Peter Anvin and Ted Tso are a huge source of deep linux-2.6 knowledge and personal wisdom. I do enjoy all sorts of interactions with them.
Christoph Hellwig with Matthew Wilcox and also William Irwin for setting up the Debian kernel Team.
Several Debian leaders including the previous and the current one for their engagement, which very often happens behind the scene.
The Debian Gnome Team work is great, also the interactions have always been always easy and a pleasure.
Martin Michlmayr and previously Thiemo Seufer do an incredible job in porting Debian on funny and interesting ARM and MIPS boxes. Debian has a lot of upcoming potential on this area. I’m looking forward to other young enthusiastic people in that area.
Colin Watson is bridging Debian and Ubuntu, which is an immense task.
Michael Prokop bases on Debian an excellent recovery boot CD: http://www.grml.org. I’d be happy if any Debian Developer would work as carefully coding and working.
