Ideas – Page 2

Planet Debian for users ?

September 19, 2007 by Raphaël Hertzog

A few days ago I created a planet for French Debian users, and the interest is slowly growing. In fact, I just received a request to add an English-speaking blog!

So the question is: why not creating (and hosting) an English-speaking planet for Debian users that would allow only Debian-related articles. Developers are also users and if they have a feed dedicated to their Debian posts, they could add it of course. It would be handled like the current planet and a few volunteers could collect and process the requests to add new feeds for non-developers.

This would provide the much-requested alternative of filtering planet Debian… and also encourage some of our users to blog about Debian and how they use it.

What do you think of this idea?

Revisiting the DPL team concept

March 19, 2006 by Raphaël Hertzog

I have not been very much involved in this year DPL campaigning, but I’m part of two DPL teams, thus I feel the need to give my point of view on the subject.

I’m not really satisfied by how the current DPL team worked out, and being on the DPL candidate team of both Jeroen and Andreas gave me the opportunity to gather information on what really happened. Also I’ve met Bdale yesterday and he gave me his opinion as well (and I really enjoyed that dinner. Thanks bdale!).

Just for the record, I’ll try to sum up what really happened: Branden had agreed to be a participant of the DPL team concept, but wasn’t a major proponent of the idea. This, combined with his personal problems, explains why he didn’t make use of the full potential of a DPL team.

Does it invalidate the DPL team concept? No, I don’t think so because the concept will evolve this year. Let’s see how it can change.

Both DPL teams would this year receive all the mails sent to leader@debian.org. This means that the members are involved from the beginning and not only on request of the leader, which means that they can pro-actively take over if they see that the DPL doesn’t manage to follow up up to its expectations (which hopefully won’t be needed this year). Furthermore I expect that the team would be informed of what the DPL does, so that the team can give its opinion on everything done, and prevent big errors (nobody is perfect, errors do happen).

But the most important thing is that the team should not stand behind the DPL, but next to him taking initiatives, and I expect the DPL to work with the team members for the best of Debian. As such I expect the DPL to accept most of the proposals of his team if there’s a consensus on it, even if he doesn’t personnaly think that’s it’s a priority for his DPL mandate.

If I am part of an elected DPL team, I will work on that basis. I do have many ideas to try, and will make proposals. I ran once for the DPL election, and if you check my platform, you can see that I always had ideas for Debian and you can see that I worked on several of them which are nowadays very common (such as the PTS, alioth, collaborative maintenance). I won’t miss an opportunity to get the project moving forward.

How to handle unmaintained packages with few users

July 17, 2005 by Raphaël Hertzog

Last week I had an interesting discussion with Benjamin Bayart about unmaintained packages which have very few users. Once the initial maintainer disappear, we usually don’t find another one having both Debian skills and a good knowledge of the package. So the software just stay there until it becomes so outdated that it doesn’t work anymore… and then it gets removed blindly. Most of those packages have a low “popcon” rating so they get removed without care.

Read the whole problematic described by Benjamin, and then see my initial mail with a suggestion on how to do better in that area.

The discussion has seen interesting developments even if there’s no consensus (yet). But it’s an important topic concerning QA, so I hope that something useful will come out of it… I’d like to have more time to implement something but I’m already overloaded… I really should have proposed projects for Google’s summer of code. 🙂

Keeping mailing lists sane with social pressure

June 15, 2005 by Raphaël Hertzog

Today I was reading my backlog of debian-devel and noticed the big thread about the trademark issue with Firefox. It was a pain to read it because as usual some people got so involved that they felt the need to reply to all mails rehashing again and again the same point.

This is not acceptable for a civilized project like Debian. So I complained by private mail to the person who misbehaved according to my own criteria. This time it was “Humberto Massa Guimarães”. I have been polite and expressed clearly what was not acceptable in his behaviour:

he has posted 20 times the same argument
he’s no more expressing his point of view but trying to impose it to other by repeating it over and over

I didn’t mention the fact that I disagree with his point of view because I’m not complaining about his opinions, only about his way of behaving on the lists.

Do you want to know the result ? Humberto replied to me :

Your point was taken and I will try to behave better.

What does it mean ? That social pressure works … and that all other readers of debian-devel should do the same. When someone clearly goes too far, we should politely invite him by private mail to calm down. When someone receives 10 similar requests I’m sure he will quickly understand that his behaviour is not well accepted.

Going further in that direction we could have a system where all those complaints can be publicly archived. We would CC or BCC complaints@debian.org and the system would generate statistics : who has been the biggest cause of complaints and so on. 🙂
(This last paragraph is only semi-serious)

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