apt-get install debian-wizard

People Behind Debian: Francesca Ciceri, Member of the Debian Press & Publicity Teams

April 6, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

I met Francesca in Debconf 11 in Banja Luka. If I recall correctly, it’s Enrico Zini who introduced me to her, because she was the “madamezou” (her IRC nickname) who started to get involved in the publicity team. Since then — and despite having a bachelor thesis to complete — she got way more involved and even gained official responsibilities in the project.

Before starting with the interview, I wanted to mention that Francesca is drafting a diversity statement for Debian… I was expecting the discussions to go nowhere but she listened to all objections and managed to improve the text and build a consensus around it. Thank you for this and keep up the good work, Francesca!

Raphaël: Who are you?

Francesca: My name is Francesca, I’m 30 and I studied Social Sciences. Currently I live in Italy but I’m planning to go abroad (not a lot of jobs here for geeky social scientists). Apart for Debian and FLOSS world in general, I have unrestrained passions for chocolate; zombie movies; sci-fi; zombie books; {knitting|sewing|crafting} and DIY in general; zombie videogames; bicycles; pulling apart objects to look inside them; splatter B movies, David Foster Wallace’s books, playing trumpet, and… did I already mentioned zombies?

Days are too short for all this stuff, but I try to do my best.

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Francesca: Some years ago I was stuck in bed for — literally — some months, due to a grave series of migraine attacks. I wasn’t able to do anything: no social life, no books or television. So, I decided to turn on the laptop and do something constructive with it: I was already a Debian user and it seemed quite logical to me to try to give back to the community. I am not a coder and I’ve not studied Computer Science, so my first step was to join an Italian Debian on-line community (Debianizzati) and help with tutorials, users support, wiki management. In a couple of months I learnt many things: helping other users with their problems forces you to do lots of research!

My first contributions to the Debian project were mostly translations of the main website. Translators are the perfect typos spotters: they work so precisely on the text to be translated that they finish to do a great QA job. This is how I’ve started to contribute to the Debian website: with very simple things, fixing typos or wrong links or misplaced wml tags. I still remember my first commit to the website: the idea was to undercase some tags, but it ended up that I misplaced some of them and — in addition — I fixed them only in the English page and not on the translations as well. When after a couple of minutes, Kåre Thor Olsen — a long time contributor of the team and now webmaster — reverted my commit, I felt so stupid and full of shame. But, to my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error: Gerfried Fuchs, one of the guru of the team, replies me in a really helpful and polite way explaining what I did wrong and how to do things correctly. I think this episode was a turning point in my Debian life: there’s this idea that Debian Developers are just a bunch of arrogant assholes and maybe it was true in the past, but for my experience they are not. Well, at least the ones I met and work with ;).

“To my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error.”

Since then, I joined the WWW team and helped them apply the shiny new design provided by Kalle Söderman. A lot of work was done during the week immediately before the release of the new website. Oh that was a week! We worked night and day to have the new design ready for February 6th, and it was fantastic when we finally published it, simultaneously with the release of Squeeze.

At the same time, I started to contribute more actively to the Debian Publicity team, not only translating news but also writing them. It can sound scary for a non native English speaker to write something from scratch in English, but you have to keep in mind that your text will be reviewed by native speakers before being published. And we have some fantastic reviewers in the English localisation team: particularly Justin B Rye, who is tireless in his effort and — more recently — Moray Allan.

I think I’m particularly lucky to work with all these people: there’s a special mood in both Publicity and WWW team, which makes you feel happy to do things and at the same time pushes you to do more just because it’s fun to work with them sharing jokes, ideas, rants, patches and hugs.

Raphaël: I believe that you have been trough the new member process very quickly. You’re now a Non-Uploading Debian Developer. How was the experience and what does this mean to you?

Francesca: Becoming a Debian Developer was not so obvious for me, because I didn’t need to be a DD for the work I do in Debian. For instance, I don’t maintain packages, so I had no reasons to want to become a DD in order to have uploading rights. For a while I didn’t really feel the necessity of being a DD.

Luckily, some people started to pester me about it, asking me to apply for the NM process. I remember Martin Zobel-Helas doing this for an entire week every single day, and Gerfried Fuchs doing it as well. Suddenly, I realized that people I worked with felt that I deserved the DD status and that I simply had thought I didn’t. As a non coder and a woman, there probably was a bit of impostor syndrome involved. Having people encouraging me, gave me more confidence and the desire to finally become a DD. And so I did.

The process for non uploading DD is identical to the one to become an uploading DD, with one exception: in the second part of the process (named Tasks and Skills) instead of questions about how to create and maintain packages, there are questions about the non packaging work you usually do in Debian.

The general resolution which created the possibility to become a non uploading DD gave us a chance to recognize the great effort of Debian contributors who work in various area (translations, documentation, artworks, etc.) that were not always considered as important as packaging efforts. And this is great because if you are a regular contributor, if you love Debian and you are committed to the project, there are no reasons to not be an official member of it.

With regards to this, I like the metaphor used by Meike Reichle in her recent talk about the Debian Women Project (video recording here):

a Debian Developer status is a lot like a citizenship in a country that you’re living in. If you live in a country and you don’t have citizenship, you can find a job, buy a house, have a family […] but if this country – at any point in time – decides to go into a direction that you don’t like, there’s nothing you can do about it. You are not in the position to make any change or to make any effect on that country: you just live there, but there’s no way that you can excercise influence on the people who run this country.

Raphaël: You recently joined the Debian Press Team. What does it involve and how are you managing this new responsibility?

Francesca: The Press Team is basically the armed wing of the Publicity Team: it handles announcements that need to be kept private until the release, moderate the debian-announce and debian-news mailing list and maintain contacts with press people from outside the project.

The “real” job, so, is done within the Publicity Team. The most important part of our work is to write announcements and the newsletter: while the newsletter is published bi-weekly, the announcements need to be write in a shorter timeframe. Localization is really important in spreading Debian word, so we work closely with translators: both announcements and DPN are usually translated in four or five different languages.

The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, we need to take quick decisions and often do last-minute changes. Personally, I like it: I work better under pressure. But I know that is sometimes difficult for contributors to accept that we can’t debate endlessly on details, we have just to go on and do our best in a given timeframe.

“The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, […]. Personally, I like it.”

Raphael: You’re one of the main editor behind the Debian Project News. What’s the role and scope of this newsletter?

Francesca: Debian Project News is our beloved newsletter, direct successor of the Debian Weekly News founded by Joey Hess in 1999 and later kept alive by Martin Schulze. In 2007, Debian Weekly News was discontinued but in 2008 the project was revived by Alexander Reichle Schmehl. The idea behind DPN is to provide our users an overview of what is happening inside and outside the project.

As the core team of editors is formed by three people, the main problem is to be able to collect enough news from various sources: in this sense we are always glad when someone points us to interesting blogposts, mails and articles.

DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian: propose news, write paragraphs and review the draft before the publication are quite easy tasks but very useful. English native speakers can do a proofread (as no one of the main editors is a native speaker) while others can always translate DPN in their native language. People who want to help us can take a look at our wiki page.

“DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian.”

Just yesterday I realized that since January we don’t miss or delay an issue: so I’d like to thank the fantastic team of editors, reviewers and translators who made it possible.

The team is now working on another way of spreading Debian’s message: a long-time project is finally becoming real. Stay tuned, surprise arriving!

Raphael: You’re trying to organize IRC training sessions but that doesn’t seem to take off in Debian, while it’s quite common in the Ubuntu community. How do you explain that?

Francesca: I’m not sure about it: both Debian users and contributors seemed to appreciate this initiative in the past. I was quite surprised by the amount of Debian members present during the various sessions and by the amount of interesting questions asked by the users. So the only reason I can think about is that I need to put more enthusiasm in convincing the teams to do it: they need more encouragement (or to be pestered more!).

I, for myself, think that IRC training sessions are a great way to promote our work, to share our best practice, to talk about our project to a wider audience. And I’ll sure try to organize more of them. Help, suggestions, ideas are really welcome!

Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on?

Francesca: There is a project I’d like to give more love, but I always end up without the time to do it: the debian-community.org project. Back in 2007, Holger Levsen founded it with the aim of reducing the gap between Debian contributors and Debian users, giving all an opportunity to contribute, share ideas and more. The project was discontinued and I’d really like to revive it: in these years various things have changed, but I think that the core idea of having a node to connect existing local communities is still good and doable. In Debian we don’t have the wide and well articulated local infrastructure present in other distributions (Ubuntu, particularly, but also Fedora): even if I don’t like too centralized structures, I think that a better connection between the project and local groups of users and on-line communities would be a step forward for the project.

Being part of the Events Team, I’m aware of how much we need to improve our communication with local groups. An example is the events organization: sometimes, Publicity and Events teams even don’t know about regional Debian related events (like booth at conferences, workshops, talks, install parties, etc) and this is a shame because we could offer a lot of help in organizing and promoting local events.

What we lack is better communication. And debian-community.org project could give us exactly this. Could be a cluster of local groups, a platform for events organization and even a useful resource for newbies who want to find a local group near them. I started some effort in this sense, sending a proposal about it, working on a census of Debian local groups. Any help is appreciated!

I’m really curious to see how many Debian communities (from all around the world and the web) are out there, and I’d love to have members from these communities better connected with the Debian Project.

Raphael: What’s the biggest problem of Debian?

Probably the bikeshedding feticism of almost all of us. It’s the other side of the coin of Debian’s commitment to technical excellence and our perfectionism, but sometimes it leads just to endless discussions about details, and it is a blocker for various initiatives.

In Debian, you have to be really patient and — in a way — stubborn to push some changes. This is frustrating sometimes.

On the other hand, I really appreciate how people take some times to think to each proposals, give some feedback and discuss about it: the process could be annoying, indeed, but the result is often an improvement of the initial proposal.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?

Most of my teammates are simply brilliant and adorable and hard-working. But I have to admit that I particularly admire David Prévot: beside being a webmaster he does a lot of things, from French translations to DPN editing. All his contributions have a great quality and he’s able to push you always further in doing things and doing them better. He is a good example of how I’d like to be as contributor: smart, tireless, friendly.

Thank you to Francesca for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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My Debian Activities in March 2012

April 1, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (227.83 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg

Thanks to Guillem, dpkg with multiarch support is now available in Debian sid. The road has been bumpy, and it has again been delayed multiple times even after Guillem announced it on debian-devel-announce. Finally, the upload happened on March 19th.

I did not appreciate his announce because it was not coordinated at all, and had I been involved from the start, we could have drafted it in a way that sounded less scary for people. In the end, I provided a script so that people can verify whether they were affected by one of the potential problems that Guillem pointed out. While real, most of them are rather unlikely for typical multiarch usage.

Bernhard R. Link submitted a patch to add a new –status command to dpkg-buildflags. This command would print all the information required to understand which flags are activated and why. It would typically be called during the build process by debian/rules to keep a trace of the build flags configuration. The goal is to help debugging and also to make it possible to extract that information automatically from build logs. I reviewed his patch and we made several iterations, it’s mostly ready to be merged but there’s one detail where Bernhard and I disagree and I solicited Guillem’s opinion to try to take a decision. Unfortunately neither Guillem nor anyone else chimed in.

On request of Alexander Wirt, I uploaded a new backport of dpkg where I dropped the DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH variable from dpkg-architecture to ensure multi-arch is never accidentally enabled in other backports.

One last thing that I did not mention publicly at all yet, is that I contacted Lennart Poettering to suggest an improvement to the /etc/os-release file that he’s trying to standardize across distributions. It occurred to me that this file could also replace our /etc/dpkg/origins/default file (and not only /etc/debian_version) provided that it could store ancestry information. After some discussions, he documented new official fields for that file (ID_LIKE, HOME_URL, SUPPORT_URL, BUG_REPORT_URL). Next step for me is to improve dpkg-vendor to support this file (as a fallback or as default, I don’t know yet).

Packaging

I packaged quilt 0.60 (we’re now down to 9 Debian-specific patches, from a whopping 26 in version 0.48!) and zim 0.55.

In prevision of the next upstream version of Publican, I asked the Perl team to package a few Perl modules that Publican now requires. Less than two weeks after, all of them were in Debian Unstable. Congrats and many thanks to the Perl team (and Salvatore Bonaccorso in particular, which I happen to know because we were on the same plane during last Debconf!).

On a side note, being the maintainer of nautilus-dropbox became progressively less fun over the last months, in particular because the upstream authors tried to override some of the (IMO correct) packaging decisions that I made and got in touch with Ubuntu community managers to try to have their way. Last but not least, I keep getting duplicates of a bug that is not in my package but in the official package and that Dropbox did not respond to my query.

Book update

The translation is finished and we’re now reviewing the whole book. It takes a bit more time than expected because we’re trying to harmonize the style and because it’s difficult to coordinate the work of several volunteer reviewers.

The book cover is now almost finalized (click on it to view it in higher definitions):

We also made some progress on the interior design for the paperback. Unfortunately, I have nothing to show you yet. But it will be very nice… and made with just a LaTeX stylesheet tailored for use with dblatex.

The liberation fundraising slowed down with only 41 new supporters this month but it made a nice bump anyway thanks to a generous donation of 1000 EUR by Offensive security, the company behind Backtrack Linux. They will soon communicate on this, hopefully it will boost the operation. It would be really nice if we managed to raise the remaining 3000 EUR in the few weeks left until the official release of the book!

The work on my book dominated the month and explains my relative inactivity on other fronts. I worked much more than usual, and my wife keeps telling me that I look tired and that I should go in bed earlier… but I see the end of the tunnel: if everything goes well, the book should be released in a few weeks and I will be able to switch back to a saner lifestyle.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

People behind Debian: Jörg Jaspert, FTPmaster, Debian Account Manager, and more

March 23, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

Jörg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones)… Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he’s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers. 🙂

Check out his interview to learn more about some of the numerous ways one can get involved in Debian, managing its infrastructure… and without having to be a packager.

Raphael: Who are you?

Jörg: My name is Jörg Jaspert and I’m 35 years old working for a small company doing system administration and consulting work for our customers. I’m married for a little while now and sometime soon a little Ganneff will be crawling out of my wife. (Whoever didn’t think of the movie “Alien” now is just boring).

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Jörg: I started using Debian somewhere around 2000, 2001. Before that I had the misfortune to try SuSE and RedHat, both with a user experience that let me fully understand why people think Linux is unusable. (Due to my work I’m in the unfortunate situation to have to use RedHat on two machines. Funny how they are still utter crap and worse than bad toys). And all of this “lets get a Linux running here” came up because I was trying to find a replacement for my beloved OS/2 installation, which I had for some years.

So after I got Debian installed, good old Potato, I got myself active on our mailing lists, starting with the German user one.

A bit later I replied to a question if someone can help as staff for a Debian booth somewhere. It was the most boring event I ever visited (very nice orga, unfortunately no visitors), but I got a few important things there:

a signature from a DD on my key (Hi grisu),
a discussion with an upstream author with some useful piece of software to package and
an impression that this can be fun, if there are just some visitors for an event. So I tried again and did help as staff on a LinuxTag booth a while later.

The software I packaged, found me a sponsor and voila, maintainer I was. Some more packages got added and at some point my sponsor turned out to be my advocate. The NM process run around 2 months, and mid April 2002 I got THE MAIL.

Raphael: Some Debian developers believe that you have too many responsibilities within Debian (DAM, FTPMaster, Debconf, Partners, Planet Debian, Mirrors, …). Do you agree that it can be problematic, and if yes, are you trying to scale down?

Jörg: It’s DebConf, tssk.

And yes, I do have some extra groups and roles. And you even only list some, leaving out all I do outside Debian. But simply counting number of roles is a plain stupid way to go. Way more interesting is how much work is behind a role and how many other people are involved.

And looking at those you listed I don’t see any I am a SPOF. Let’s look at those you listed:

DAM: Here I did start out assisting James to get the huge backload down which had accumulated over time.

Nowadays I am merely the one with the longest term as DAM. Christoph Berg joined in April 2008 and Enrico Zini followed during October 2010, both very active. Especially Enrico, lately with the redesign of the NM webpages.

FTPMaster: The basic outline of the FTPMaster history is similar to the DAM one. I joined as an assistant, after the oh-so-famous Vancouver meeting in 2004. Together with Jeroen, we both then got the backload down which had accumulated there. He did most of the removals while I had a fun time cleaning up NEW. And we both prepared patches for the codebase.

And in 2007, as the last action as DPL, Sam made me FTPMaster. Since then I haven’t been alone either. In fact we have much more rotation in the team than ever before, which is a good thing. Today we are 3 FTPMasters, 4 FTP Assistants and 1 Trainee.

Though we always like new blood and would welcome more volunteers.

DebConf: I am very far outside the central DebConf team. I am not even a delegate here. Currently I am merely an admin, though there are 4 others with the same rights on the DebConf machines. I’ve not taken any extra jobs this year, nor will I. Probably for next year again, but not 2012.

Planet: I am one of three again, but then Planet is mostly running itself. Debian developers can just edit the config, cron is doing the work, not much needed here. Occasional cleanups, every now and then a mail to answer, done. In short: No real workload attached.

Mirrors: My main part here is the ftpsync scriptset. Which is a small part of the actual work. The majority of it, like checking mirrors, getting them to fix errors, etc. is done by Simon Paillard (and since some time, Raphael Geissert is active there too, you might have heard about his http.debian.net).

Having said that, there is stuff I could have handled better or probably faster. There always is. Right now I have 2 outstanding things I want to do a (last) cleanup on and then give away.

Raphael: You got married last year. I know by experience that entertaining a relationship and/or a family takes time. How do you manage to combine this with your Debian involvement?

Jörg: Oh well, I first met my wife at the “International Conference on OpenSource” 2009 in Taiwan. So OpenSource, Debian and me being some tiny wheel in the system wasn’t entirely news to her. And in the time since then she learned that there is much more behind when you are in a community like Debian, instead of “just” doing it for work. Even better that she met Debian people multiple times already, and knows with who I am quarreling…

Also, she is currently attending a language school – having lots of homework in the evening. Gives me time for Debian stuff. 🙂

How that turns out with the baby I have no idea yet. I do want to train it to like pressing the M key, so little-Ganneff can deal with NEW all on its own (M being Manual reject), but it might take a day or twenty before it gets so far. 🙂

Raphael: Thanks to the continuous work of many new volunteers, the NEW queue is no longer a bottleneck. What are the next challenges for the FTPmaster team?

Jörg: Bad link, try this one. 🙂

Also, “no longer” sounds like its recent. It’s not, it’s just that people usually recognize the negative only and not the positive parts.

Well, there are a few challenges actually. The first one, even if it sounds simple, is an ongoing one: We need Debian Developers willing to do the work that is hidden behind those simple graphs.

Yes, we are currently having a great FTP Team doing a splendid work in keeping that queue reasonably small — this is a/THE sisyphean task per excellence. There will always be something waiting for NEW, even if you just cleaned the queue, you turn around and there is something else back in already. Spreading this workload to more people helps not burning one out.

So if one or more of the readers is interested, we always like new volunteers. You simply need to be an uploading DD and have a bit of free time. For the rest we do have training procedures in place.

Another one is getting the “multi-archive” stuff done. The goal is to end up with ONE host for all our archives. One dak installation. But separate overrides, trees, mirrors, policies and people (think RMs, backports team, security team). While this is halfway easy to think of in terms of “merging backports into main” it gets an interesting side note when you think of “merging security into main”. The security archive does have information that is limited to few people before public release of a security announce, and so we must make sure our database isn’t leaking information. Or our filesystem layer handling. Or logs. Etc. Especially as the database is synced in (near) realtime to a DD accessible machine. And the filesystem data too, just a little less often.

There is also a discussion about a good way to setup a “PPA for Debian” service. We do have a very far developed proposal here how it should work, and I really should do the finishing touches and get it to the public. Might even get a GSoC project on it.

So far for some short to middle term goals. If you want to go really long term, I do think that we should get to the point where we get rid of the classical view of a source package being one (or more) tarballs plus the Debian changes. Where a new version requires the full upload of one or more of those parts of the source package.

I don’t know exactly where it should end up. Sure, stuff like “one central DVCS, maintainers push there, the archive generates the source tarballs and prepares the mirrors” do sound good for a quick glance. But there are lots of trouble and pitfalls and probably some dragons hidden here.

Raphael: The Debian repositories are managed by DAK (Debian Archive Kit) which is not packaged. Thus Debian users pick tools like reprepro to manage their package repositories. Is that how things should be?

Jörg: Oh, Mark Hymers wants to do a package again. More power to him if he does, though yes, DAK is not exactly a quick-and-easy thing to install. But nowadays it is a trillion times easier than the past — thanks to Mark’s work people can now follow the instructions, scripts and whatever they find inside the setup directory.

Still, it really depends on the archive size you are managing. A complex tool like dak does not make sense for someone who wants to publish one or a dozen of his own packages somewhere. Thats just like doing a finger amputation with a chainsaw — it certainly works and is fun for the one with the chainsaw — but you probably end up a little overdoing it.

I myself am using dpkg-scan[packages|sources] from a shell script but also mini-dinstall in places (never got friend with reprepro when I looked at it). Works, and for the few dozen packages those places manage it is more than enough.

Also, using dak forces you into some ways of behaviour that are just what Debian wants — but might not be what a user wants. Like inability to overwrite an existing file. One of the reasons why mentors.debian.net won’t work with dak. Or the use of a postgres database. Or that of gpg.

Sure, if you end up having more than just a dozen packages, if you have many suites and also movement between them, then dak is sure a thing to look at.

And “how should things be”: however the user and admins of that certain install of reprepro, mini-dinstall, dak, whatever want it. This is not one-tool-for-all land 🙂

Raphael: What is the role of Debian Account Managers (DAM)? Do you believe that DAMs have a responsibility to “shape” Debian by defining limits in terms of who can join and what can be done within Debian?

Jörg: Quote from https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/10/msg00010.html:

The Debian Account Managers (DAM) are responsible for maintaining the list of members of the Debian Project, also known as Debian Developers. DAMs are authoritative in deciding who is a member of the Debian Project and can take subsequent actions such as approving and expelling Project members.

Now, aside from this quote, my OWN PERSONAL OPINION, without wearing anything even vaguely resembling a DAM hat: DAM is the one post that is entitled to decide who is a member or not. Usually that is in the way of joining (or not), which is simple enough. But every now and then this also means acting on a request to do something about whatever behaviour of a Debian Project member. I hate that (and i think one can easily replace I with WE there). But it’s our job.

We usually aren’t quick about it. And we don’t act on our own initiative when we do, we always have (numerous) other DDs complain/appeal/talk/whatever to us first. The “expulsion procedure”, luckily not invoked that often, does guarantee a slow process and lots of input from others.

Are we the best for it? Probably not, we are just some people out of a thousand who happen to have a very similar hobby — Debian. We aren’t trained in dealing with the situations that can come up.

But we are THE role inside Debian that is empowered to make such decisions, so naturally it ends up with us.

Raphael: You did a lot of things for Debian over the years. What did bring you the most joy? Are there things that you’re still bitter about?

Jörg: The most joy? Hrm, without being involved in Debian and SPI I would never have met my wife.
Or my current job.
Or a GR against me. Not many running around with that badge, though I’m still missing my own personal “Serious problems with Mr. Jaspert” thread. Bad you all.
Or visited so many places. Think of all the DebConfs, QA meetings, BSPs and whatever events.
Or met so many people.
Or learned so many things I would never even have come near without being DD.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?

Jörg: Yes.

Thank you to Jörg for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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People Behind Debian: Gregor Herrmann, member of the Perl team

March 8, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

I followed Gregor’s evolution within Debian because I used to be somewhat active in the Perl team. His case is exemplar because it shows that you don’t need to be an IT professional to join Debian and to make a difference. His QA page is impressive with hundreds of packages maintained and hundreds of non-maintainer uploads too.

While he started out slowly, I remember meeting him at Debconf 7 in Edinburgh and after that he really got more implicated. Again a case of someone joining for technical reasons but getting more involved and staying there for social reasons! 🙂 Let’s jump into the interview and learn more about him.

Raphael: Who are you?

Gregor: I’m 41 years old, and I live in Innsbruck, Austria, in a shared apartment with a friend of mine. In my day job, I’m working at the regional addiction prevention agency, so I’m one of the few Debian guys who’s not an IT student or professional. I started maintaining packages in 2006, and I am a DD since April 2008.

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Gregor: After having used Debian on servers for some years, I finally switched to it on the desktop after some procrastinating. Soon afterwards I wanted to know more about the “making-of”, started to join mailing lists, filed bugs, and tried to learn packaging.

Luckily I quickly found a permanent sponsor — Tony Mancill, and we’re still co-maintaining each others’ packages. And when I packaged my first Perl modules, Gunnar Wolf invited me to join the Debian Perl Group, an offer I accepted a few days later. — And I’m still there 🙂

Later, the NM process, although it involved some waiting times, was also a good learning experience due to my AM Wouter Verhelst. (And in the meantime the organization of the NM process has vastly improved, from what I hear.)

So my starting point for joining Debian was my curiosity but what really helped me to find my way into the project was the support of the people who invited and helped me.

Raphael: What’s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu?

Gregor: I’m not sure I can name a single big achievement but I guess I can say that my contributions to the Debian Perl Group have helped to make and keep the team a success story.

Raphael: The pkg-perl team seems to work very well. As an active member, can you explain us how it is organized? How do you explain its success? In particular it seems to be a great entry point for new contributors.

Gregor: The team is huge, both in numbers of members and packages (over 2200). Since last DebConf we manage our source packages in git, we have 2 mailing lists and an IRC channel, and we manage to keep an overview by using PET, the Package Entropy Tracker.

It’s true that we get new members on a regular basis; we try to invite people (like it happened to me 6 years ago :)) but there are also quite a few new contributors who find our docs and introduce themselves on the mailing list. Maybe someone should conduct a study and ask them what motivated them to join. 🙂

We hand out group membership/commit access quickly, and we try to mentor new contributors actively during their early times in the group. Some of them leave for other projects after some time, but many also stay and become DDs later.

I’m not sure what the reasons for the group’s success are, maybe a combination of:

a culture in the group (and also in the upstream Perl community) that’s based on fun, cooperation, and respect;
the fact that packaging Perl modules is most of the time quite easy;
a great set of tools, and also (hopefully) useful documentation;
a bunch of relaxed people who are open to newcomers and try to help each other.

For everyone interested in joining the Debian Perl Group, our Welcome page on the wiki is a good starting point.

Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?

Gregor: Nothing overly exciting. What I should do is getting a newer JabRef into Debian (which involves packaging some new Java libraries — any takers?).

A solution for libdatetime-timezone-perl (which ships timezone data converted to Perl modules and tends to get outdated when the timezone data change) would be nice; let’s see if #660404 leads to some results …

And some Perl packages will also need a bit of work for the hardening build flags release goal (cf. #657853).

Raphael: What’s the biggest problem of Debian?

Gregor: Inertia. While I really like the fact that Debian is a volunteer project, and that every contributor works when and on what they decide to work on, I get the feeling that Debian could do better in moving forward, innovating, taking decisions.

I also think that more uniformity in managing source packages would make things easier; it’s quite amazing to see how many source formats, packaging helpers, patch systems, RCSs etc. are used all over the archive. I’m not advocating for mono-cultures, and I consider this diversity a strength in general, but having to find out first how this particular package works when preparing a bug fix can be annoying.

On the bright side, I think that the myth “Debian and its mailing lists are mostly about flames” can be seen as dispelled in the meantime. Sure, sometimes the tone could be a bit more civil, but in general most of the interactions I’ve seen in the last years were friendly and helpful. IMO, the Debian Project consists of mostly nice and cooperative people, and that’s what makes it fun for me.

Raphael: You’re one of the most dedicated participants to RCBW (Release Critical Bugs of the Week), an initiative to fix RC bugs every week. How much time do you spend on it? What would you advise to people who are considering to join the movement?

Gregor: I got into the habit of fixing RC bugs after having been invited to my first Bug Squashing Party in Munich some years ago. During this weekend I saw that fixing RC bugs can be fun, is often not that difficult, and gives a warm fuzzy feeling 🙂 I can definitely recommend attending a BSP if one happens to be organized near you.

After tasting blood at this first BSP I tried to continue looking at RC bugs, and I guess I spend something around half an hour per day on it. I usually blog about it once a week, in order to motivate others to join in.

And joining is easy: just take a look at the tips people like Zack, Vorlon, or me have written. You don’t have to be a DD to help, many of my NMUs are based on patches that others kindly prepare and send to the BTS — kudos!

Another nice aspect is that the RC bug list contains problems from different fields: general packaging problems, language-specific issues, policy violations, etc. So there’s something for everybody, and you don’t have to be an expert in all fields to fix a specific bug.

What’s rewarding about fixing RC bugs is not only the feeling of accomplishment and the knowledge about having helped the next release — I also received quite a few “Thank you” mails from maintainers who were busy at that time and appreciated the help.

Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy?

Gregor: Well, there’s not so much left of the Wheezy release cycle if we manage to freeze in June 🙂 Some quick thoughts for Wheezy and Wheezy+1:

Obviously, getting multi-arch and the hardening build flags as far as possible would be good.
What I like is the idea of the time-based freeze, and I hope it will work out in June. And then I hope that the freeze will be shorter this time than during the last 2 releases.
Unless I’m missing something, the CUT discussions have more or less died down; IMO that’s a pity because there are users who run testing and would like to avoid the several month long freeze. Maybe someone can come up with new ideas for Wheezy+1 …
Too late for broad adoption in Wheezy but still: What constantly annoys me is the handling of conffiles during upgrades (when I want to keep changed values but at the same time want to add new variables). Config::Model seems to be the best idea so far for configuration upgrades but it’s not yet widely adopted.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?

Gregor: There are many people in Debian I admire, too many to name them all. The first one that comes to my mind is Russ Allbery who not only does great work from lintian to Debian policy but who also sets a great example of communicating in a perfectly polite and respectful way even in heated discussions.

Thank you to Gregor for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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