Contributing – Page 2

Journey of a new GNOME 3 Debian packager

April 11, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

With all the buzz around GNOME 3, I really wanted to try it out for real on my main laptop. It usually runs Debian Unstable but that’s not enough in this case, GNOME 3 is not fully packaged yet and it’s only in experimental for now.

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.

7 mistakes to avoid when participating to Debian mailing lists

February 24, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

You’re eager to start contributing to Debian, your first action is to subscribe to some high-profile mailing lists (like debian-devel and debian-project) to get a feel of the community. You read the mails for a few days and then you find out that you could participate to the discussions, it’s a simple first step after all. True enough.

That said, it’s not as easy as it looks like. There are many mistakes that you should avoid:

Don’t fall in the trap where your mailing list participation is your sole contribution to Debian. If you want people to give credit to your messages, you should already be doing something else for Debian.
Don’t participate more than once a day to a given thread. There are many people subscribed, you should leave room for other people to express their point of view. You can always follow up one day after and reply to several messages at once if you believe you still have something new to add to the discussion.
Don’t reply to off-topic threads. Someone asked a simple question and someone else pointed out that his message was off-topic. Don’t reply, or if you really need to, do it on the correct list or with a private response.
Don’t ask questions unless it’s useful to bring the discussion forward. Development lists are not here to fill the gaps in your knowledge. We already have debian-mentors for this. Furthermore there’s no better way to learn than to find yourself the answers to your questions. 🙂
Don’t believe your opinion is so important. We’re all very opinionated and discussions that consist only of contradicting opinions tend to go nowhere. Thus don’t give your opinion unless you can back it up with new facts or another experience.
Don’t participate to all threads. There are surely some topics where you are more knowledgeable than others, participate where you add the most value and leave the others threads to the other experts (and learn by reading them).
Don’t hide your identity. In Debian we like to know each other. Use your real name and not some anonymous nickname. You need to be able to stand up behind your words, otherwise you’re not credible.

I have myself been guilty of several of those when I started… I invite you to follow my recommendations to ensure our mailing lists remain pleasant to read and an effective discussion place.

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Librement: a new way to help people who want to contribute to free software

December 3, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Find your way in the free software world I have this project in my head, I want to work on it but I always lack the time. In order to go forward, I thought I could write about it, at least it would let me clarify my ideas and the core goals. So here I am, I will present you Librement (I have registered the alioth project but it’s empty).

The core goal is to make it easy for every user to contribute to free software in some way. I will now present the main features that I envision.

Defining skills and interests

In order to propose tasks that the user can do, we must have an idea of his skills. So on the first run (and later through a preferences menu) the user will be invited to define his skills:

his native languages (multiple allowed)
other languages he can understand
programming languages he knows
version control systems he can use
markup language he knows (HTML, DocBook, Wiki-like formats, etc.)
etc.

Maybe we can also ask which skills he would like to learn. Because contributing to free software is a nice opportunity to learn new skills!

We should also find out what the user is interested in. What are his favorite free software projects? What kind of contributions would he like to do (documentation, translation, coding, bug fixing, bug triaging, creating artwork, donations, etc.)?

Choose activities and pick concrete tasks

Based on the user’s skills and his interests, the software shows a list of possible activities. The user can then sort that list, from the most interesting one to those that he doesn’t want to do.

Each activity can generate concrete tasks. For example, the activity “Do translation for Debian” could generate a task “Translate strings in debconf/fr.po” or “Review translations in partman/fr.po”.

Work on tasks

When the user decides to work on a task, a step-by-step assistant helps him/her. It can automate some steps and provide explanations for the remaining ones, for example in the case of a translation for Debian:

grab the PO file (from a VCS, from an HTTP URL, from a translation server, etc.);
select and install a software to work with PO file (if not already done);
edit the PO file with the preferred program;
check the PO file (is it complete? is there no mistakes like missing substitutions?);
send back the completed PO file in a mail to the Debian bugtracking system.

If the tasks is not completed in one go, the user can resume it the next time.

Each free software project must provide some meta-information describing the various workflows involved for contributing to the different parts of the project. If necessary the project can also provide new plugins to support new operations that are not available in the default library.

Setting goals

In order to keep the user motivated, the software could track how much time he spent contributing to free software and it could verify if the user reached the goals he picked up for himself. Maybe it can also hook into the OMG Trophy Awarding System.

The sky is the limit

I hope that you now have a clearer idea of what this desktop application is supposed to be. There are literally hundreds of ways to contribute to free software and I like the idea that we can streamline the process for most users.

All the plugins implementing activities can use local information (list of packages installed with their versions, configuration settings, etc.) to propose tasks targetted to the user and highly beneficial for the corresponding free software projects. For example, a bug tagged unreproducible might benefit from a few more users trying to reproduce it. The software could direct the user to this bug report if it detects that he/she runs the same version on the same architecture and that this software is regularly run on the system.

Many projects have created “operations” or “events” to encourage people to contribute, they could all be implemented as dedicated activities in Librement. I’m thinking of stuff like Gnome Love, Ubuntu’s 5-a-day, Ubuntu’s 100 papercuts, etc.

Even for people who have no time to contribute, the application can still be useful by referencing the various ways to donate money (or material) to projects that they are using.

Feedback welcome

I’m excited by the potential of such an application, but it’s normal since it’s my idea. Do you believe it can be useful and popular? Do you have ideas of exciting activities that such a framework can offer?

PS: If you wonder how I came up with the name “Librement”, here’s the explanation. It’s a French word which means “freely”. And users who want to give back are trying to live up to the principles of free software, which I sum up by “they are trying to live freely”.

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