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People behind Debian: Michael Vogt, synaptic and APT developer

January 21, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Michael and his daughter Marie

Michael has been around for more than 10 years and has always contributed to the APT software family. He’s the author of the first real graphical interface to APT—synaptic. Since then he created “software-center” as part of his work for Ubuntu. Being the most experienced APT developer, he’s naturally the coordinator of the APT team. Check out what he has to say about APT’s possible evolutions.

My questions are in bold, the rest is by Michael.

Who are you?

My name is Michael Vogt, I’m married and have two little daughters. We live in Germany (near to Trier) and I work for Canonical as a software developer. I joined Debian as a developer in early 2000 and started to contribute to Ubuntu in 2004.

What’s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu?

I can not decide on a single one so I will just be a bit verbose.

From the very beginning I was interested in improving the package manager experience and the UI on top for our users. I’m proud of the work I did with synaptic. It was one of the earliest UIs on top of apt. Because of my work on synaptic I got into apt development as well and fixed bugs there and added new features. I still do most of the uploads here, but nowadays David Kalnischkies is the most active developer.

I also wrote a bunch of tools like gdebi, update-notifier, update-manager, unattended-upgrade and software-properties to make the update/install situation for the user easier to deal with. Most of the tools are written in python so I added a lot of improvements to python-apt along the way, including the initial high level “apt” interface and a bunch of missing low-level apt_pkg features. Julian Andres Klode made a big push in this area recently and thanks to his effort the bindings are fully complete now and have good documentation.

My most recent project is software-center. Its aim is to provide a UI strongly targeted for end-users. The goal of this project is to make finding and installing software easy and beautiful. We have a fantastic collection of software to offer and software-center tries to present it well (including screenshots, instant search results and soon ratings&reviews). This builds on great foundations like aptdaemon by Sebastian Heinlein, screenshots.debian.net by Christoph Haas, ddtp.debian.org by Michael Bramer, apt-xapian-index by Enrico Zini and many others (this is what I love about free software, it usually “adds”, rarely “takes away”).

What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?

For apt I would love to see a more plugable architecture for the acquire system. It would be nice to be able to make apt-get update (and the frontends that use this from libapt) be able to download additional data (like debtags or additional index file that contains more end-user targeted information). I also want to add some scripts so that apt (optionally) creates btrfs snapshots on upgrade and provide some easy way to rollback in case of problems.

There is also some interesting work going on around making the apt problem resolver a more plugable part. This way we should be able to do much faster development.

software-center will get ratings&reviews in the upstream branch, I really hope we can get that into Wheezy.

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

In that case I would start with a refactor of apt to make it more robust about ABI breaks. It would be possible to move much faster once this problem is solved (its not even hard, it just need to be done). Then I would add a more complete testsuite.

Another important problem to tackle is to make maintainer scripts more declarative. I triaged a lot of upgrade bug reports (mostly in ubuntu though) and a lot of them are caused by maintainer script failures. Worse is that depending on the error its really hard for the user to solve the problem. There is also a lot of code duplication. Having a central place that contains well tested code to do these jobs would be more robust. Triggers help us a lot here already, but I think there is still more room for improvement.

What’s the biggest problem of Debian?

That’s a hard question 🙂 I mostly like Debian the way it is. What frustrated me in the past were flamewars that could have been avoided. To me being respectful to each other is important, I don’t like flames and insults because I like solving problems and fighting like this rarely helps that. The other attitude I don’t like is to blame people and complain instead of trying to help and be positive (the difference between “it sucks because it does not support $foo” instead of “it would be so helpful if we had $foo because it enables me to let me do $bar”).

For a long time, I had the feeling you were mostly alone working on APT and were just ensuring that it keeps working. Did you also had this feeling and are things better nowadays ?

I felt a bit alone sometimes 🙂 That being said, there were great people like Eugene V. Lyubimkin and Otavio Salvador during my time who did do a lot of good work (especially at release crunch times) and helped me with the maintenance (but got interested in other area than apt later). And now we have the unstoppable David Kalnischkies and Julian Andres Klode.

Apt is too big for a single person, so I’m very happy that especially David is doing superb work on the day-to-day tasks and fixes (plus big project like multiarch and the important but not very thankful testsuite work). We talk about apt stuff almost daily, doing code reviews and discuss bugs. This makes the development process much more fun and healthy. Julian Andres Klode is doing interesting work around making the resolver more plugable and Christian Perrier is as tireless as always when it comes to the translations merging.

I did a quick grep over the bzr log output (including all branch merges) and count around ~4300 total commits (including all revisions of branches merged). Of that there ~950 commits from me plus an additional ~500 merges. It was more than just ensuring that it keeps working but I can see where this feeling comes from as I was never very verbose. Apt also was never my “only” project, I am involved in other upstream work like synaptic or update-manager or python-apt etc). This naturally reduced the time available to hack on apt and spend time doing the important day-to-day bug triage, response to mailing list messages etc.

One the python-apt side Julian Andres Klode did great work to improve the code and the documentation. It’s a really nice interface and if you need to do anything related to packages and love python I encourage you to try it. Its as simple as:

import apt
cache = apt.Cache()
cache["update-manager"].mark_install()
cache.commit()

import apt cache = apt.Cache() cache["update-manager"].mark_install() cache.commit()

Of course you can do much more with it (update-manager, software-center and lots of more tools use it). With “pydoc apt” you can get a good overview.

The apt team always welcomes contributors. We have a mailing list and a irc channel and it’s a great opportunity to solve real world problems. It does not matter if you want to help triage bugs or write documentation or write code, we welcome all contributors.

You’re also an Ubuntu developer employed by Canonical. Are you satisfied with the level of cooperation between both projects? What can we do to get Ubuntu to package new applications developed by Canonical directly in Debian?

Again a tricky question 🙂 When it comes to cooperation there is always room for improvement. I think (with my Canonical hat on) we do a lot better than we did in the past. And it’s great to see the current DPL coming to Ubuntu events and talking about ways to improve the collaboration. One area that I feel that Debian would benefit is to be more positive about NMUs and shared source repositories (collab-maint and LowThresholdNmu are good steps here). The lower the cost is to push a patch/fix (e.g. via direct commit or upload) the more there will be.

When it comes to getting packages into Debian I think the best solution is to have a person in Debian as a point of contact to help with that. Usually the amount of work is pretty small as the software will have a debian/* dir already with useful stuff in it. But it helps me a lot to have someone doing the Debian uploads, responding to the bugmail etc (even if the bugmail is just forwarded as upstream bugreports 🙂 IMO it is a great opportunity especially for new packagers as they will not have to do a lot of packaging work to get those apps into Debian. This model works very well for me for e.g. gdebi (where Luca Falavigna is really helpful on the Debian side).

Is there someone in Debian that you admire for his contributions?

There are many people I admire. Probably too many to mention them all. I always find it hard to single out individual people because the project as a whole can be so proud of their achievements.

The first name that comes to my mind is Jason Gunthorpe (the original apt author) who I’ve never met. The next is Daniel Burrows who I met and was inspired by. David Kalnischkies is doing great work on apt. From contributing his first (small) patch to being able to virtually fix any problem and adding big features like multiarch support in about a year. Sebastian Heinlein for aptdaemon.

Christian Perrier has always be one of my heroes because he cares so much about i18n. Christoph Haas for screenshots.debian.net, Michael Bramer for his work on debian translated package descriptions.


Thank you to Michael for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

Review of my Debian related goals for 2010

January 17, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Last year I shared my “Debian related goals for 2010”. I announced that I would not be able to complete them all and indeed I have not, but I have still done more than what I expected. Let’s have a look.

Translate my Debian book into English and get it published: NOT DONE

Or rather not yet done. It’s still an important project of mine and I will do it this year. When I wrote this last year, I expected to find a publisher that would take care of everything but we failed to find a suitable one so we’re going to do it ourselves.

Cleanup the dpkg perl API and create libdpkg-perl: DONE

libdpkg-perl has been introduced with dpkg 1.15.6.

Create dpkg-buildflags: DONE

dpkg-buildflags has been introduced with dpkg 1.15.7. It’s not widely used yet and it won’t really be until debhelper 7 supports it (see #544844). It would be nice to see progress on this front this year.

Ensure the new source formats continue to gain acceptance: DONE

The adoption rate has been steady, it clearly slowed down since the freeze though. I have implemented quite a few features to satisfy the needs of users, like the possibility to unapply the patches after the build, or the possibility to fail in case of unwanted upstream changes.

Design a generic vcs-buildpackage infrastructure to be integrated in dpkg-dev: NOT DONE

I believe it’s something important on the long term but it never made it to my short-term TODO list and it’s unlikely to change any time soon.

Continue fixing dpkg bugs faster than they are reported: PARTLY DONE

We have dealt with many bugs over the year, but we still have 20 more bugs than at the start of last year (370 vs 350). We’re not doing bad compared to many other Debian teams but we can still benefit from some help. Start here if you’re interested.

Enhance our infrastructure to ease interaction between contributors and to have a better view of how each package is maintained: NOT DONE

I am convinced that we need something to have a clearer idea of the commitments made by each contributor. I don’t put the same amount of care in maintaining smarty-gettext that I do on dpkg. If we had a database of the stuff that we know we don’t do well enough, it’s easier to point new contributors towards those.

Anyway, this project is still unlikely to come to the top of my priorities any time soon.

Work on the developers-reference: NOT DONE

We have switched the Maintainer field to debian-policy@lists.debian.org to have more review of the changes suggested through the bug tracking system but that has not changed much on the global situation.

I still hope to become more active on it sometimes this year. Maybe by trying to make it more fun and creating the text for some of the wishlist bugs as blog articles first.

Rewrite in C the last Perl scripts provided by the dpkg binary package: DONE

Dpkg 1.15.8 was the first version working without Perl, I announced it in July.

Integrate the 3-way merge tool for Debian changelogs in dpkg-dev: DONE

dpkg-mergechangelogs is part of dpkg-dev since 1.15.7.

I enjoy it regularly. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well for cherry-picks. Would be nice to see this fixed, anyone up to the task? 🙂

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16 Debian contributors that you can thank

January 3, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

I put 5 EUR in Flattr each month and I like to spend those among other Debian contributors. That’s why I keep a list of Debian people that I have seen on Flattr (for most of them I noticed through an article on Planet Debian).

Directory of Debian contributors that you can thank

I thought this list could be useful for others so I put it on a web page. Then I realized that limiting this to Flattr was not a good idea, and indeed several developers already propose multiple ways to be thanked.

I went back through my list and looked up each developer’s website to identify a “Thank me” page (it can be “Donate”, “Support me”, “Amazon Wishlist”, etc.). Obviously this means that Debian contributors who are not on Flattr do not appear on the initial list even if they have some “Thank me” page… please help me fix this and send me the missing entries if you know of any.

Click here to view the directory. The initial listing contains 16 developers and 8 of them have an additional (non-Flattr) “Thank me” link.

Please note the warning I put on the page: the inclusion in the directory should not be taken as an endorsement of the amount or quality of the work done for Debian. You are supposed to make up your own judgment when deciding who you want to thank (but the links can help you learn more about what each contributor is doing).

Flattr subscriptions explained

Since this article replaces the traditional Flattr FOSS issue for this month, I wanted to introduce a new Flattr feature I recently discovered.

With Flattr you have to click on some things every month or your monthly fee is given to a random charity. Now you can avoid this pitfall by “subscribing” to some things that you like. A subscription acts like an automatic click during a period of 3/6/12 months.

If you want to subscribe to something, you just have to click a second time on the Flattr button and you will see this:
Screenshot with Flattr subscription choices

Once you clicked on the desired duration, the subscription is recorded and the button will appear like this:
Screenshot with a subscribed flattr button

Easy, isn’t it?

PS: I installed a WordPress plugin to make it super easy to share my articles on the most common social networks.

People behind Debian: Mehdi Dogguy, release assistant

December 23, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Mehdi Dogguy
Picture of Mehdi taken by Antoine Madet

Mehdi is a Debian developer for a bit more than a year, and he’s already part of the Debian Release Team. His story is quite typical in that he started there by trying to help while observing the team do its work. That’s a recurrent pattern for people who get co-opted in free software teams.

Read on for more info about the release team, and Mehdi’s opinion on many topics. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Mehdi (except for the additional information that I inserted in italics).

Who are you?

I’m 27 years old. I grew up in Ariana in northern Tunisia, but have been living in Paris, France, since 2002.

I’m a PhD Student at the PPS laboratory where I study synchronous concurrent process calculi.

I became interested in Debian when I saw one of my colleagues, Samuel Mimram (first sponsor and advocate) trying to resolve #440469, which is a bug reported against a program I wrote. We have never been able to resolve it but my intent to contribute was born there. Since then, I started to maintain some packages and help where I can.

What’s your biggest achievement within Debian?

I don’t think I had time to accomplish a lot yet 🙂 I’ve been mostly active in the OCaml team where we designed a tool to compute automatically the dependencies between OCaml packages, called dh-ocaml. This was a joint work with Stéphane Glondu, Sylvain Le Gall and Stefano Zacchiroli. I really appreciated the time spent with them while developing dh-ocaml. Some of the bits included in dh-ocaml have been included upstream in their latest release.

I’ve also tried to give a second life to the Buildd Status Pages because they were (kind of) abandoned. I intend to keep them alive and add new features to them.

If you had a wand and could change one thing in Debian, what would that be?

Make OCaml part of a default Debian installation 😀

But, since I’m not a magician yet, I’d stick to more realistic plans:

  1. A lot of desktop users fear Debian. I think that the Desktop installation offered by Debian today is very user-friendly and we should be able to attract more and more desktop users. Still, there is some work to be done in various places to make it even more attractive. The idea is trying to enhance the usability and integration of various tools together. Each fix could be easy or trivial but the final result would be an improved Desktop experience for our users. Our packaged software run well. So, each person can participate since the most difficult part is to find the broken scenarios. Fixes could be found together with maintainers, upstream or other interested people.

    I’ll try to come up with a plan, a list of things that need polishing or fixes and gather a group of people to work on it. I’d definitely be interested in participating in such a project and I hope that I’ll find other people to help. If the plan is clear enough and has well described objectives and criteria, it could be proposed to the Release Team to consider it as a Release Goal for Wheezy.

  2. NMUs are a great way to make things move forward. But, sometimes, an NMU could break things or have some undesirable effects. For now, NMUers have to manually track the package’s status for some time to be sure that everything is alright. It could be a good idea to be auto-subscribed to the bugs notifications of NMUed packages for some period of time (let’s say for a month) to be aware of any new issues and try to fix them. NMUing a package is not just applying a patch and hitting enter after dput. It’s also about making sure that the changes are correct and that no regressions have been introduced, etc…
  3. Orphaned packages: It could be considered as too strict and not desired, but what about not keeping orphaned and buggy packages in Testing? What about removing them from the archive if they are buggy and still unmaintained for some period? Our ftp archive is growing. It could make sense to do some (more strict) housekeeping. I believe that this question can be raised during the next QA meeting. We should think about what we want to do with those packages before they rot in the archive.

[Raphael Hertzog: I would like to point out that pts-subscribe provided by devscripts makes it easy to temporarily subscribe to bug notifications after an Non-Maintainer Upload (NMU).]

You’re a Debian developer since August 2009 and you’re already an assistant within the Release Management team. How did that happen and what is this about?

In the OCaml team, we have to start a transition each time we upload a new version of the OCaml compiler (actually, for each package). So, some coordination with the Release Team is needed to make the transition happen.

When we are ready to upload a new version of the compiler, we ask the Release Team for permission and wait for their ack. Sometimes, their reply is fast (e.g. if their is no conflicting transition running), but it’s not always the case. While waiting for an ack, I used to check what was happening on debian-release@l.d.o. It made me more and more interested in the activities of the Release Team.

Then (before getting my Debian account), I had the chance to participate in DebConf9 where I met Luk and Phil. It was a good occasion to see more about the tools used by the Release Team. During April 2010, I had some spare time and was able to implement a little tool called Jamie to inspect the relations between transitions. It helps us to quickly see which transitions can run in parallel, or what should wait. And one day (in May 2010, IIRC), I got offered by Adam to join the team.

As members of the Release Team, we have multiple areas to work on:

  1. Taking care of transitions during the development cycle, which means making sure that some set of packages are correctly (re-)built or fixed against a specific (to each transition) set of packages, and finding a way to tell Britney that those packages can migrate and it would be great if she also shared the same opinion. [Raphael Hertzog: britney is the name of the software that controls the content of the Testing distribution.]
  2. Paying attention to what is happening in the archive (uploads, reported RC bugs, etc…). The idea is to try to detect unexpected transitions, blocked packages, make sure that RC bug fixes reach Testing in a reasonable period of time, etc…
  3. During a freeze, making sure that unblock requests and freeze exceptions are not forgotten and try to make the RC bug count decrease.

There are other tasks that I’ll let you discover by joining the game.

Deciding what goes (or not) in the next stable release is a big responsibility and can be incredibly difficult at times. You have to make judgement calls all the time. What are your own criteria?

That’s a very hard to answer question (at least, for me). It really depends on the “case”. I try to follow the criteria that we publish in each release update. Sometimes, an unblock request doesn’t match those criteria and we have to decide what to accept from the set of proposed changes. Generally, new features and non-fixes (read new upstream versions) changes are not the kind of changes that we would accept during the freeze. Some of them could be accepted if they are not intrusive, easy and well defended. When, I’m not sure I try to ask other members of the Release Team to see if they share my opinion or if I missed something important during the review. The key point is to have a clear idea on what’s the benefit of the proposed update, and compare it to the current situation. For example, accepting a new upstream release (even if it fixes some critical bugs) is taking a risk to break other features and that’s why we (usually) ask for a backported fix.

It’s also worth noticing that (most of the time) we don’t decide what goes in, but (more specifically) what version of a given package goes in and try to give to the contributors an idea on what kind of changes are acceptable during the freeze. There are some exceptions though. Most of them are to fix a critical package or feature.

Do you have plans to improve the release process for Debian Wheezy?

We do have plans to improve every bit in Debian. Wheezy will be the best release ever. We just don’t know the details yet 🙂

During our last meeting in Paris last October, the Release Team agreed to organize a meeting after Squeeze’s release to discuss (among other questions) Wheezy’s cycle. But the details of the meeting are not fixed yet (we still have plenty of time to organize it… and other more important tasks to care about). We would like to be able to announce a clear roadmap for Wheezy and enhance our communication with the rest of the project. We certainly want to avoid what happened for Squeeze. Making things a bit more predictable for developers is one of our goals.

Do you think the Constantly Usable Testing project will help?

The original idea by Joey Hess is great because it allows d-i developers to work with a “stable” version of the archive. It allows them to focus on the new features they want to implement or the parts they want to fix (AIUI). It also allows to have constantly available and working installation images.

Then, there is the idea of having a constantly usable Testing for users. The idea seems nice. People tend to like the idea behind CUT because they miss some software disappearing from Testing and because of the long delays for security fixes to reach Testing.

If the Release Team has decided to remove a package from Testing, I think that there must be a reason for that. It either means that the software is broken, has unfixed security holes or was asked for the removal by its maintainer. I think that we should better try to spend some time to fix those packages, instead of throwing a broken version in a new suite. It could be argued that one could add experimental’s version in CUT (or sid’s) but every user is free to cherry-pick packages from the relevant suite when needed while still following Testing as a default branch.

Besides, it’s quite easy to see what was removed recently by checking the archive of debian-testing-changes or by querying UDD. IMO, It would be more useful to provide a better interface of that archive for our users. We could even imagine a program that alerts the user about installed software that got recently removed from Testing, to keep the user constantly aware any issue that could affect his machine. About the security or important updates, one has to recall the existence of Testing-security and testing-proposed-updates that are used specifically to let fixes reach Testing as soon as possible when it’s not possible to go through Unstable. I’m sure that the security team would appreciate some help to deal with security updates for Testing. We also have ways to speed migrate packages from Unstable to Testing.

I have to admit that I’m not convinced yet by the benefits brought by CUT for our users.


Thank you to Mehdi for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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