Freexian – Page 28

Spotify migrate 5000 servers from Debian to Ubuntu

July 16, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

Or yet another reason why it’s really important that we succeed with Debian LTS. Last year we heard of Dreamhost switching to Ubuntu because they can maintain a stable Ubuntu release for longer than a Debian stable release (and this despite the fact that Ubuntu only supports software in its main section, which misses a lot of popular software).

A few days ago, we just learned that Spotify took a similar decision:

A while back we decided to move onto Ubuntu for our backend server deployment. The main reasons for this was a predictable release cycle and long term support by upstream (this decision was made before the announcement that the Debian project commits to long term support as well.) With the release of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS we are now in the process of migrating our ~5000 servers to that distribution.

This is just a supplementary proof that we have to provide long term support for Debian releases if we want to stay relevant in big deployments.

But the task is daunting and it’s difficult to find volunteers to do the job. That’s why I believe that our best answer is to get companies to contribute financially to Debian LTS.

We managed to convince a handful of companies already and July is the first month where paid contributors have joined the effort for a modest participation of 21 work hours (watch out for Thorsten Alteholz and Holger Levsen on debian-lts and debian-lts-announce). But we need to multiply this figure by 5 or 6 at least to make a correct work of maintaining Debian 6.

So grab the subscription form and have a chat with your management. It’s time to convince your company to join the initiative. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have questions or if you prefer that I contact a representative of your company. Thank you!

Convince your company to contribute to Debian Long Term Support

June 19, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

The press picked up the recent press release about Debian LTS but mainly to mention the fact that it’s up and running. The call for help is almost never mentioned.

It’s a pity because while it’s up, it’s not really running satisfactorily yet. As of today (2014-06-19), 36 packages in squeeze need a security update, yet squeeze-lts has only seen 7 updates.

As usual what we lack is contributors doing the required work, but in this specific case, there’s a simple solution: pay people to do the required work. This extended support is mainly for the benefit of corporate users and if they see value in Debian LTS, it should not be too difficult to convince companies to support the project.

With some other Debian developers, we have gone out of our way to make it super easy for companies to support the Debian LTS project. We have created a service offer for Debian-using companies.

Freexian (my company) collects money from all contributing companies (by way of invoices) and then uses the money collected to pay Debian contributors who will prepare security updates. On top of this we added some concrete benefits for contributing companies such as the possibility to indicate which packages should have priority, or even the possibility to provide functional tests to ensure that a security update doesn’t introduce a regression in their production setup.

To make a good job of maintaining Debian Squeeze, our goal is to fund the equivalent of a full-time position. We’re currently far from there with only 13 hours per month funded by 4 companies. That makes a current average of 3.25 hours/month funded by each contributing company, for a price of 276 EUR/month or 3315 EUR/year.

This is not much if you compare it with the price those companies would have to pay to upgrade all their Debian 6 machines now instead of keeping them for two supplementary years.

Assuming the average contribution level will stay the same, we only need the support of 50 other companies in the world. That’s really not much compared to the thousands of companies using Debian. Can you convince your own company? Grab the subscription form and have a chat with your company management.

Help us reach that goal, share this article and the link to Freexian’s Debian LTS offer. Long Term Support is important if we want Debian to be a good choice for servers and big deployments. We need to make Squeeze LTS a success!

Thank you!

My Debian activities in June 2011

July 3, 2011 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 (195 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dropbox for Debian

This is not free software but Dropbox is very popular and they did only provide an Ubuntu package that did not work on Debian. So I created an official package.

I have been in touch with Dropbox developers and they have been very helpful. They’ll shortly release a signature mechanism (with GPG) so that we can further improve the package by verifying the origin of the downloaded binaries.

SAT Britney

At the start of the month, I continued my work on the britney reimplementation (the software that creates testing out of unstable) but I quickly stalled it because the release managers asked the feedback of Stefano Zacchiroli and Ralf Treinen (who have extensive knowledge on the topic with their research work on Mancoosi) and I did not want to invest further work in case they would identify a major flow… the feedback came only very late this month and while it was somewhat negative, I still think it’s worth pursuing the effort for a bit longer.

Converted ftplib to multiarch

While dpkg still doesn’t support multiarch (no news from Guillem and no visible sign of progress :-(), unstable got all the remaining bits allowing us to convert libraries to multiarch (see the announce). As soon as the required libc6 landed in unstable, I looked into converting the only library package that I maintain. I had no major problem but I still identified 2 issues in Lintian (filed as #630164 and quickly fixed by Niels Thykier).

build-arch / build-indep support

For the 42th time in the last 10 years, the idea of using build-arch/build-indep targets in the rules file has surfaced again. I had already decided some time ago that I would accept a patch implementing a new field Build-Features to enable dpkg-buildpackage to use those targets and this time Bill Allombert completed such a patch so I merged it.

The technical committee also decided that it would take a final decision on this topic (see #629385). Roger Leigh provided useful input by doing an archive-wide rebuild with the various solutions suggested. Given that the majority would like to make the target mandatory at some point in the future, I provided the dpkg patch for my preferred solution. We would use “auto-detection” as a temporary measure until all packages have been converted to have the targets.

The technical committee has not yet taken any decision even though the discussion stalled since the 12th of June. But that’s usual with that body. I’m sure it will be solved during Debconf. 😉

Misc dpkg work

Modified dpkg-source --after-build to automatically unapply patches if they have been applied by dpkg-source --before-build.
Lots of small bug fixes (#628726, #629582, #630996, #631435, #631439, #631547, #632168) and that’s just to keep with the flow of incoming bug reports!
Added 2 supplementary Perl modules to the supported API for the benefit of Lintian.
Spent an evening to track down the possible causes of an long-standing and annoying assertion failure related to triggers.
Updated my branch with improved triggers directives to take into account the feedback of Guillem, and merged it.
While doing this I discovered a design flaw with the usage of “prerm failed-upgrade” and merged a fix.
Discussed integration of dpkg-buildflags with debhelper in #544844 and decided of further improvements for dpkg-buildflags as a result.

Hamster applet update

Hamster-applet is a GNOME application which did not have a 3.0 release, but it had a development release (2.91.x). I checked out whether it was possible to package this version for experimental and have the applet work with the GNOME fallback mode. Apparently not, the code was not yet updated to be compatible with the newer panel.

Instead I uploaded the latest stable version (2.32.1) to unstable. It has some nice improvements in the standalone version (and the name of the executable changed). For usage with GNOME 3, I have created a custom shortcut to start it quickly (with gconf-editor set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 to “<Mod4>t” and /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 to “hamster-time-tracker” because the GNOME 3 control panel does not seem to work to set custom keybindings currently).

Translated my professional website into English

While I’m grateful for all the people who are supporting my work, I’m still far from my goal to have one third of my time funded through donations and sales of products on this blog.

So I decided to also bring more visibility to my company and in particular to its Debian-related service offering. It was only available in French up to now so I translated it and expanded it a bit. My “support page” on this blog now also links to my company’s website.

If your company needs help to create Debian packages, or needs Debian technical support by email, you just found the right partner. 🙂

BTW, I have discounted prices for individuals and non-profits who would like to benefit from my help to create Debian packages.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

This is the title of the upcoming translation of my book. The project now has a dedicated website: debian-handbook.info.

You can subscribe to its RSS feed to keep up with the latest news. The full table of contents is online along with a FAQ.

I’m actively looking for partners to help me promote the fundraising once it goes live. If you can reach a large set of readers interested by a good Debian book, get in touch with me to join the affiliate program.

Thanks

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

5 years of Freexian

January 5, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

5 years ago I founded my own company Freexian SARL with the goal to make a living out of my free software experience. I marketed the company as being specialized on the Debian distribution in the hope to combine my Debian work and my professional work.

Given that Freexian is still alive I think I met the first goal. My free software experience allowed me to complete many projects: a large number of development projects for embedded devices running a custom Linux distribution (usually built with debian udebs), the development of a Debian derivative (SLIS) and some recurring tasks of remote system administration.

However, even if I use Debian daily for all my work, very few of the projects that I complete for customers have direct results in terms of improvements for Debian (except some bugreports and some related fixes). And even when I’m able to contribute something back to Debian, it’s usually not in areas that I care about.

My focus within Debian is on the technical and organizational infrastructure of the project: as a dpkg/dpkg-dev maintainer I try to improve the packaging infrastructure, as a QA member I maintain the Package Tracking System to ease collaboration, as an Alioth admin I ensure all DD can host VCS repositories for their Debian related projects, as a developers-reference co-maintainer I try to share good packaging practices, etc. Given this bias, it’s difficult to find customer projects that would let me contribute in those areas. Thus I think I need to try another approach: the simplest solution would be to find sponsors for some of my own Debian-related projects (if you have something else to suggest, please leave a comment — either in the blog or by mail).

That said finding sponsors looks like a difficult task in itself. While I can imagine (for example) a company using Debian on embedded devices that would like to sponsor the rewrite of update-alternatives in C in order to get rid of the perl dependency in the dpkg package (if you know such a company, get in touch with me!), I don’t see who would have an interest in sponsoring the time that I need to contribute new sections to the developers-reference manual. But who knows… maybe I should just try and publicly solicit sponsorship for some of the projects that I care about. In any case, suggestions and comments are welcome!