Interview – Page 4

People behind Debian: Martin Michlmayr, former Debian Project Leader

July 21, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Martin Michlmayr is a Debian developer since 2000 and I share quite a few things with him, starting with his age and involvement in the quality assurance team. He managed to be elected Debian Project Leader in 2003 and 2004.

He’s no longer as active as he used to be but his input is always very valuable and he continues to do very interesting things in particular concerning the support of NAS devices. Read on for the details.

Raphael: Who are you?

Martin: I’m Martin Michlmayr. I’m 32, originally from Austria, and currently living in the UK.

I’ve contributed to various free software projects over the years but Debian is without doubt the one I’m most passionate about. I joined Debian in 2000 when I was a student. I worked on Debian more or less full time for a few years while I was pretending to study. Later I started a PhD to do research about quality and management aspects of volunteer free software projects. I investigated the release process in several free software projects, in particular looking at time-based releases. After finishing my PhD in 2007, I joined Hewlett-Packard. I’m part of HP’s Open Source Program Office and work on various free software and open source activities, both internally and within the community.

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Martin: I first used Debian in the days of 0.93R6, some time around the end of 1995. The 0.93R6 release was still based on a.out but I needed an ELF-based system for some application, so I moved to Slackware. I then quickly moved to Red Hat Linux where I stayed for several years. I rediscovered Debian in 2000 and quickly decided to join the project. I cannot recall how I rediscovered Debian but when I did, it was clear to me that Debian was the ideal project for me: I could identify with its philosophy, I liked the volunteer nature of the project, and I found the size and diversity of Debian interesting since a large project offers a lot of different challenges and opportunities.

I remember how many new things there were to learn and back then the documentation and other resources for new contributors were nowhere as good as they are today. My application manager, Julian Gilbey, was a great help… he was incredibly friendly and passionate about Debian. I also remember meeting up with Peter Palfrader (weasel) for key signing when we were both in the New Maintainer queue. I was incredibly lucky with my New Maintainer process and soon became an official Debian Developer. Because there was a shortage of application managers, my first major contribution in Debian was to become an application manager myself and help other people join the project.

Debian is a large project with a long history and a rich culture, so new contributors should expect that it will take some time to become familiar with everything. Fortunately, there are many resources, such as documentation and the debian-mentors list, for new contributors. Another great way to become familiar with the way things are done in Debian is to subscribe to various Debian mailing lists and ideally to read some mailing list archives. It’s also a great idea to attend the Debian Conference or other conferences since meeting people in real life is a great way to integrate. I remember attending Debian Conference 1 in Bordeaux where I gave my first public talk.

Finally, new contributors should find an area where they can make a unique contribution. Most people in Debian maintain packages but there are so many other ways to contribute. For example, most of my contributions were not technical but were about coordination and other organizational activities.

Raphael: What’s your biggest achievement within Debian?

Martin: I’m particularly proud of a number of achievements:

New Maintainer: I helped a lot of people join Debian. It’s great to help someone join the project and then see how they contribute. Of course, some people join Debian and then quickly become inactive or retire… you never know in advance how it will work out. But I had the pleasure to help some truly outstanding contributors to join Debian.
Quality Assurance: I helped improve QA processes within Debian. In particular, I realized a few years ago that a lot of packages had maintainers who were inactive and that nobody did anything about it. I started to write to those maintainers to see what could be done. It’s hard because you don’t know the circumstance of someone… they may be inactive because of an illness or for other good reasons… so you have to be friendly, but yet persistent. Fortunately, most maintainers I contacted were truly inactive and so they couldn’t complain when I took their packages away.
DPL: I acted as the Debian Project Leader for two years. I’m particularly proud of this because Debian is a great project and it was an honour to represent it. I performed important organizational and coordination tasks. I also traveled to a lot of conferences and had the pleasure to meet many Debian Developers as well as users of Debian. It’s very motivating to meet users and to hear how they use Debian and how we can further improve it.
Debian on NAS: Debian is without the doubt the Linux distro with the best support for NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. I was always impressed by what the OpenWRT folks have done to support wireless routers and wanted to do something similar for Debian. Unfortunately, wireless routers just don’t have enough storage for a full distro. But then NAS devices came along and they obviously have enough space since they are meant for storage.

Raphael: Speaking about NAS devices: what exactly are you doing on this topic and how can people help?

Martin: There are plenty of instructions on the Internet to install Linux distributions on NAS or various embedded devices by connecting a serial console and then typing in hundreds of commands. What I found is that such instructions significantly limit the user base because they are way too complicated for most users. There are just too many steps that can go wrong.

So instead, in Debian, we provide a solution that just works: usually, you download a firmware image for your NAS device from Debian and when you upgrade you get the Debian installer. You connect to the installer via SSH and perform a normal installation. The installer knows about the device and will prepare everything for you automatically… for example, it knows if the device has requirements for the partition layout and it will install the kernel where the device expects to find it; unfortunately, NAS devices are not like PCs, so the requirements are different for almost every device and therefore you need special code to support a new device. Finally, there are detailed installation guides and we provide help on our mailing lists.

There are a number of technical areas for improvement. The installation could be made even easier, and it would be nice to support new platforms and devices.

A bigger problem is that while we’ve implemented a great solution for NAS devices, we haven’t really extended this work to support other classes of devices. For example, tablets and mobile phones are getting incredibly popular and we don’t have a compelling solution for such devices, mostly because of the lack of an appropriate GUI.

Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?

Martin: I’ve recently been asked by Stefano Zacchiroli, our current Debian Project Leader, to coordinate the care-taking of Debian finances. Debian, as a volunteer project, relies on donations and in-kind gifts (e.g. hardware) to maintain its infrastructure and to support various development efforts, such as funding sprints and other developer gatherings. Debian’s money and other assets are held by affiliate organizations around the world.

My responsibility will be to keep track of money and other assets (e.g. hardware and trademarks), work with the DPL to establish procedures related to the use of Debian’s assets, and make sure that the procedures are followed. Finally, we want to publish public statements so our donors know how we use their donations to further improve Debian. I just started working on this and this will be my main activity in Debian in the coming months.

Raphael: Speaking of money, I plan to run a fundraising to get the Debian book I wrote with Roland Mas translated (cf. https://debian-handbook.info). Is this something Debian should support?

Martin: First of all, I should make it clear that I don’t decide how Debian spends its money. This is up to the DPL to decide together with the project at a whole. I’ll just make sure that procedures are followed and expenses tracked and reported properly.

Having said that, in my opinion, it’s unlikely that Debian as a project will fund this effort. It would be inconsistent with the position of the project not to fund work directly (only some related expenses, such as travel costs to allow Debian teams to organize face-to-face meetings). Whether Debian should support the fundraising effort by helping to promote it is another question and that’s probably not as clear cut. It looks like a worthwhile effort, but on the other hand it would be unfair for authors of other Debian books for Debian to put its weight behind one… and there are many other efforts that are worth promoting… if you promote one, where do you stop? So while it sounds worthwhile, it’s probably better for Debian to stay out of it.

But somehow related to this, I sometimes worry about the fact that there are so few paid opportunities around Debian. If you contribute to the Linux kernel for a while, you have an excellent chance to get hired by someone and to work on the kernel full time. The kernel may be an extreme example but there are a lot of projects that have more paid opportunities than Debian, e.g. Mono, GNOME, OpenOffice/LibreOffice and KDE.

Obviously, there are some Debian Developers who can spend some time on Debian as part of their job. I know that some Canonical employees contribute to Debian, that support companies like credativ improve Debian as part of their work, and that system administrators fix bugs or package new software as they deploy Debian. But I think this is a minority of contributors and even they don’t work full time on Debian. Instead what I see is that a lot of people leave university, get a job and then no longer have time for Debian… or people start a family and no longer have time. I can take myself as an example since I don’t have nearly as much time as I did in the past when I was a student.

I guess there are different ways to deal with this problem… one would be to create more paid opportunities around Debian outside the project, another one might be to make it easier for new volunteers to join the project. I don’t have the answers to these questions… but it’s something I wonder about, and I also wonder whether pure volunteer projects can still keep up with projects with a lot of full time contributors.

Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year?

Martin: Debian is a great project with a great mission, goals and people. I contribute to make Debian a better solution and to promote the free software philosophy. Finally, the community around Debian provides a lot of motivation. It’s amazing how much I’ve learned about other cultures because of my involvement in Debian and how many friends I’ve made over the years all around the world.

Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy?

Martin: Not really. I’m pretty happy with the way things are going at the moment. We have made a lot of organizational changes in the last few years from which the project has greatly benefited. I’m particularly pleased about the plans to adopt a time-based freeze.

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

Martin: There are many people I admire greatly. I’d like to mention Joey Hess because he’s a great example to follow. He doesn’t get involved in politics, is easy to work with and does great technical work. In fact, he has made not one but several contributions that have completely changed Debian (debconf, debhelper, and debian-installer). Furthermore, Debian has a lot of contributors who have done great work over the years but who are not very vocal about it. People like Colin Watson or Peter Palfrader. Debian has many unique contributors and the list of people I admire is much longer than the few people I just mentioned.

Thank you to Martin for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. He raised some interesting questions.

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.

People behind Debian: Sam Hartman, Kerberos package maintainer

June 24, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Sam Hartman is a Debian developer since 2000. He has never taken any sort of official role within Debian (that is besides package maintainer), yet I know him for his very thoughtful contributions to discussions both on mailing lists and IRL during Debconf.

Until I met him at Debconf, I didn’t know that he was blind, and the first reaction was to be impressed because it must be some tremendous effort to read the volume of information that Debian generates on mailing lists. In truth he’s at ease with his computer much like I am although he uses it in a completely different way. Read on to learn more, my questions are in bold, the rest is by Sam.

Raphael: Who are you?

Sam: I’m Sam Hartman. I’m a 35-year-old software engineer. I am a principal consultant and co-owner of a small consulting company, called Painless Security. I started using Debian in the mid 1990’s around the time of the bo release. I ended up deciding to join the project as a developer in 2000.

Raphael: You’re blind and yet you’re using your computer as effectively as I am. Can you explain us how you setup your computer ?

Sam: I gave a talk at Debconf9 on how my computer is set up; you can watch the video for full details.

My main laptop runs Debian. I use the gnome-orca package as my primary screen reader. It speaks the Gnome desktop. It does a relatively good job of speaking Iceweasel/Firefox and Libreoffice.

While it does speak gnome-terminal, it’s not really good enough at speaking terminal programs that I am comfortable using it. So, I run Emacs with the Emacspeak package. Within that, I run the Emacs terminal emulator, and within that, I tend to run Screen. For added fun, I often run additional instances of Emacs within the inner screens.

Raphael: Are there important problems in Debian in terms of accessibility to blind people?

KDE documentation talks a lot about accessibility, but at least for blind users, the code completely fails to deliver. That means there are a lot of good packages a blind user cannot use.

The non-free Adobe Flash player has some accessibility, but it could be a lot better. The free alternatives have none.

The free PDF readers have basically no accessibility. You can use pdftotext, but you cannot actually read a PDF in a graphical application.

It’s way too easy for a misbehaving program to lock up the entire accessibility infrastructure. Gnash is a big culprit here: if my Iceweasel starts Gnash, there’s a good chance that either Iceweasel or the entire desktop will appear to hang from an accessibility standpoint. Other programs, including gksu tend to fail in this way.

Some of the more dynamic website features like pop up menus or selection lists are really difficult to find and click without causing them to disappear. This gets better and worse over time as the accessibility support in Iceweasel changes and as websites change.

Raphael: What’s your biggest achievement within Debian?

Sam: I decided to be a Debian developer because I thought that in 2000, Debian support for using enterprise security and infrastructure software was lacking. Back then, any software that included crypto functionality was segregated into a special non-us archive. Some of the software was missing; I started by packaging MIT Kerberos for Debian. Other software had security or enterprise features disabled in the packages. At the height of working on this, I was maintaining krb5, some SASL modules, PAM, some PAM modules,OpenAFS, a version of and Ssh with Kerberos support.

I was also involved in the effort to resolve the legal issues so that we could move security software into the main archive. I think this work has been a huge success. In fact, it’s been such a success that other people are now doing most of the work. I still maintain the krb5 package. When I started I felt like I was pushing against the flow trying to get people to add patches, sometimes even having to fork a package. However, now, I can maintain just one component and there are enough others who shared my original goal that the work continues.

These days, I’m working on something that’s an evolution of this enterprise security work. I’m packaging Project Moonshot for Debian and Ubuntu. Project Moonshot is a response to the wide variety of identity management systems such as OpenID, Oauth, SAML, and the like. Moonshot works to create an identity management approach that works well both for the web and for client-server and other applications.

The project is a lot of fun, but the role of Debian in the project is also interesting. One of the things we want to show with Moonshot is how our technology can be effective when it is integrated throughout a platform. To really show the potential it needs to work with as many applications in a given platform as possible.

The open and collaborative nature of the Debian community makes it possible to introduce a new technology and have that technology evaluated based on its merits. We don’t need huge business relationships or marketing deals to integrate our technology: we need some combination of doing the work ourselves and showing others the benefits of working with us. For someone trying to do innovative work, the Debian model is powerful.

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

Sam: I’d really love to work with the embedded Debian folks. The vision of a single source base that could be the stack from devices from small embedded devices all the way up to high-end servers is very appealing. Doing that with Debian involves a number of challenges. However with the right people working on meeting these challenges full-time, I think we could offer something promising. I’d also love to have the time to contribute to project infrastructure: working on the release team, helping ftpmaster, that sort of thing. However I don’t. I’m just happy that so much of my consulting practice involves working on open-source software.

Raphael: What’s the biggest problem of Debian?

Sam: There’s something really not right about how we transition libraries from unstable to testing. Every time I get involved in a library transition I’m shocked at how complicated it is and how disruptive it is both to testing and unstable. We need to look at technology and processes to break up the dependency snarles. For example we don’t have good archive tools for keeping old versions of libraries around to ease transitions.

If you haven’t thought about this issue you’ll probably say that I’m being overly picky and this can’t be the major problem for Debian. However, if you think about how much this impacts our ability to introduce things into unstable around the times of the freeze or about how much it slows the release process, you may begin to appreciate how big of an issue this is.

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

Sam: There are a number of people who have been role models for me over the years. Anthony Towns really helped me understand a lot of what drives free-software projects and what needs to be true for positive motivation. Joey Hess showed us all that sometimes, social problems do have technical solutions. If the tools are so good that doing the right thing is far easier than any other course of action, quality improves.

Thank you to Sam 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.

People behind Debian: Philipp Kern, Stable Release Manager

June 10, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Philipp is a Debian developer since 2005 and a member of the release team since 2008. Since he took the responsibility of Stable Release Manager, the process has evolved for the best. I asked him to explain how the release team decides what’s fit for stable or not.

His work on the buildd infrastructure is also admirable but I’ll let him describe that. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Philipp.

Who are you?

I’m a 24 year old Computer Science student, living in Karlsruhe, Germany. As a student assistant I’m currently in two jobs: one is taking care of getting our university IPv6 network in shape, or rather generally getting fringe technologies into the network. The second is taking care of a s390x machine in the basement which my faculty got sponsored recently. In my spare time I tend my Debian duties and I’m active in the student council (Fachschaft) as a sys-admin, software developer and until recently as treasurer.

I got accepted as a Debian Developer in 2005. I’m only really active since I was invited to join the Release Team in early 2008 after I contributed rewrites of some scripts that got lost in a disk crash of ftp-master. In late 2008 I also took on wanna-build/buildd duties.

What’s your notable achievement within Debian?

For one I worked on the deployment of a single buildd/sbuild combination over all of our buildds and I rebased it on the sbuild in the archive several times already. All buildds basically look the same on all architectures, with only few variations. The chroots are now also created in a mostly predictable manner.

Then we finally got build autosigning after years of constant poking. However the policy decision to allow it was made by the ftp-masters anyway, for which I’m grateful, as it eases the workload of the buildd maintainers, the Security Team and the Release Team quite a bit.

On the release side there’s the integration of volatile into the proper structures of Debian. But there I’m guilty for choosing the bad name squeeze-updates is, in comparision with security’s squeeze/updates. Let’s see if we can improve that for wheezy.

The policy for stable updates have changed over time. Can you summarize what kind of updates are allowed nowadays?

All the changes that were made to the policy were driven by the aim to keep stable (and to some lesser degree oldstable) usable throughout its lifetime.

I have to admit that we got slightly more liberal in what we accept since I took over. The previous stable update policy included the fixes of critical bugs that break the system in interesting ways and security fixes. We also opened up the possibility of including important fixes for annoying bugs on a case-by-case basis.

The whole “don’t update that much” part of the stable release management is rooted in “let’s don’t change the behaviour of a running system” and “let’s have as few regressions as possible”. We currently try to counter that with a review process that only allows self-contained fixes that were tested in unstable first, if applicable.

In the future I’d also like to have a feedback process that includes the users of the packages to report problems more early. In fact that’s also why we now send calls for testing to debian-stable-announce one week in advance (see this mail as an example).

So stable is updated through point releases that happen roughly every two months for stable and roughly every four for oldstable. They are accompanied by announcements and new CD/DVD sets.

To be able to push some updates with less delay to our users and to avoid that they have to pick them from proposed-updates, there is stable-updates. The current policy for this suite is available in this post on debian-devel-announce. It boils down to everything urgent like tzdata, regression fixes and volatile packages. We noticed that some packages in stable just weren’t useful anymore when they got updated through volatile. Hence those are folded into stable, too. We also relaxed the rules a bit so that leaf packages like clive, that rely on external websites not to change their URLs, can be updated too.

If somebody wonders what happened to the “and a half” releases… Those were intended to mark the inclusion of new hardware support (mostly by including a co-installable new kernel version). This kind of flag point release is thankfully no longer needed because our marvellous kernel team now backports certain hardware drivers to the kernel version in stable. They have some trouble soliciting test feedback for them, though. It would be cool if more people using stable could respond to their calls for testing.

What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?

Luckily the wanna-build/buildd side isn’t much dependent on release cycles. The stable release management also just takes care of what gets dumped on them by the testing RMs. 😉

The near-term goals are certainly:

getting d-i to use some development process in the archive that’s compatible with the normal flow of packages into testing and
hopefully getting wanna-build to use a sane SQL layout and hence better performance

Apart from that my work is mainly squashing the bugs on buildd.debian.org for the wanna-build part, so if you want something fixed, you need to report it, I’m afraid.

You have several roles within Debian, in particular stable release manager and member of the wanna-build team. Which role do you enjoy more and why?

So the regular duties of the SRM, apart from setting up policies, are reviewing requests for uploads to proposed-updates, accepting them, chasing builds and scheduling point releases. It’s mainly steady work. As for the Release Team it’s working in a fabulous team where everyone’s doing an awesome job.

For me the wanna-build role is holding the things together and fixing up stuff that breaks while the world continues to evolve. And occassionally taking a stab at the ftp-masters. So rather… different.

My heart is probably siding with the buildd side because it’s infrastructure but release work is fun, too.

What’s the biggest problem of Debian?

Mainly that we’re not quick in picking up new technologies and that we got slow on innovation. Distro-wide changes are usually a very big effort to coordinate and to finally complete. I guess people should be able to push fixes for release goals more eagerly into the archive.

Also it seems to me that many DDs are actually disengaging from the release process, especially during the freeze but also before, which makes me a bit sad. However I’m still not sure how we could counter that. As we’re all volunteers you can’t suddenly make others love the idea of releasing something together, I guess.

Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy?

It’s getting old, but there’s certainly multiarch. Also a usable Python 3 is something I’d really appreciate.

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

Peter Palfrader did an awesome job of getting a nicely working team together for DSA and got many tasks as automated as they are now. It’s a pleasure to work with them and setting up a new buildd is, for example, a real breeze. He also developed a sane archive snapshot service, kudos for that.

Thank you to Philipp 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.

People behind Debian: Steve Langasek, release wizard

May 6, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

Steve Langasek has been contributing to Debian for more than a decade. He was a release manager for sarge and etch, and like many former release managers, he’s still involved in the Debian release team although as a release wizard (i.e. more of an advisory role than a day-to-day contributor). Oh, and he did the same with Ubuntu: on the picture on the left, he just announced the release of Ubuntu 10.04 from his Debian-branded laptop. 😉

He has also been maintaining PAM in Debian for as long as can I remember and does a great job at that. He’s very knowledgeable and fully deserves his place within the Debian Technical Committee. I’m glad he still has the time to participate on several important Debian mailing lists because his contributions are always very useful.

I’m sure you’ll notice this just by reading his answers below. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Steve.

Who are you?

I’m 32 years old, have been running Linux since my first year in college back in ’96, and have been a Debian developer now for ten years. Along the way I’ve been involved in maintaining a variety of server packages, worked on the Alpha port for a while, did a stint as a release manager for a couple of years, and serve on the technical committee.

This year I’m also celebrating my ten year anniversary with my lovely wife Patty, who many know as an erstwhile front-desk volunteer at DebConf. God only knows why she puts up with my late-night hacking!

These days in my day job I’m a manager on the Ubuntu Platform team at Canonical, working to help make Ubuntu a daughter distribution that the Debian community can be proud of.

What’s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu?

There’s no doubt that my biggest achievement in Debian has been overseeing the release of two Debian releases as release manager.

On the other hand, the scope of a release is so huge, and it represents the output of so many developers working together, that it would be arrogant to claim the release itself as an achievement of my own. Also, sarge and etch have long since been rotated off of the mirrors so no one cares about them anymore. 😉 For a more personal and lasting contribution in the distro itself, I’m very proud of writing pam-auth-update. It’s a small piece of code, but one that Debian was missing for a long time – it’s made a big difference to PAM module integration in packages!

What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?

My top priority for this cycle is to see multiarch through. We’re still not far enough along in Debian for most developers to see any difference… and once we are, the first thing people are going to see is a fair bit of breakage when we start breaking a lot of assumptions about paths that have been hard-coded upstream. But I’m still excited by the progress that is being made here. We should be able to ship wheezy without any ia32-libs package. We might even be able to get rid of all the biarch library packages, including those used by the toolchain itself. 54 packages in testing build-depend on gcc-multilib right now, in order to build 32-bit code to ship in the amd64 package; a bunch of those should go away with absolutely no reduction in functionality, saving us a bit of space in the archive and saving the maintainers a lot of complexity in their packages, while at the same time giving us much better support for cross-compilation than we’ve ever had before.

It’s a tall order, certainly, but the pieces are falling into place one by one.

My second priority is to get a policy in Debian around packages integrating upstart jobs. It would of course benefit Ubuntu to have many packages back in sync with Debian, but if all we wanted was to sync with Debian, we could mostly just make debhelper ignore upstart jobs in Debian, prefer them in Ubuntu, and call it good. I’m interested in making sure Debian also gets the benefits of being able to use upstart, because as Linux has become increasingly asynchronous (doing more in parallel at start up), the traditional sysvinit has not been able to keep up. There are all kinds of bugs now related to network startup, for instance, that we don’t have a good answer for in a sysvinit model but that we can fix with an event-based system.

Upstart has been around for a while now, but we’ve been slow to integrate it into Debian because it only works on Linux. It would be a shame if right after the first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD technology preview, packages all stopped working on kFreeBSD because they started to assume the availability of upstart! Unfortunately, having been so cautious we now have systemd on the scene, which not only doesn’t support non-Linux but seems to be in the process of trying to gobble up other, non-Linux-specific components of the desktop stack. So I have to wonder what the future holds for the free desktop on non-Linux kernels.

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

Well, based on my previous experiences when I did spend all my time on Debian, I think the answer here is QA / release work. 🙂 Otherwise, I don’t know. My hands are full enough now with multiarch that it’s hard for me to see what the Next Thing would be.

You’re a member of the technical committee. In the interview of Bdale Garbee, I have argued that it’s not working well. What’s your point of view on this topic?

Well, I feel a constant low level guilt about my own poor level of activity in the TC; but that doesn’t translate into a belief that the system is broken. This is, after all, the decision making body of last resort for technical disputes in Debian, and as such it should really be used sparingly. And if a reputation for glacial deliberation means more developers work out their disputes on their own rather than asking the TC to step in, I think that’s actually a healthy thing!

I do still wish we were more effective at resolving those issues that do come our way, but there’s no silver bullet for this. Though the funny thing is, I’ve noticed that the majority of issues that get referred to the TC nowadays never even need us to make a decision; a short conversation with the disputants is often enough to get them to come to an agreement.

What’s the biggest problem of Debian?

By and large, I think Debian is still doing a great job at what it’s best at — delivering a rock-solid distribution that users can rely on. If I would highlight one problem in Debian, though, it would be that I think we’re becoming less innovative as time goes on. Part of that comes from being such a large project that we’re bound to be more conservative as an institution; but even though the three pet Debian projects of mine that I mentioned above are fairly innovative (multiarch, pam-auth-update, upstart), each of these has landed first in Ubuntu rather than in Debian. Always with a clear intent of pushing back up into Debian, of course, but it just wasn’t possible to do this work within Debian for the first cut without much longer delays.

I worry that if Debian is no longer the place to try new things, that we’re going to miss out on attracting contributions from the folks who are inspired to make Free Software better – and not simply to make it stable.

I’m not sure how to address this, though. Maybe improved conversations with derivatives such as (but not limited to) Ubuntu, about what crack of the day is being tried where and how that can be integrated into Debian once it’s proven to work? I don’t think that team-based maintenance or low-threshold NMUs do anything to address this, though, as the kinds of innovation that matter most are ones that require discussion and consensus-finding — not just routing around inactive maintainers.

Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy?

Well, I’d like to see the armhf port get on its feet and become an official port. Over the lifetime of the arm and armel ports, the state of the art on ARM has changed quite a bit; it would be great to see Debian taking advantage of this richer platform, to let people make better use of their hardware via Debian.

As a former release manager, you’re now a “release wizard”. I guess you have seen it on debian-devel, there are proposals to not freeze testing and to use another distribution starting as a snapshot of testing to finalize the new stable release. According to your experience, what needs to happen to make this possible?

Frankly, I’ve stayed out of that discussion because I don’t think what’s being asked for is possible. I think proponents of a freezeless release have seriously underestimated the amount of work required on the part of the release team to wrangle testing into a releasable product, and that anything that makes propagation of fixes into the pending release more time consuming will make Debian worse on the whole, not better.

If people really want to avoid long freezes for the Debian release, the best way they can help this happen is by making Debian more releasable on an ongoing basis, by helping to hold our packages to our shared standards for quality (i.e., by fixing RC bugs!). The biggest factor in long freezes for Debian is the slow rate at which we bring the RC bug count down during the freeze. Back in the sarge, etch days we used to have really great bug squashing parties that would get people together on weekends to hack through RC bugs by the dozens. I don’t see that happening as much anymore. I’d really like us to get back to that, but my few attempts at this so far since retiring as release manager have led me to think I’m really terrible at organizing parties of any kind. 🙂

On the other side, as seen at http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/, the RC bug count for testing at the beginning of the release cycle keeps getting higher and higher. I’d love to know why that is so we can address it. I know we’ve gotten better at detecting some classes of RC bugs; that’s part of it, but I don’t think it explains the whole trend.

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

Wow, what kind of arrogant jerk would I be if I didn’t admire anyone in Debian for their contributions? Debian is and always has been an amazing community of top-notch developers; there are certainly too many I admire to list them all here. Joey Hess certainly makes the list, for his longstanding example of code speaking louder than words and for his ability to get to the heart of common problems and come up with elegant solutions. So does Russ Allbery, who by all accounts had his ability to feel anger in response to email burned out of him at a young age in a flame-related accident on Usenet. 😉 The list goes on, but here I think I have to follow Joey’s example and cut the words short.

Thank you to Steve 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.

Tags

Recent Posts