The vote close in two days and we have so far only 283 votes, and last year we got 482 in the end. So we’re likely to have much less participation this year… even if you add a percentage for the people who wish to vote but cannot for various reasons (which proves once more how important it is that the next DPL be determined to fix those recurring problems), you won’t get the same numbers.

So my question is: do we have lower participation because all candidates are good and people do not care who gets elected? or do we have so many DD that follow Debian only every 2.5 weeks?

And if you haven’t voted yet, it’s time to do it.

Grab and install the package here and try building packages with dpkg-source "--format=3.0 (quilt)" -b mypackage (or any other new format). You can find more infos in the call for test on debian-dpkg (here and here). If you find regressions, please report them.

If you want to grab the latest sources, use git clone git://git.debian.org/git/dpkg/dpkg.git dpkg; cd dpkg; git checkout -b sourcev3 origin/sourcev3.

Some time ago I tried to get the ball rolling by providing a first patch in #462444. Unfortunately the glibc team has not been able to finish the work up to now and the base freeze is approaching… so it would be great if some people could jump in, make the required changes, test and propose a new (fully working) patch. I just sent a message to give some indications on how to get forward, hopefully that will help anyone who wants to tackle this.

Thank you for your help!

After noticing that the developers-reference also switched to SVN, I decided to convert the whole debian-doc CVS repository and import it in the new “ddp” SVN repository on Alioth. This is now done.

Hopefully, the Debian Documentation Project can now again become the central place for writing good documentation about Debian. New contributors can be easily added through the DDP Alioth project. Volunteers are welcome to review what’s in the SVN and move obsolete documentation aside. People who moved away are welcome back.

Another project that also suffers from its CVS usage is the website (and it desperately needs a better design). After yet another round of discussion on #debian-devel, we agreed that discussing endlessly was not an option and that someone had to try the conversion and prepare the scripts for SVN usage. So I proposed to handle the CVS to SVN conversion and ifvoid decided to try to update the scripts. And it looks like things are progressing quite well… we included the CVS revision -> SVN revision mapping in the conversion (option –cvs-revnums of cvs2svn) and this will enable us to script the update of all translations (they encode a CVS revision to know if they are out-of-date or not). Expect to hear from us soon on debian-www@lists.debian.org…

I’ve been relatively satisfied by the work done by sam (although one can always do better) and it looks like many share this feeling… and when this is the case, we just expect the DPL to run again. But sam clearly said that he won’t run again. What a pity.

I also don’t plan to run this year[1] but I’m always interested in leadership issues and I’d gladly be part of a DPL team. Hopefully someone will provide such an alternative on the ballot this year.

Right now, I’m more in the mood of implementing some real changes (like the symbol based dependencies that I added to dpkg-shlibdeps) instead of trying to convince others to do them. When you associate this to some support of the leadership in place, it can give very good results.

Now back to real work, I still have to test and polish the dpkg-source rewrite which adds support of several brand new source package formats. Feel free to check out our progress in the sourcev3 git branch.

[1] Feel free to convince me otherwise by adding some comments here.

Phil Hands (who was really quiet in the discussions) decided that the situation had lasted long enough already and proposed to add Peter Palfrader (weasel@debian.org) to the team if nobody expressed any opposition in 24 hours. And this morning, Phil added weasel to the “adm” group… which make of Peter a full DSA member!

I really didn’t expect this outcome after so many months of negociations and discussions. But I’m really relieved to see some new blood in the DSA team. I wish him good luck and I’ll hope he will be able to foster cooperation with non-DSA people like I tried since the beginning of the year.

Thank you Phil!

I don’t buy everything he says, but in the case of DSA, the part where he says “you cannot have a functional and respectable subgroup if it maintains autonomy like that” is a real problem.

The leadership problem I mentioned is real. And it can theoretically be solved by undelegating one of the problematic side of this DSA-internal dispute. But which one? Given the unwillingness of Joey to discuss the problems, he makes an easy target… which would leave DSA up to Ryan, James and Phil.

But is that a desirable thing? If DSA is perceived as being an “autonomous” group which is not involved in Debian’s main discussions and which is somewhat disconnected from Debian’s day-to-day life, it’s largely due to the behavior of James and Ryan. E-mail communication with them is very difficult as they’ll respond only if they really care about something. And despite the setup of the request tracker, they have barely been able to make proper usage of it… the idea was to use RT tickets to track everything that DSA does but they don’t use it as such. For example, James setup a “wikiadm” group and he never reported anything to the related ticket (#194) (I did it myself once I found out). Also there’s an internal ticket about the replacement of ftp.debian.org (that I created because ftp.d.o ran out of space regularly) and AFAIK Jeroen has been in touch with James to setup that replacement, but nothing got reported to the tracker. Ryan promised me once to put his DSA TODO list in the tracker so that other people can jump in and help out. He never did.

So while Joey is definitely a pain for DSA, at least he’s a visible participant of the team and he interacts with the community. James and Ryan are not, they interact only through private channels and do not share their opinions or their vision of Debian.
I believe this is a real problem. On the other hand, most of the interesting changes in the last months are the results of James’s work. But he’s also implicitly blocking addition of new members as long as the leadership problem is not solved.

I tried to fill the communication void of the DSA team by various means. I follow everything as closely as I can so that I can report changes on other channels, mailing lists when needed. I made efforts to document stuff on the wiki page, etc. But this is not a long term solution, the communication issue must be fixed within the team.

The path ouf of this mess is still not very clear, but something is going to change soon. Not quite sure what though. What would you suggest? And if you were DPL, what would you do?

Since private discussions and negotiations lead nowhere, it’s tempting to bring the issue in the public area. In theory, they have no way to escape discussions and they’ll have to communicate their grudges against the other side if they want to have some fair judgment between both parties. Unfortunately, given the habits of James and Ryan, they probably won’t participate in any public discussion and either resign or stay where they are waiting for any decision…

Comments welcome.

Use login “guest” and password “readonly” if you want to check the RT tickets linked in this article.

The facts

• 65 public tickets open (and 5 private tickets)
  • Want to help and seek input from DSA? No response.
  • Want to help and you provide patches and/or solutions? Many are still waiting.
  • Security updates? Who cares…
  • Backup of ftp-master (ries)? No reply (though ftp-master stuff is mirrored on merkel)…
  • New alpha machine? No movement despite the fact that we still have no DD-accessible porter machine.
• 68 tickets closed. Here are some unscientific and manual stats (I counted one each time that someone was involved for the work or for closing the ticket):
  • 27 for James Troup (elmo)
  • 26 for Phil Hands (fil)
  • 13 for me (buxy)
  • 3 for Martin ‘Joey’ Schulze (those I manually forwarded him)
  • 3 for Ryan Murray (neuro)
  • 3 for Matt Taggart (taggart)
  • 2 for Josip Rodin (he handles tickets concerning the mirrors until they have a dedicated queue in the RT)

Note that myself and Matt do not have the needed rights to fix most of the tickets, so we provided help on a best-effort basis. Otherwise we would have done more.

The communication problem

It’s a multi-level problem. Each of the members has some problems with one or more other members. Joey’s behavior has been part of the recurring problems mentioned: he doesn’t use the RT, doesn’t read the DSA email alias and doesn’t follow the DSA IRC channel but he still does stuff very regularly without reporting anything and obviously problems happen. Ryan and James tried to impose him a rule to document what he does, without success apparently. On the other side, as far as I know, Ryan and James also don’t impose themselves to document everything in a central changelog. Joey has refused to provide me an explanation for his behavior. He just reminded me that he holds grudges against James and Ryan because as ftpmasters they didn’t cooperate well with him while he was stable release manager.

In general, outside of all personal griefs that they might have, the DSA members do not communicate very much (at least not on their own official channels). Some examples have already been given concerning the request tracker, but it’s not much more effective on IRC. Most of the traffic on the channel is made up by local admins fixing the problems themselves without any intervention by any DSA.

I also use the channel to regularly ping some DSA about simple issues and/or stuff that they usually handle. It used to work somewhat but lately fil has been busy (with the kernel summit and other conferences) and I simply got no answer at all… for example I pinged elmo, neuro and fil several times in the last weeks in the hope that they handle the tickets of the security team (#150, #157, #164) without results.

There’s room for improvement.

The leadership problem

The team has no designated leader and every time that there’s a decision to take, they are blocked. Joey wouldn’t communicate and give his opinion, Ryan is extremely requiring and perfectionist, there’s not much room for compromise…

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Joey and elmo were friends. It’s even Joey who gave root rights to elmo. Nowadays, it’s rather James that is sort-of leading the team but he’s fed up of the situation and hasn’t managed to get out of this mess.

He refuses to take drastic measures by himself because he’s not clearly the leader and doesn’t solicit a decision of the Debian leader (or the project) because he believes that the DSA team is not under the scope of the constitution!

This can’t last any further. We’ll have to do something about it. Stay tuned.

So the question is: why not creating (and hosting) an English-speaking planet for Debian users that would allow only Debian-related articles. Developers are also users and if they have a feed dedicated to their Debian posts, they could add it of course. It would be handled like the current planet and a few volunteers could collect and process the requests to add new feeds for non-developers.

This would provide the much-requested alternative of filtering planet Debian… and also encourage some of our users to blog about Debian and how they use it.

What do you think of this idea?

Since I maintain the French Debian planet, I decided to apply the same policy for the French version (and announced it here). At the same time I also created a planet for the French-speaking Debian users who happen to blog… it’s hosted on the same server at http://planet-fr.debian.net/users/ and its policy is a bit more strict as it only allows free-software related content.

For all those reasons, I recategorized my articles so that I can now provide an english-only feed and a french-only feed. The first one is used on planet.debian.org and the second one on planet-fr.debian.net.

Continuing on this blogging frenzy, I upgraded Wordpress to the latest version, I installed the subscribe-to-comments plugin and translated it to French. Thus it’s now possible to have a sane discussion in the comments of my blog articles!

Thanks to mako, the move to Alioth is underway. The CVS repository has been disabled (crude hack, if you know a proper way to forbid commits to a CVS repository, please leave a comment) and its history has been imported in a new SVN repository

As usual DD have write-access on this repository so that they can add/update their feeds and hackergotchis. Mako will change the live setup from CVS to SVN somewhat later today.

Please start updating any documentation that refers to the CVS repository.

Last time gluck ran out of space, a few non-DSA people (me, taggart, Ganneff, and others I might have forgotten) contacted people to ask them to clean their home directories. Following that discussion we discussed a bit about the opportunity to move some services from gluck on another host. Among the services on gluck, there’s cvs.debian.org. As an Alioth administrator, it struck me that cvs.debian.org is the only VCS service that’s handled by the DSA team. It seems logical to not duplicate the administrative work and have all the VCS repositories handled by the same team.

The logical conclusion is that cvs.debian.org should be deprecated in favor of Alioth. So I made the suggestion in RT ticket #146 (login with guest/readonly). I got exactly zero response from DSA. No support and no opposition. So I went ahead and contacted the last users of cvs.debian.org:

• webwml: the website team
• debian-doc: the Debian documentation project
• debian-admin: the DSA team (this was already suggested in April this year in ticket #44, no response of course… except elmo saying me that he’s in favor. On IRC I also discovered that neuro doesn’t like bzr and is thus not in favor of such a move. Furthermore he visibly wants to keep control on userdir-ldap, thus he probably has not much interest in moving to a distributed system.)
• buildd: the Packages-arch-specific file is maintained in the dak cvs…

All in all, the debian-doc and debian-www folks are rather supportive of the move, but it requires adjustment to the build infrastructure, in particular to keep track of the status of translations. I have no answer from DSA and the buildd guys however.

The web team started a wiki page to evaluate the VCS that they would switch to. Volunteers would be welcome to organize the conversion of the repositories and to fix the build infrastructure accordingly. This a nice little project for new contributors that want to learn.

I discover a DPL taking position on hot topics of the moment. I’m glad to have a DPL who is trying to fulfill his duty of leading discussions amongst developers. He gave his opinion on the current vote about “endorsing the concept of Debian Maintainers” (he’s in favor because it dilutes power) and also about Apt’s change to install Recommends by default. I’m glad to hear the encouraging news concerning volunteers for ftpmasters.

By the way, if you have voted for Sam, and if Sam’s opinion bears any importance for you, you still have until saturday midnight (UTC) to change your vote if you wish so (like Russ did). Right now, only 289 DD have voted.

It’s really worth a read before casting your final vote on this issue. As I explained in my reply to Russ, this vote is not about details but whether we want to have an intermediate level between DD and nothing, or not.

If you don’t give an initial policy, then people against DM will use that “hole” to block it because “it’s not how DM must be done” (and then you’ll need another GR to define a correct implementation and overrule those who are blocking). Yet people keep mixing issues when discussing DM. For some, DM is okay if we had a working NM system. For some, DM would be okay if the responsibility to give upload rights didn’t rely on DD but on a sort of QA committee. For some, DM would be okay if it were integrated in NM. There are also people who are opposed to this second class of contributors but I don’t think they are a majority. Still we might loose a nice opportunity because people want to solve too many things at once instead of doing a first step in a new direction.

In parallel I discovered some problems with the git repository that I created: the tags were no more pointing to my master branch. This is because git rebase won’t convert them while rewriting history.

This lead me to redo everything from scratch. This time I used git-filter-branch instead. The man page even gives an example of how to link two branches together as if one was the predecessor of the other. Here’s how you can do it: let’s bind together “old” and “new”… the resulting branch will be “new-rewritten”.

$ git rev-parse old
0975870bb1631379f2da798fa78736a4fe32960a
$ git checkout new
$ git-filter-branch --tag-name-filter=cat --parent-filter \
"sed -e 's/^$/-p 0975870bb1631379f2da798fa78736a4fe32960a/'" \
new-rewritten
[...]
Rewritten history saved to the new-rewritten branch

Short explanation: the only commit without a parent commit (thus matching the empty regex “^$”) is the root commit and this one is changed to have a parent (-p) which is the last commit of the branch “old”.

At the end, you remove all the temporary branches, keep only what’s needed and repack everything to save space:


$ git branch -D old new
$ git prune
$ git repack -a -d


Obviously DM tries to respond to cases that NM is not prepared to handle. Furthermore, the DM discussion has been active for quite some time and the various members of the NM team (Frontdesk, DAM) have not participated much in the public discussion. Only when it comes to a vote do we hear some more (negative) opinions. I don’t see that as a sign of willingness to integrate DM or something similar in the current NM structure.

So people who are requesting DM to be integrated in NM, please take it up with the frontdesk/DAM… and don’t oppose the principle just because of organizational matters.

Internal organization always change and adapt themselves to the situation. Joey is right when he compares this to the introduction of the sponsorship process. I was one of the main actor in that process. I introduced the concept without the consent of the NM team (James Troup, Martin “Joey” Schulze) at that time.

It was a fork, a new way to proceed and it became mainstream with the creation of the current NM process. It’s the natural way of doing things in a free software project.

That said, I’m not opposed to improving our NM process. It really needs to be reworked in a “Membership Process” and be open to various kinds of contributors. That’s why I created a dedicated wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/ReformedMembershipProcess

Let’s see if we’re ready to really fix that! I hope to have comments from all the people who look to be so eager to fix the NM process.

Therefore you should no more use the debian-admin@debian.org alias (DSA members only). The debian-admin@lists.debian.org mailing list (DSA + local admins) is also scheduled for removal. Instead you should mail admin@rt.debian.org making sure to put “Debian RT” somewhere in the subject (crude but working spam prevention). By default, your ticket ends up in a private incoming queue. Up to now only DSA members had access to those queues. They moved most tickets in the public queue but it happened several times that this simple administrative burden took several weeks.

Since a few days, Matt Taggart and myself have been granted RT accounts with required privileges to handle tickets and move them between the various queues. So from now on, all tickets will be quickly moved in the public queue (when they don’t contain sensitive information of course). We’ll be able to do some triage and ping DSA members for urgent requests.

Matt and me have been trying to help out the DSA team for quite some time now, and while we’re not DSA with root rights, we’re in regular contact with the members (except Martin “Joey” Schulze who refuses to join the DSA IRC channel, who doesn’t use the request tracker and who doesn’t read the DSA mails either) and with several local admins. So if you have some troubles interacting with the DSA team, you can try to get in touch with us and we’ll see if we can help you.

In too many cases people contact directly individual DSA members (Joey in particular). Please refrain from doing so, other volunteers (who might help you) won’t notice your request. Furthermore systematic request tracker usage helps us identifying what is well handled and what’s not. And it’s not more complicated than a simple email for you.

Update: currently local admins are not subscribed to the request tracker. The RT setup will need some further adjustment for that, so the debian-admin@lists.debian.org list can still be useful if you want to reach them.

Now we’re likely to move over git for various reasons and we wanted to get back the various bits of history stored in the different VCS. Unfortunately we lost the arch repository. So we have disjoints bits of history and we want to put them all in a single nice git branch… git comes with git-cvsimport, git-archimport and git-svnimport, so converting CVS/SVN/Arch repositories is relatively easy. But you end up with several repositories and several branches.

Git comes with a nice feature called “git rebase” which is able to replay history over another branch, but for this to work you need to have a common ancestor in the branch used for the rebase. That’s not the case… so let’s try to create that common ancestor! Extracting the first tree from the newest branch and committing it on top on the oldest branch will give that common ancestor because two identical trees will have the same identifier. Using git_load_dirs you can easily load a tree in your git repository, and “git archive” will let you extract the first tree too.

In short, let’s see how I attach the “master” branch of my “git-svn” repository to the “master” branch of my “git-cvs” repository:

$ cd git-svn
$ git-rev-list --all | tail -1
0d6ec86c5d05f7e60a484c68d37fb5fc31146c40
$ git-archive --prefix=dpkg-1.13.11/ 0d6ec86c5d05f7e60a484c68d37fb5fc31146c40 | (cd /tmp && tar xf -)
$ cd ../git-cvs
$ git checkout master
$ git_load_dirs -L"Fake commit to link SVN to older CVS history" /tmp/dpkg-1.13.11
[...]
$ git fetch ../git-svn master:svn
$ git checkout svn
$ git rebase master

That’s it, your svn branch now contains the old cvs history. Repeat as many times as necessary…

I would just like to remind everybody that we elected sam to see changes and progress on many areas. We haven’t seen many results yet, but I know that sam has been working hard and I’ve been helping him as much as I can on the problem of our DSA team (one day I might blog about it or even start a GR if the situation continues to not improve despite the numerous efforts that we’ve put into it).

Here we have a concrete proposal for a change, and I believe a change for the better. But just like for every change, people have fears: they fear people who only care about technical excellence and not too much about philosophy, they fear that the quality level will drop, they fear that nobody will care about NM afterwards, etc.

It’s legitimate to have concerns, to express them and to discuss them. But we should not let them take us over or we’ll end up abandoning all initiatives that are required to evolve and adjust to our moving environment.

We need to encourage people who are ready to try out new things. In cases where it’s not entirely clear how the situation will evolve, it’s better to try out and react accordingly instead of doing nothing and hoping that people will wait us. When we do things while hoping for the best, the worst won’t come up true so easily.

Have faith in our future.

What we can learn from this election:

• the principle of a DPL board makes its way, I have been ranked well above NOTA and I have been mainly advocating this proposal (and this despite some votes anti-dunc-tank that I probably suffered from)
• my selection of board members was pretty good, the 4 candidates that I selected for the board are the top-4 of the election
• Debian developers are fed up by the various problems in some core teams (overwhelmed, not recruiting new members, not communicating enough, etc.). I’ll try to help Sam fix those issues, but it’s going to be a big challenge for us.

In the end, I really hope that sam is going to find a way to cooperate closely with the various candidates that are still highly motivated to work on improving Debian. I doubt that he will choose a board structure (although I would be glad to be proven wrong!), but I really hope that he will expand the 2IC principle (or something similar).

I once told sam that he would have my full support if he got elected, and I intend to stand up to this promise. I said that because I share many of his ideas. The few fears that I have are mainly on how he is going to try to address these issues. But I have no reason to believe that he’s not going to listen to what we (and I) have to say. That’s why he got ranked just after me on my ballot.

Good luck Sam, do not disappoint us!