%:
	dh --with quilt $@

There’s also dh_quilt_patch and dh_quilt_unpatch for those who don’t use tiny rules files.

Enjoy !

I’m glad that I can attend again this year. I’m sure it will be very productive. At least concerning dpkg it will be good to meet Guillem Jover IRL.

I have ranked misleading options (“Reaffirm social contract“ at least) lowest and below “Further discussion“ and sorted all the other options according to my preference, and ranked some of them equally when the choices answer different questions (where I can not prioritize any preferred outcome). I’m not yet sure if I put “Further discussion“ first or not.

There’s some hope that the vote will be cancelled and redone with separate ballots but I’ve lost trust in Manoj’s abilities to do his job properly. I’m sure he’s convinced that he’s doing the right thing but that doesn’t help at all, on the contrary. It also means we probably should fix the constitution to make it crystal-clear how the secretary should decide whether 3:1 ratio is needed for a given resolution or not. Not really the kind of thing I enjoy within Debian, but that’s the price to pay if we want to continue to work together. On this and much more I agree with Russ Alberry.

Update: Manoj resigned as secretary. I want to thank him for having taken this hard decision. And I sincerely hope he doesn’t resign from Debian completely as our strength is also in our diversity of opinions.

SSD disk

I now use an SSD drive for my main disk (Dell Ultra Performance SSD, it’s the second generation of Samsung SSD) and I’m satisfied with that choice, I can boot (an unmodified Debian desktop install) from the SSD in less than 30 seconds while the same system booting from a traditional hard-disk takes more than 45 seconds.

X server

The Intel GM45 graphic card is not auto-recognized by Xorg 7.3 (or rather by xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.3.2 which is in lenny) so you end up with the vesa driver by default. It’s possible to force the usage of the intel driver by adding a “Driver “intel”” line in the device section of xorg.conf but I have opted to use Xorg 7.4 (available in experimental). With this version, I can successfully use the DVI output in the associated dock and I have working suspend/resume. It does create some interesting problems however since that version of the xserver relies on HAL to detect the keyboard layout and doesn’t use the Keyboard section of xorg.conf. You have to create /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi by using /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-keymap.fdi as template and reload HAL then restart X.

Wifi support

The Intel 5100 Wifi chipset requires Linux 2.6.27 at least for the new iwlagn driver. This driver also needs a new firmware (the iwlwifi-5000 one) that is not yet integrated in the non-free package firmware-iwlwifi (see #497717).

Sound support

It works ok with alsa and the version integrated in linux 2.6.27 but it still has some rough edges when used in combination with the dock. Using the output jack connector on the dock doesn’t stop the output in the integrated loudspeakers and the volume on that connector is so low that you could think that it doesn’t work at all if you don’t pay attention. Using the microphone works fine.

For reference, if you play in the mixer, “Front mic” means the microphone connected on the dock while “Mic” means the one connected on the laptop. Each “Analog loopback X” option goes pairwise with the corresponding “Input source X” setting. In order for the recording to work, I have to set “Digital Input Source” to “Analog Input”, “Digital” must be activated and “Input source 1” defines the default input used for the recording.

Bluetooth support

Contrary to the previous laptop, Dell offered no choice on the bluetooth chipset, they only propose the “Dell 365 Bluetooth™ Card” so I took it but it doesn’t seem to work out of the box. In fact I can’t even see it with lspci or lsusb so I wonder if they did something wrong during the assembly. Googling on the topic didn’t gave me any good result, let me a comment if you know how to get this working.

Update: so apparently the bluetooth component is there (ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp.), it just appears as an USB hub so it’s somewhat difficult to guess that it’s effectively a bluetooth card.

Freezes, in particular with an amd64 installation

I first installed the system in 64 bits mode (amd64 architecture) but I had very regular freezes of the system (I couldn’t finish a single kernel compilation for example). Since I switched to an i386 installation, the system is more stable but I still get an occasional freeze every other day. It might be that a more recent kernel fixes this or maybe it will be fixed with a future Dell Bios update… we’ll see, but it’s my biggest complaint with this laptop so far.

Links

Lucas Nussbaum bought the same laptop, you might want to read his remarks as well.

More details

Load the full article only if you want to see the lspci and lsusb output on this laptop.


rhertzog@rivendell:~$ lspci -nnk
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub [8086:2a40] (rev 07)
Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel
Kernel modules: intel-agp
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a43] (rev 07)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection [8086:10f5] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: e1000e
Kernel modules: e1000e
00:1a.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:2937] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1a.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 [8086:2938] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1a.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 [8086:2939] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1a.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 [8086:293c] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd
Kernel modules: ehci-hcd
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:293e] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:2940] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
Kernel modules: shpchp
00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:2942] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
Kernel modules: shpchp
00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 [8086:2946] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
Kernel modules: shpchp
00:1d.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:2934] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1d.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:2935] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1d.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:2936] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1d.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 [8086:293a] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd
Kernel modules: ehci-hcd
00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge [8086:2448] (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller [8086:2917] (rev 03)
00:1f.2 RAID bus controller [0104]: Intel Corporation Mobile 82801 SATA RAID Controller [8086:282a] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: ahci
Kernel modules: ahci
00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller [8086:2930] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: i801_smbus
Kernel modules: i2c-i801
02:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller [1180:0832] (rev 05)
Kernel driver in use: firewire_ohci
Kernel modules: firewire-ohci
02:01.1 SD Host controller [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter [1180:0822] (rev 22)
02:01.2 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller [1180:0843] (rev 12)
0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100 [8086:4232]
Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
Kernel modules: iwlagn
$ lsusb
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 019: ID 046d:c03d Logitech, Inc. M-BT69a Pilot Optical Mouse
Bus 004 Device 018: ID 0424:2228 Standard Microsystems Corp. 9-in-2 Card Reader
Bus 004 Device 017: ID 0424:2602 Standard Microsystems Corp.
Bus 004 Device 016: ID 0424:2502 Standard Microsystems Corp.
Bus 004 Device 007: ID 045e:00dd Microsoft Corp.
Bus 004 Device 006: ID 0c45:63fe Microdia
Bus 004 Device 004: ID 413c:2513 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 413c:2513 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 413c:8162 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 413c:8161 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:5800 Broadcom Corp.
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub


With our current model, all DD can sponsor, NMU, introduce/adopt/hijack packages without review. This is fine as long as we trust the body of DD to contain only skilled and reasonable people. I believe that premise to be somewhat broken since Debian has become too big for people to know everybody and since the NM process had no way to grant partial rights to volunteers who were motivated but that clearly had not shown their ability to handle more complex stuff than what they had packaged during their NM period (like some trivial perl modules for example).

Thus I strongly believe that any membership reform must provide a convincing answer to that trust problem before being implemented. I took several hours to draft a proposal last Friday and I’ve been somewhat disappointed that nobody commented on it. I hope to draw some attention on it with this blog post.

The proposal builds on the idea that we should not have “classes” of contributors but simply two: a short-term contributor and a long-term contributor (those are called Debian Developers and have the right to vote). But all contributors can be granted “privileges” as they need them for their work and each privilege requires the contributor to fulfill some conditions. The set of privileges and the conditions associated all need discussions (but I have personal opinions here, see below). There’s however one privilege that is somewhat particular: it’s the right to grant privileges to other contributors. Handling it as a privilege like another is on purpose: it makes it clear that anyone can try to get that privilege and the procedure is clear. In practice, imagine that set of people as a big team encompassing the responsibilities split over DAM/AM/FD/DM-team and where all members can do all the steps required to grant/retire a privilege provided that 2 or 3 members agrees and that nobody opposes (in case of opposition a specific procedure is probably needed). I called that set of people the Debian Community Managers. It should contain only skilled and dedicated developers.

One of their main duties would be to retain the trust that the project as a whole must have in all its members. They would have the powers to retire privileges if they discover someone that has not acted according to the (high) expectations of the project.

Among the privileges would be “limited upload rights” (like DM have currently), “full upload rights” (like DD have currently although it might be that we want to split that privilege further in right to sponsor, right to package new software, right to maintain a package of priority > standard, etc.) and “developer status” (email + right to vote, once you can prove 6 months of contribution).

There’s lots of stuff to discuss in such a proposal (like how to decide who gets what privileges among existing DD) but I think it’s a good basis and need some serious consideration by all the project members. The NM process is there only so that we can collectively trust that new members are as good as we expect them to be and trust can only be built over time so it’s good that we can grant privileges progressively.

Some people believe that I’m reinventing a new NM process that will end up to be very similar to the current one. My answer is that the conditions associated to each privilege should be based on the work done by the contributor and the advocations that he managed to collect. It should not be a questionnaire like “Task and Skills”. This, together with the distribution of the power/work on many people, would render this system very different from today’s NM process.

Some people believe that I’m copying Ubuntu when designing this since it’s somewhat similar to the process to become MOTU and/or get upload right to Ubuntu’s main component. Let me say that I’m not copying deliberately at least, I simply took the problem from the most important side. But remember that many aspects of Ubuntu have been designed by Debian developers that tried to avoid known pitfalls of Debian, and maybe they got some things right (or better at least) while doing this.

while read oldrev newrev refname; do
    branchname=${refname#refs/heads/}
    [ "$branchname" = "master" ] && branchname=""
    for merged in $(git rev-parse --not --branches | grep -v $(git rev-parse $refname) | git rev-list --reverse --stdin $oldrev..$newrev); do
         /usr/local/bin/git-ciabot.pl $merged $branchname
    done
done

It will stop git rev-list each time that it encounters a commit that is available in any of the other branches present in the repository and thus when you merge a branch, you only see the merge commit in CIA.

You should also note that the script is smarter as it calls CIA only for branch updates, not for tag creation (and other kinds of updates) where it only leads to strange errors IIRC.

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.