 Okay, and now for the last talk in the morning session. Joey Hess will talk about Debian cosmology. Thanks, good morning everybody. I hope you had a good night's sleep. I enjoyed sleeping out in the tent in the middle of Switzerland looking out over the lake. And this is kind of the first debcom where I kind of had a problem. If I just look over there, I'll probably just, you know lose focus, it's so gorgeous. I thought this would be a good place to get up on a mountaintop as it were and think about the bigger picture and try to think about some of the big questions, the big vague things that we wonder about but don't really sometimes talk about maybe in public in front of a live streaming audience, I don't know. So I have this crazy Debian cosmology idea and let's look at Debian, let's look at the universal operating system and think about thinking back 20 years back to when Debian was founded up to the present and where it's gonna go from here. So back in the beginning, there was kind of this void. You know, and there was a gap, yeah thanks. And Ian Murdoch saw this and he said, well, let's make a new Linux distribution to replace SLS, it'll be great, I'll get it done in a couple of weeks, you know. And this was back in 1993. And you know, just as with the big bang, you have the laws of nature somehow forming out of the void, we developed these standard principles of Debian that are pretty much stood the test of time although some of them like the one package, one maintainer thing have changed over time. But you know, this is all the stuff that we think of as the core principles of Debian today probably. You know, and this was kind of in the period of 94 to 98. You know, this early period where there weren't very many people involved in Debian and things got done fairly quickly. I have down here one of the initial threads for the Debian constitution. This is where Ian Jackson said, you know, I think we'll use this constitution proposal as to bootstrap the constitution. So we'll vote on the constitution using the principles of the constitution. That could be a kind of controversial thing to say actually because you know, it's a bootstrapping problem. But you know, the thread actually wasn't that long by I would say by today's standards for something that important, right? So you know, this was, as I said, the early period. And then in the late 90s and early 2000s we went through this inflation period just like the universe blew up, got bigger and bigger. You know, we have the nice up and to the right graph which is the number of maintainers over time. And you know, I don't think that this data is very good but I'm kind of happy to see that it started going up again in the most recent election. Although that's probably also just because Zach wasn't running. So you know, during this inflation period we had things happen like adding port to Debian. One port in 98, two ports in 99, two ports in 2000. That's two ports a year. You know, it's a crazy rate of change. And then we had all these derivatives started popping up. We had Debian for hams for a while. But you know, we got these derivatives that you don't think of much anymore like Corel Linux, Stormix, Progeny. These are names that we haven't mentioned in a while but they were the early corporate entities saying, well we're gonna try to do something here with Debian and modify it. And of course many more came from there. And another big event in this period was that apt started out. And this is one of the early threads about apt. This is about a year after it started being developed everybody started trying it and realized, oh, it actually doesn't work on my system because I have these packages that are half configured. I have a few broken dependencies because I just forced something at some point. And everybody tried apt and they're like, gosh, it says my system's inconsistent and it doesn't have apt-f yet. So it doesn't work. And so I thought this was an amusing thread. It's also not really too long a thread but here's an introductory or a representative message. I don't know if you can read it back there but it's just what I said. apt-f doesn't seem to work. It says my system lacks integrity. And then Jason Gunthorpe who wrote apt said, well you know, I don't think I've actually seen a Debian system that has a perfect dependency setup so that apt can actually work on it. And if you think about introducing some big new change like apt, it doesn't work at all. And this was in April of 1998. If we then move forward one month to May of 1998 here's somebody saying, this makes me wonder if we should think about dropping this auto-up script that we're using for upgrades, some kind of a shell script or something and switch to apt. Auto-up seems to work and maybe we shouldn't postpone Debian 2.0 for apt but auto-up's a hack and apt is what you do an entire bow to ham upgrade and deselect. Wow. I was kind of surprised to see this. It turns out I wrote that, I had no idea that I proposed converting Debian to apt for 2.0. It didn't actually happen in May of 1998. We had to wait a whole year until March of 1999 when 2.1 came out. And this is a quote from Debian history about apt which I thought was a great quote. It established a new paradigm for package acquisition and installation. And it really did. If you look now at things that are basically command line compatible with apt or more or less command line compatible maybe they didn't quite understand the difference between upgrade and update. There's so many of them. It's crazy. And one of the interesting things about this list is if you look at and see which ones of these actually do it securely it's a really small subset. And maybe some of them use HTTPS in some way and have a little bit of security there. I don't know. I didn't check them all in detail. But of course back then apt didn't have any security either. It was just pulling stuff via HTTPS off the web and hey it'd be the right thing because why wouldn't it be? So soon after apt came out this is a screenshot from 2002 but it was around earlier. We got apt get dot org which was all these third party apt repositories. And this was kind of interesting. There were hundreds of different repositories you could go off at your sources.list get your packages. And we kind of started thinking wow maybe we're gonna change how Debian works in some way. Maybe we'll have some kind of a central core and everything else will just be pulling from other repositories somewhere. And we kind of went off on a divergent path. We kind of went down a wormhole to some kind of a distributed apt or app store model where there's Debian and there's all the stuff that you pull in from here and there and if somebody wants to make a package they do. And this kind of is what happened today too. You can pull signed packages from Google and from Debian multimedia or Deb multimedia and that kind of thing. But we didn't really go down that path. We're still very much a centralized distribution. I kind of think it's interesting to think about what could have happened if we branched off a different way there. But there were good reasons to keep it centralized such as security. And if you now fast forward to the present here's appget.org from 2011. It's been broken and we can't check if these repositories work anymore. We're not accepting new submissions. And this is what happened to Debian multimedia.org which is a pity but it's a Russian domain about motorcycles or something I don't know. So that's kind of the inflation period of Debian and then we can move forward again into the modern era. And this might be where my cosmology analogy gets a little bit strained but we'll see. So I think you can see two, I picked out two things about the modern era of Debian. This past 10 years or 15 years. So one of them just as in the universe you have large scale structures forming galaxies and larger structures. In Debian we've kind of developed all kinds of structures on top of the one maintainer, one package model and extending it and going beyond it. So a few of these, it's the teams. Lucas showed us the graph of team maintenance increasing over the past 10 years or so. And we've just developed all these structures. Custom Debian distributions, stuff like DI, different projects within Debian. And so it gets pretty complicated. It's not a heterogeneous thing, it's a homogeneous thing. It's all clumped around in different places. And if you also look at where are people using Debian that's differentiated a lot too. It's not just we are the universal operating system we say that a lot of people are using Debian on servers and a few are on laptops and basically nobody is on a mobile phone except for a few people who are lucky enough to still have an open moco or something like that, right? So we've really differentiated Debian a lot. So that's the large scale structure thing. I think it's interesting to think about it because it kind of makes you think about how Debian's evolving. Now this is where it really gets strained. Redshift, okay. How do we have redshift in Debian? I don't see any red when I look out unless I've been in the middle of a flame war or something. Here's kind of an amusing paper which I don't think has been peer reviewed yet but it says what if the universe rather than actually expanding right now like we think it is because of redshift what if the mass of everything is increasing at once? And it says well everything would work pretty much just like it does now. I wouldn't even be able to test this theory. And well I don't know if the mass of the universe is increasing exponentially over time like this paper says it is. It seems a little unlikely. Debian's mass has definitely increased. We have an enormous mass and an enormous momentum. We're moving in a certain direction and it's really hard to move Debian into a different direction now. So one really easy example of this, system D. Think about how many threads we've had about system D lately and yeah. And this isn't replacing the package with apt and breaking all of our dependencies and having to change everything. This is changing how systems boot which you do once a week or once a month or once a year or whatever. It's a minor change as things go right. And yet it's an enormous controversy inside the project. So I think we have to think about this momentum, this mass and how do we manage it? How can we make Debian nimble on top of all this momentum? So I think that's probably the largest problem that Debian is facing right now and we'll face in the next telegrapher out you want to look. It's kind of hard to give a talk about Debian cosmology because when, what is a long time period, long time scale in Debian? We have 20 years of history to look back on. Can we, you know, can people think in their head? Wow, will Debian be around in 20 years? I don't know. You pick a time scale that, you know, that seems to make sense to you for the rest of this talk. I'm not gonna try to force some kind of a time scale on you. If you want to think 100 years ahead, great. If you want to think 10 years ahead, okay. But I'm gonna try to think about moving forward. But first I have a little digression which I forgot about. So one of the examples of a way that the, you know, the momentum in Debian can be a problem. I mentioned apt. Well there's this interesting thing being developed right now called functional package management. It started out with NixOS and now the GNU project's gotten involved with it with the GNUics, I don't know how to say it. The idea is that it somehow takes ideas from functional programming and applies them to package management. So it's bread and butter for me. I'm really interested in it being a Haskell guy now, you know, being in a functional program. I'm like, wow, there's some interesting ways to use these ideas. It's not really functional but it's a neat terminology to hook on it. And what this lets you do is it's kind of a source-based system in a way, I don't know. Has anybody used any of these systems in the audience? I'm just curious, you have Zach, okay. I'd love to chat with you about it and get a broader idea. But you know, the idea is kind of that you never make a destructive change in the system. Every package change is atomic and if you have dependencies you might have multiple versions of a package installed at a time. And it's completely different than the de-package model in every way. And you know, it's kind of inconceivable to think that Debian would switch to something like this model now. It would just be so incredibly hard. You know, the switching the app would be just nothing in comparison and it's much later in our evolution and we have a lot more structure built up around our current system than we did back then even. But you know, this is an example of something that, you know, the universe is coming up with neat new things. How do we possibly put them into Debian? We can obviously package up these package managers and make it easy enough for people to use them as a third party thing. You can install stuff in your home directory with functional package management and just, you know, have a system on top of Debian and that kind of thing. But how do you integrate this kind of thing or ideas from this kind of thing into Debian? I think the closest we're coming is the switch to more declarative systems for Debian packages so that rather than maintainer scripts we have triggers and stuff like that. But this is just taking it to a whole new level. And you know, there's a lot to learn from stuff like this. So that's my kind of quick look at the modern era of Debian. Let's move into the futures that I was talking about. So just like in cosmology, I think you all probably know where this is gonna go. You know, one of the models for the future is that Debian is in some way gonna continue to expand and grow for however long you want to think ahead. And there's kind of two ways that I think this could happen. It could be a targeted growth where we pick a direction we want Debian to move in and we just put everything behind that and we have enough momentum going that we can continue to maintain growth as time goes on and meet the needs of, you know, that one area. So we could pick say the server market and say, okay, we're doing all this Debian Cloud stuff. People talked about all the talks that are gonna be here at Debconf about that. You know, if you, there's a lot of that going on if you go out to any virtual BPS provider, you know, you can pick a Debian image pretty much on every single one of them. You know, it's big in that area, obviously. Or we could say, well, we're gonna try to, you know, also handle desktop or mobile or something, pick something a little bit more targeted might be a good idea than just something that broad. But, you know, maybe if we decide, well, we just wanna do this and this, then that would help us grow. I don't know, it's just one model. If you look at mobile though, and you look at where Debian is right now, this is a screenshot of little Debian, which is a Android app, that it basically debootstraps Debian. That's what it's doing there in the screenshot. And this is kind of the current state of the art of Debian on all the mobile devices that every single person out there has in their pocket, I'm assuming, that aren't running Debian probably. You know, it's pretty basic. It really doesn't give you a system that can do a lot of wonderful things unless you're wanting to do wonderful things at the command line in a, you know, with a virtual keyboard, which isn't much fun. You know, what can we, you know, you can think about what can we do to expand this? You know, can we say, add Android support into Debian in some ways that you can install Android apps and run them? You know, can we have some way of getting a, you know, installing something in a CH route of this type and then displaying it on the normal Android, you know, display and having a full interactive application, that kind of thing. So that's kind of an example of how we could go into one area and try to expand, you know, get Debian growing in that area. The other, you know, the other major way that I think we could grow Debian or that Debian could continue growing is this more community-driven model. This is kind of where you have different projects doing their own thing, and Debian can somehow come in and help them out. And, you know, these are kind of, you know, we have some good examples like Freedom Box, but I saw the ways I did, and Tails and stuff like that that are, you know, using Debian in great ways. They're doing wonderful stuff. Hopefully they're getting a lot of developers, I hope. I don't know if that's the case. But, you know, they're community-driven things. They're ways that Debian can expand out into an area without having to move the whole project there. You can just say it's a custom Debian distribution, it's a blend, whatever, and we're still, you know, it's still contributing back. It's a wonderful, you know, ecosystem going on there. Now, if you look at something like the Raspberry Pi, I think we kind of made a mistake with the Raspberry Pi, because we said we're not gonna support the specific ARM instruction set that they want to use because it's 5% faster or something. And so they went off and built Raspbian, and that's fine. You know, but we've kind of, I think, possibly lost a little bit of the mindshare in the Raspberry Pi community because everybody's like, well, okay, we've got this Raspbian thing, it's not Debian, right? Of course it is in pretty much every important way. And maybe if we had been a little bit more open to this project coming in and saying, we would like to build everything for ARM V5, whatever it was, you know, maybe we would have had a bit more opportunity for growth and expansion there. And then if you look at just Debian developer communities in general, you know, there's always opportunities which we sometimes don't take advantage of to have really good relationships with various interesting projects that might end up using Debian in some way or might end up contributing back or becoming part of it even. And so I think that, you know, I really feel pretty bullish about this community-driven thing. I think it's kind of how Debian has always worked. I don't know if, you know, it's hard to look out and say, oh, in 10 years Debian will be an attractive target for people doing, you know, whatever the equivalent of the Raspberry Pi is in 10 years, but I hope so. So that's the one model. Whoa, what happened to the other model? Okay, so steady state. You know, it's another cosmological model, obviously. I think, you know, we could just continue sort of coasting along indefinitely without really saying, oh, we're gonna make big changes, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that. We could just keep doing our thing and be completely happy for, you know, as long as you want to look out. We've got a lot of momentum we can keep going. Even if we all stop doing much today, I think definitely we keep going for years and years quite happily. And, you know, after a while, you start having to think about generational things. You know, I think when most of our generation or generations got involved with Debian, we kind of had some infrastructure that we just kind of thought was there. Maybe it was a kernel or a C compile or something like that. We didn't really think about it. Maybe we occasionally ran into a bug in it and reported the bug, but it wasn't something that was, you know, the forefront of our minds as something new and exciting necessarily. And maybe that's where Debian's going. Maybe Debian becomes an infrastructure that things get built on top of over time and, you know, there's enough people to keep it going because, you know, if nothing else, people like companies like Google, as long as they continue using Debian, they're gonna want to employ tons of Debian developers just to keep it going. So, you know, this is definitely, I think, a likely possible future at some point is that Debian becomes an infrastructure. And that's fine. And, you know, if you continue looking forward, does it continue being infrastructure at some point, does it get replaced or does it even matter if it gets replaced in X years? I don't know. But, you know, I think this is another likely possibility. I will see. And then, of course, we have this final fun possibility that you get. And I might, I would probably put some bullet points up here, but I've, I had an unexpected root canal and stuff, so I kind of ran out of slides at this point. But, you know, you can have a big crunch. And this is always my favorite possibility for the universe as a whole. I don't know about for Debian. You know, what would happen if Debian just petered out and somehow died and fell off a cliff and everything started going down and everybody switched to Android on their servers or who knows what? I mean, what are they gonna replace us with? I can't possibly think, there's gotta be something out there, right? Maybe it's all Fedora in the future, I don't know. Hi, Fedora folks. You know, this is definitely a possibility that we have to keep in mind. And it's not like the end of the world, right? It's only the end, it would only be the end of Debian. And even if that happened, think back to that earlier slide about establishing a new paradigm in package management. You know, even if Debian stopped being actively used and developed at some far future point that I don't wanna imagine, it would still have influenced things in a great many ways. And I think we could all be quite pleased with the work that we had done on it. Of course, we all hope that it will continue to be used for as long as we're involved in the project and maybe 10 years longer so we can keep using Debian systems after we retire. So I kinda thought that I would take a little poll of the audience. Who thinks that we're gonna somehow continue to expand for however long you want to imagine as a long time? Hands, continued expansion. I would say maybe 10% of the room. Okay, so who's for steady state? Slightly fewer than for expansion. Okay, big crunchers. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Okay, well, I think we're for expansion. What was that? So that's really all that I came here to say. It's a fairly fluff talk, I know. I hope that you've enjoyed it. Maybe some people have some other cosmological models that they'd like to suggest. Andrew Cader, sort of relevant to the big crunch scenario, Andrew asks AMA Cader on IRCS. I'm watching other community distributions fragment and lose focus. Fedora, OpenSUSE, SUSE, are killing themselves right now. Are we doing the same? I don't think that we're fragmenting as such. We've already kind of fragmented already. There was the whole Ubuntu thing, which I think is the first time I've said that word in this talk. You know, and we, I don't know if we lose focus as such. We've never really had focus, have we, we've all just done our own thing and it's half, you know. I was just saying to somebody over here that one of the differences is that those distros are actually more tightly tied to something else that matters, whether it's the commercial distribution organization that they were sort of spawned out of or whatever, that they've had a less completely community-driven reason to exist and to continue to exist than Debian has. So I would not be surprised if we don't end up having an entirely different life cycle than something like Fedora, OpenSUSE. The question I was gonna pose, I've noticed as you have, and you made a couple of sort of references to this, that the average length of thread about almost anything has gotten a lot larger. One of the things that I observed a while back though is that the average number of participants per thread had not actually increased all that much. It was certainly for any given thread a much smaller percentage of the people currently active in the project than used to be the case when there were 30 of us and five of us were screaming at each other. So I'm wondering if there's, I don't know exactly what to take from that, but the notion that, you know, a similar number of people can just scream at each other for a whole lot longer and still not come to a conclusion, I don't know if there's anything to take from that or learn from it or not. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I was gonna, I had actually meant to say that I was going to put the system D thread on here, but despite this being a pretty zoomy thing, there are limits to floating point resolution and eventually you can't actually represent the whole thread in Ice Weasel or whatever I'm running here. Yeah, maybe what's happened is that we have either, A, we just have more people and so the number of people who feel really strongly about something, they feel much more strongly about it. You have a small subset who all feel that they have to win and so they just keep talking about this and they don't come to a consensus. Do you have a thought? Yeah, it's really interesting because as a project, I think we have this sense about ourselves that we're all about freedom and so forth and somewhere along the way, freedom got translated into we should all be able to have our own way and that was really not part of the freedom that we cared about when this project was young. Even when there were strong debates, they were debates about technical details or when the Constitution was being drafted, there were a few big questions about how should this be structured and then a draft got generated, a lot of folks looked at it and went, yeah, that's close enough and off we ran and the amount of bike shedding that goes on these days just scares me a little bit because it seems like taking that word freedom and translating it way too much into not needing to collaborate or not needing to come to agreement and consensus. I don't know how we change that or fix it but it bothers me sometimes when I see people take the things that I thought of when I first joined the project in 1994 as being fundamental tenants of the project and they use the same words but they mean something very different and it causes their behaviors to be very different from what I would like to see. Yeah, when the Constitution was originally proposed, I was kind of against it and I thought, well, this seems like a lot of faff around for something that shouldn't matter and I didn't even bother to vote on it and because I was like, well, if Ian wants to do this, great, Ian can do this. He'll take care of it. If it breaks, he'll fix it and I think we've kind of there's, maybe it's just that we have a lot of people now who Debian is an important part of their life, maybe professionally or personally much more important. How many people here in the room have their livelihood in some way connected to Debian? So probably about as many people as want Debian to continue growing, which... Yeah. One thing I just wanted to add to what Bida was saying about the bike shedding and stuff. I'm in preparation for my both later this week about the code of conduct. I've actually been reading a lot of other codes, codes of conduct on a page prepared by SAC. Thanks for that. And one item that I saw coming back a few times and which I've also taken into my proposed code of conduct that we'll be discussing is about be collaborative, try to work with other people. And I think that's, it could help to put something like that there, but it's just a proposal anyway. We still have to discuss. Yeah. So let me as a darker, destructive person focus on the big crunch model for a moment. The question is what would happen? What would we be able to do in Debian if we would be in this big crunch situation? Because, okay, now we are big. We are very important and we are central to the, quite central to the free software world in a number of ways. So what happens if this world in some ways disintegrates? We, obviously there must be a replacement. So we should be open to change and revolve in a way that makes the world go on even if we in the way we are now fundamentally change. Fundamentally change. You know, I haven't, I didn't really think about the big crunch is affecting the free software community as a whole. I kind of just assumed that that was some background noise that kept everything going even if Debian went away. I mean, yeah, it seems to me that Debian could definitely go away without the free software community fragmentary uploading or, you know, whatever, turning the BSD licenses and, you know. Now I'm shing down the Apple rabbit hole or whatever. That's what not, that's not what I was about here. Right. It's more, we have one model of working in our free software ecosystem that maybe this model at some point in time is not relevant anymore. It's like, maybe some of you know this Gunkards model of evolving system. There is a first system which is a big hack. The second system is built by a community and great and does everything. But at some point in time, this second system becomes irrelevant. Fundamental ideas will be changed and the third system will or third systems will evolve on the remains of the second system. That's just what's happening now slowly with X for example. X will not be completely disintegrate, disintegrating but people will evolve on it. And I think the same, we should have some thoughts about the same ideas in Debian and we should prepare what might happen if this case starts growing on us. Yeah, thank you for that. I definitely think you're thinking farther ahead than I am and that's great. Anybody else with a question? I'm not sure how we are on time here. I think disintegrating is not really an interesting point. Debian is, I think, there to each our scratch. If we don't have the scratch left, there's no reason to it. As long as we are community driven, as long as there will be a scratch, we will continue to itch. Or the other way around, but yeah, I take that point. To the mailing list problem, I think I see a tendency on mailing lists that we have something like this anti-politician and anti-intellectual point. It's too often, everything that's on a mailing list, that's bike-shedding. If you give a point against something, then if it's not the opinion that you are, then it's bike-shedding. It's not a technical argument. You are against progress and I think we need to be a bit more collaborative at this point. To more listen to each other and not to dismiss everything as everything you don't understand doesn't make sense. It's only people that want their old stuff keeping there. It's, I think, the reason some flames go up very much is that it's important to people and then it's important to listen to them and not just tell them old parts if you don't care. I think if you go back and look at older threads in Debian like I did for this talk, or if you go wherever stuff's getting done and you look at what a thread looks like when stuff is getting done and people are busy making things happen versus when people are busy complaining about other people making things happen or whatever. There's a really different tone there and I think you can learn to recognize that tone. I don't know if you can teach people who are part of the problem, which we all probably are from time to time, to squelch that down or not. But I think it's something we need to be, yeah, Enrico. Oh, I'm like, no, it's right there. There's a stand, go up to the stand. On that point, it's interesting to make that point. I found myself, after some frustrating discussion I was having, asking people to please, a real life discussion about something completely different. Asking people, telling people please, can you please stick to, I'm more interested in hearing your personal story. I'm more interested in hearing your experience in what you have done. Please don't, I'm less interested in hearing what you wish would happen. I'm less interested in hearing what you wish I would do. Please let me choose what I would do and I'm happy to hear your experience. And I think that is a pattern that also matches very well what you mentioned. When people are getting things done, they're not discussing about the way they wish everybody else would believe or the way they wish everybody else would have done something, but they bring in their experience. When I did this last time, I did it this way and it didn't work, let's try another way. But then, when it comes from personal experience it is more about getting things done than about seeing who has the better ideas or something, which is rather pointless. So yeah, I wish in mailing lists to see people bringing in their experience, their stories at work, the way they fix the problem like that before and how rather than people should do this. People should do this is possibly something I don't want to see in a mailing list anymore. Yeah. You know, I think we have to somehow learn to be more accepting of just doing something and if it's a mistake reverting it, it would be great if we had more technology around this but just socially deciding, if somebody wants to go off and do something, then let them and if it turns out to be a bad idea we can undo it later and trying to, I think if you look at where we're really good in Debian at making things happen, it is stuff like the one maintainer for package model where people are given the power to go off and do something and it's their responsibility and if you have a flame war about it, well we have processes but we don't use them very often and it would be great if we could find more ways to expand that kind of, that way of doing things, often the things that don't just touch one package. You know, I think that's kind of what's broken down is that we're building this bigger stuff on top of individual packages and we don't really have a way to go off and say this guy is gonna handle the system to transition with this group of people that he's got together or something, maybe that doesn't work, BDL looks unhappy with it so maybe it's a bad idea but there must be a way to make it happen. Anybody else, yeah. Yeah, I used to expect that at some point sooner or later Debian would effectively just split into multiple groups which competed with each other. I mean, I know some people talk about Ubuntu as a fork of Debian but it's kind of a different thing. I really thought that maybe sometime there'd just be a discussion where the two sides just disagreed so badly about some issue that you would end up with two things basically both of which claimed to be the true Debian which obviously one probably would own the trademark but yeah, I mean, both of them would just think they were the true continuation and hate each other forever. That seems to have become less likely now and it seems to me that most of the times we have big discussions, it just ends up with not much happening rather than something happening that really annoys people. I mean, in some ways that's better in some ways that's worse. That's a fascinating comment. Maybe you, I mean, that doesn't fit in any of my three models, the forking off thing. And it is multi-universes, obviously it fits in the cosmological model and so yeah, that's fascinating, how, I mean, why is that less likely now than it used to be? Is there less excitement and energy around Debian or is it something else? Yeah, I mean, and now I would worry more that again, if things get harder to push new ideas and you end up, it's not, well, we are still getting new people, but if you look at the official members of Debian, we're basically only at a replacement rate. And I don't know, I had to say, looking around the room in particular here, but we're definitely a kind of aging population too. So although that gets us still fine for a few decades, but yeah, if we want to continue in the kind of long-term of Debian having a good future and still being relevant, then we, again, on your graph, we need to, how do we get back into really growing, not just growing around the community, around the edges, kind of helpers and contributors and so on, but actually, there are people who are members of Debian, should also be growing and taking new ideas. Yeah. Sort of replying to that, if we go a bit smaller than cosmological and go to the galactic scene, I think Debian could be looked at as if it started out being a star nursery and then we turned into a galaxy and we're now at a stage where we need to find a way of maintaining the black hole. Because otherwise, if people aren't allowed to work on an alternative black hole, then the arms will fly off as, what? We need to suck more. We need to suck more, yeah. But... So the black hole is the sort of boring central packages which you're not allowed to touch because if you do that, everything will break and we need a way of instantiating a new galaxy next door and just replacing the black hole and as you say, if it doesn't work, you can get revert. So, and the other thing is that if you look at the mailing lists, you get the impression that there's a war going on where there is gonna be a schism and half the people will go off and maintain their servers and the other half will go off with their tablets or whatever and sort them out but actually the people in those discussions aren't gonna believe there are those things and the rest of Debian is just getting on with it. So that's why I think Debian doesn't fragment us because the vocal people aren't necessarily the people doing the job. I think there's another possibility and that is that when I think about Murray's question, there are more derivatives of Debian than any other core distribution. So there are certainly lots of people out there who have decided that the thing they wanted to do differently or that they cared about was worth going and creating a CDD or a fork or whatever. So that's happened. It just hasn't dragged the trademark into or the name into some kind of a pit which I would hate to see happen but I have the sense that maybe the other thing about it is that Debian has become large enough and means enough things to enough people that the vast majority of us in the project who don't give a flying you know what about whether it's upstart or system D, that's an impassioned, important discussion for the people for whom how the system boots is the thing they care about in Debian but for the vast majority of us it's like, as you say, I do that once per kernel update cycle, a reboot and the rest of the time I just don't care and so the idea that the distribution would fracture somehow Debian wouldn't be Debian anymore because there's a fractious discussion going on in a particular sub project or sub part of the distribution is just hard for me to wrap my brain around. Yeah, it kind of seems like it'd have to be something that isn't technological based. Some kind of, you know, we want to change the social contract or maybe we want to change what free software is and that would fracture Debian but yeah. So on the lines of what BDEL just said, this way that we are becoming almost a preferred choice to be upstream is a very good thing and that enables our work to scale much better than if we tried to grow the project. I think the reason why we aren't growing in terms of number of people is because we're already at some kind of limits of scaling, we're having, you know, a lot of the things we're talking about, the difficulties to do with coordinating and communicating between this number of people and allowing and becoming upstream for people as a way for us to scale that a lot better and one of the things that we should be trying to do is to look outward rather than inward and to try to think of ways in which we can be a better upstream for people to make it easier for people to derive so that fewer people have to do their work within Debian and that they're easier to do it outside Debian because after all, software freedom is about freedom to make the change yourself to the software you're using and that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have a huge, kind of get involved with a huge complicated upstream who have processes and decide to do things in a particular way. No, you should just be able to do it. The moment, if you actually want to do that, it's quite hard and we should make it easier. Yeah, you know, when you think about that, maybe, I mean, it's kind of what's happening now but you have to wonder if, I mean, your scenario, you can go one of either two ways. You can have a lot of custom Debian distributions and things based on Debian and Debian can just become a background infrastructure and then who wants to work on it when it's something that's down there in the depths that other exciting things are being built on top of. You know, maybe you contribute patches back when it makes your life easier but do we get a sustaining model that way or maybe we don't? I kind of used to have this argument with Manoj. I thought that Debian had to expand or we were just gonna die and Manoj was like, no, Debian is just about what I need for my system and what my friends need for their systems. I'm only interested in it in that way and I don't know, maybe Manoj was right. I think that I was definitely wrong. Well, yeah, the best arguments are always that way, right? Okay, I guess time is over, so we have to take this as the closing comment and yeah, you have to move it to lunch to discuss over that. Okay, thanks everybody.