 Okay, so we're now off to some technical difficulties ready for our first proper session, which is the current and past DPLs So everyone can hear me. All right. This is going through the microphone. It sounds like it I'm Anthony Towns. I'm the previous DPL. This is Sam Hosebar. I Can't pronounce French or Hungarian or whatever it is. Yes, Slovenian. I can't pronounce French Slovenian either. So our current DPL So I Was I woke up and completely just changed what I was going to say because I was thinking back to the 2005 Demian DebConf and at that I was scheduled for a ridiculous early talk and was jet lagged and did this horribly depressing What's wrong with the project before my debut strap talk and I had to look over my notes for that and all the things that were wrong with the project so The the time then was just after Sarge had been released and we're now just after etch has been released and Some of the things that I had on my list that were all going terribly wrong was that We weren't accepting related projects like Debbie and women or having Alioth really well supported or using AMD 64 And we didn't have a live CD We seem to have all those things now though. So We also didn't really have a very effective policy process at the time and the tech committee wasn't doing anything and I think we Now have a full Contingent of the tech committee here and we're down to one or two open bugs The policy team is any of the policy team here. Can you stand up? There should be a Marga here at least and Andy maybe and a Russ is that a Russ? Okay? I haven't met Russ before so I don't recognize Russ Oh Okay, so we have a bunch of lazy policy people who don't get up in the morning fair enough Yeah, that's fair enough So you can either just catch tech committee people and policy committee people and get everything sorted out there and What else have we got? We've got fairly current versions of apt in the archive and we've got lots of new features in apt like internationalization That have been on the drawing board since 2002 or earlier and they're actually in the archive And in experimental and being used and tested We've now got a graphical installer, which we didn't at the time. We have live CDs. We have current versions of xorg We have 2.6 kernels We have lots of new features for the bug tracking system 2005 was just shortly after or the debcom 2005 was when we were still in the Vancouver controversy And we were going to support power PC and AMD 64 and maybe keep supporting I 386 and everything else would go Good put instead. We've managed to up the standard of all the architectures including m68k and We're even essentially still supporting m68k for etch We have LSB support for the first time ever We've resolved the gftl questions and stuff so in a couple of years We've actually kind of turned around my horribly depressing sort of This is my take on the project and every single one of those points has been Done much better and I mean I can't take credit for that myself. It's basically everyone in Debian who's done an awesome job, so Okay, and my my talk followed on from that with the actual debut strap thing Which it was meant to be about and that kind of segues into Deb conf here because about the only thing I've done so far is Committed deb the debut strap to di subversion. So we now have a team maintained debut strap and we've got Yeah, we don't have a team maintained if up down yet, but maybe we've still got a few days left in the week and We've had a quite successful Dakbof which gave me a huge to-do list which my computer crashed and now I no longer have So I need to watch the video again when it comes up Okay, so how are we for time? Yes, good so the DPL stuff Was kind of not what I was expecting. I don't know if it's ever been what any newly elected DPL has been expecting either It really gave you less a lot less time to actually do the stuff that you wanted to do rather than just respond to queries and stuff So the first month or so which I'm sure Sam's now experienced is The huge flurry of press requests for interviews and comments and what's it feel like to be DPL now? I don't know yet. I've only been DPL for a week and After those have kind of died down then suddenly you don't get press requests anymore because hey the only thing that's interesting in Debian is DPL elections, right? And instead you start getting arguments between people that you need to try and come in and resolve even though you've got no idea what they're really talking about and Once you've got once you've got that done you're expected to do regular DPL reports, which Usually means you haven't actually done anything so you then need to find other people who've done really cool stuff that you can kind of take the credit for and Report on and it's all exciting and interesting But you've just been been talking to press people and trying to resolve resolve conflicts Which hasn't been succeeding so you've got nothing to say for yourself and so yeah, that's I think you've still only done one Bits from the DPL so far or have you done another one since? Yes, so we've still only got one bits from the DPL on develop announce this term But I'm sure that will change after this week because Sam will have lots of other people's stuff to take credit for And the only thing that the DPL can really do that's vaguely interesting is actually spend SPI's money Which of course I've tried to do and not succeeded in some parts, but in other parts work much better and so Flying people around getting meetings organized. I think there's going to be a publicity meeting Sorry a mailing list team meeting in a few months that hopefully Debian will be supporting and last year there's been Events team meeting for the Germans and Austrians I think that Debian supported through FFIS's funds and Basically getting people together at times other than debconf is a good thing and Debian's got a fair bit of money That is more use being spent on developing Debian than just sitting in a bank account earning a little bit of interest And so I think I'll pass on to you now. We'll have questions at the end if we've got time Thanks, AJ So hello everyone. I'm Sam. I'm your new DPL And I'm going to talk a bit about why I'm here and about the future now that AJ has talked about Well the past and near future Okay, so I'm here because you voted for me I'm going to talk more to the inside people So if they are people here who are not DD's or not expecting to become DD's in the near future There's probably not much for you in here Except what I'm going to say about our user base Two major points I had in my platform were having a Sexier distribution and a more efficient efficient project in terms of Organization and process so I guess that if I'm here You mostly agree with that point of view and I'm going to explain it a bit So why a sexier distribution? Because we're not alone This is a graph of Google trends for major distributions in yellow. You can see Ubuntu and red green and blue are Debian Susie and Fedora. So this is just Google trends. So it's maybe not very Very meaningful, but you can draw a lot of graphs that have roughly the same shape for instance, this is the Distrowatch.com user hits per page. So it gives another idea of what's new What I call more sexy distributions are going are doing actually and how they can take a new user base that wasn't interested at all in Debian before and that we may have failed to to take to Debian or maybe that it's the logical step have them go to more user friendly distributions and end users Targeted distributions and then take them back to Debian to help us improve Debian and become DDs and so on That's not What happens Okay, I'm sorry about that Okay, a sexier distribution is not only what I or the developers want, but it's also what our users want We've been talking to them about the Linux or the open source desktop for years now And it's starting to happen and I guess a lot of people are saying exactly the same thing every year but now We're beginning to see a lot and a lot of desktop based distributions that are really usable and Do not require any any non-free or Windows based stuff. So it's really the time that Debian needs to react and Focus on the desktop. I don't mean by that that we should disregard other uses for Debian, but desktop users are a huge huge user base and we should not ignore them And I don't I also don't mean that we've been ignoring them. We should we should just Work more on them A desktop is not just a launch menu with a list of programs that you have that's the 1995 desktop now we need documentation Translations we need to integrate all the software together so that it works well so that you can drag and drop stuff from One application to another We need screenshots so that users know what they are going to install before installing the software Really we need icons so that the menus don't not do not only have I Do not only have The name of the application because open source software developers like to use very cryptic names for their applications So it's a lot of stuff that we need to put together that the upstreams do not necessarily do That Debian can provide we have a huge package repository adding switch screenshots or icons to each of our Packages is a huge task, but we can start doing it and everyone can benefit from it It's also QA QA is not only about Having policy compliant packages. It's also having General good quality I don't know if you can imagine a world where Not having a main page could be an RC bug. I could very well imagine that and I hope it wouldn't be fixed by just adding a linton override or something like that But having a main page is very critical for Some kind of users and these users do not care about building their package on MCCK so maybe what we What we are thinking of the QA and needs to to focus also on these users So everything I'm talking about is already happening If you have read the the release team announcement from this week about the plans for Lenny and for the stable release team and so on you'll see that we're now Committed to faster release cycles, which is in my opinion a good thing to more frequent point releases with More stuff in the point releases the the operation of volatile also goes in The direction of having a more up-to-date stuff in Debian for stable users We are likely to see a K3BSD port in the official release if everything goes well We will have a new architecture, which is armor very likely We might see open Solaris amongst our ports when Some licensing issues have been dealt with Everything is almost in place and patches are here for Multi arc which just needs to happen now and there's a lot a lot more of new stuff that's going to be in The next Debian and the other Debian's after this one So I won't do anything like I just said because that's not the DPL Roll to to do things, but I can talk to you about and then pretend I did it So I only I only talked about our distribution now. I'm going to talk about the project and what we do so We're not doing that bad because we are 1,000 people They are going to be 300 people at Debian Most of whom most of which are probably DD's and we are growing every day And that's good But there are a few things that we can improve and that I was talking about in my platform And I hope to see them happen first of all our core teams There are people that are who are really Crucial to our project. We could not do much without them and these people have been doing the same thing ever and ever again on a nearly daily basis and So it's quite normal that some things don't get done as fast as before because you always get tired of doing the same thing ever and ever and they're also overwhelmed because our developer base our Number of Debian machines our number of packages everything is scaling but not these teams so they need two priorities and Joining the teams is not easy and I'm working on it and trying to to get things Go a bit better. It's not easy because there are reasons there are valid reasons for Everything that's happening But you need to push the right buttons and I hope to get a few things done But you can also help By not relying that much on these teams for instance if you need a new service for a Qa work or something like that. You can just set up set it up yourself and I'm sure there are a lot of examples where You don't need for instance DSA to install a machine. You can just do it yourself. I know it's It's hard to do and you don't always have everything you need but take alias for instance It's an awesome service that's been set up and it does not rely on on much of our core teams And it's a very valuable service for Debian and it's great. So I'm hoping that That people can do more and more Things in the spirit of what was done for alias Another idea I want to promote is to stop owning packages Everyone is in charge of one or several packages, but We are There's a tendency to own packages and have a very protective Behavior towards packages. So just as an email is not hosting hostile act It's just the content of the email that may or may not be just like the grippers are not you should not consider NMUs as hostile acts they they might be there there are hostile NMUs, but I Think a few developers are Considering NMUs like An illustration of their laziness or something it's not it's just that someone had more time to do the stuff and they did it There's a famous Wikipedia policy if you've been on Wikipedia, which is be bold Just don't hesitate doing things that you think will improve the the overall status so that doesn't mean be reckless and do anything you want but If you're planning to do something that can be undone if it was done wrong I say don't hesitate and Be bolder when doing things in in Debian So do more NMUs and don't hesitate to improve everything of course do them right send the patches send warnings and so on so the usual rules apply but Don't hesitate to to improve Debian if if things are not going fast enough So there's another problem We're not really mentioning is what if you disappear one day? So of course you may believe the whole universe disappears with you. That's what I believe but That's also the possibility that the universe has to deal with that and struggle dealing with your Disapparition and and try to fix things when you're not here. So There are many ways you can die You can simply lose interest in what you're doing and everyone does that from time to time you can get Demotivated you can get better things to do You can have exams you can move you can have children get married and so on So you have lots of problem with real life That mean one day you're going to be away from Debian for a while for a long while or maybe Forever, I don't know. So please try to think about what happens when you're gone Because it may happen suddenly There's the problem. Well, it's not a problem but with shorter release cycles It means everything has to be faster for everything to work. So We have lower tolerance for delays if you want shorter release cycles And that means that inactivity even short-term inactivity has a bigger impact if our goal is a shorter recycle. So There's nothing wrong with going away for a while and Just not touching your Debian stuff and so on but try to think of other people who who going to fix the stuff So in the same way that I'd like to see more NM use I'd like to see more NMU friendly developers and I'd like to to see more packages that are handled in a revision control system and yes No, no has I think every possible revision control system available I guess a few are missing and probably the one you are using I don't know but just request it and it will probably appear and If you give right access to other people not necessarily backup maintainers, but backup maintainers are good or maybe I don't know the QA team or anyone interested in doing transverse work on the archive like fixing package descriptions or Doing big transitions that need right access to a lot of packages it it can make the life of everyone really easier so Please use alias or anything publicly accessible if you can and Give access to more people We should also take back from others other distributions who Do the same things as us? We're not the only ones who try to integrate software and add icons and menu stuff and Have an integrated desktop So I'm thinking of Ubuntu of course, but also many other distributions that just appear sometimes Disappear after one year or so, but the work they did might be useful. So Try to integrate their work in your demo packages. Maybe try to share with the the developers if they're still here Well, not only desktop files, but also translations There's a cool a cool tool for translations that not many devian developers like because it's non-free, but You may enjoy the results of this tool So I wish we would share much more among distributions Again, I am not really mentioning Ubuntu, but it's it's one of the the main targets of this slide I'm thinking about Fedora as well, which is not Which is quite an old project because it is based on Red Hat, but the community is quite younger that the Debian community and they have Excellent tools that have appeared and I I have the feeling that we are not paying attention to to what Fedora does Because there's this This philosophy of thinking we are doing the best anyway, so We don't need to to have a look at what other people do Of course, not everyone thinks that way. That's just a general feeling I have and I'd like to see that disappear as well Okay, one of the major points in my Platform was communication because I felt there was not enough communication within Debian like teams not reporting or Stuff being done and done again in different places because no one knew what was going on So there's no magical solution to that. If you don't have time to say what you're doing It's probably better that you do it rather than just talk about it But I hope there's going to be more communication Don't hesitate to use Debian Devil announced for anything you're going to do or anything you've done Don't think that no one will care because in within one year or six months Or I don't know maybe someone would be interested in what you did and Will not be aware that you started that project or that you set up that service and so on so Please try to put everything you do in a public place and communicate about it on a public place so that Later we can remember that you did that and the work doesn't have to be done again And of course, I wish we we communicated better with other distribution I don't know if maintainers do this on a per package basis. Maybe I'm doing it a bit I think I'm not doing it enough for my packages. So That's a piece of advice for everyone Have a look at other distributions patches because they're often good Take back what's good and share what you've done to your package that might be of interest to the other maintainers from other distributions And I hope we can improve Debian and the free software as a general Product together So I'm finished Thanks for listening and have a pleasant napkin. Now AJ and I will take questions if anyone has questions There's a mark at the bottom of the room at the middle of the room You mentioned a sexier distribution That implies that we have better graphics and even tasteful and well integrated graphics that collides a little bit with the self-proclaimed graphical abilities of many devian developers which are Below standard frankly speaking I would like to see some initiative from you or Generally from Debian developers to really trust in the graphical experts that want to help But really can't because they don't package anything or are not developers or whatnot. We need to change our attitude there, too I'm fully agree. Yes. Yes Currently our our policy for accepting new maintainers is some kind of technical excellence in Package integration There are a few people who managed to enter Debian without knowing anything about programming Christian Now Christian knows a lot more about programming But the important part is that he managed to enter Debian and improve Debian from the inside without doing any programming work He was just working on transitions, which is a Crucial part of Debian as well Internationalization is is really important as our graphics Drawing icons and so on and yes, I wish we could Find a way to to have more of these people enter Debian, you know in a faster way Comment it probably for people with questions lining up behind the mic would probably be useful How do you say your last name? Oh, it depends when I'm talking to Because I don't know how to say it in France in French So I say Osvar in France, but when talking to English speaking people. I usually say Hosbar or something like that in a kind of English like accent. I I really don't mind. I'm not feeling very strongly about how my last name is pronounced. I Will repeat the question if you can't walk to the microphone. I was wondering how exactly is the lag in infrastructure team improvements going to be addressed during your mandate as a leader that is you were saying yes we are going to fix the system administration team and whatever but How about some details? I think there's the room after all these years Okay, well first things First thing that was done some month ago Before I was DPL was the addition of the RT system That will help us have a better measurement of what's done and What's not done and at which speed it's done So I hope by by using this tool we can convince everyone in the team that more people are added In a separate way on I've I've got a few Candidacies to join the team which I've submitted to the current members of of the team and they They're still discussing them But I have hopes that at least one more person will be added quickly I Can't say much about it right now because there are other issues that I'd rather kept private for now, but I will definitely communicate on that as soon as I have information But it's the first team I've been working on working with so So the results if any you should should come faster than for the the other teams And I'm not sure this satisfies you, but that's how things are right now There There's at least one member of the DSA team here and I'm well two members actually And I'm hoping to have a chat with them and well, I hope that real life chat would be Well, we'll get better results than just I see which is Well, you cannot communicate as well Well, at least I cannot communicate as well in on IRC than in real life So I'm going to to talk to them as well What about And AJ made a proposal on the project mailing list A few months ago, maybe weeks About the general handling of new members to teams. Yeah, well That sounds interesting one thing you should know is that a few teams Predate the DPL and the Constitution itself and so on and don't believe The the DPL should really interfere with what they're doing. So if there are external Initiatives to to address the problem As the DPL I'll have an opinion on it, but as a mere developer I'm all for it I just hope it doesn't interfere with What I'm currently doing But All right Are there any plans on replacing these teams with other people who would be more willing To follow the Constitution and the other rules of the project And why not I wouldn't want to to choose people just on Whether they follow the Constitution or not because there's no need to let go of any other technical criteria in Replacing people who refuse To listen to any other rules than what they set up themselves Okay, I tend to agree with you I just don't think a fight with between the DPL and these people is the best way to solve things Maybe just having a GR to to settle things would be the best way to to handle it I Am not sure I want to provoke it, but if it happened I Believe it will be the voice of the whole project And well we'll have to deal with it. So so if If enough people you only need five or six people for that want to to do that Well, I'm all for it But I don't have the The power to force that I The DPL does not need any seconds to set up a GR. So if you're all that you don't need anybody else Okay, okay, I remember that Hi, you may be aware that about 20 Debian developers work at Google We have an internal mailing list Debian at Google.com that I I think you can mail to from the outside So you there are a couple of communications things that we can do to help things out if you want to present some idea and Get it circulated get it archived There's a very good video team that sets up and records tech talks So any of us can invite you to give a tech talk And you can invite you can ask to be invited by contacting us at Debian dot Google dot Debian at Google.com We can invite you to give a tech talk They'll set it up. They'll record it and they'll stick it on videos.google.com. We can also set up Video conferencing between the different offices for you So if you're in New York and you want to talk to somebody in Zurich We have friendly people at both locations that we can set that sort of thing up Some of the major offices that we can do this at would be Mountain View Santa Monica New York Zurich Dublin There's a small office in London And I think there's one in Japan somewhere Okay, well, that's an excellent idea. We'll remember that as well. Thank you. I Have a question for Anthony. It's not really Related to his being DPL, but I think this is the right form for it anyway We've had to release management experiment for edge with To release manager being paid part of the time in order to try to get released out on schedule and With experiment belongs Evaluation and we've had some discussions while the experiment was running But I don't think those can replace the evaluation and I was wondering what the plans are for that So one of the plans was not to mention it during the DPL thing to keep it separate, but anyway so I'm starting to draft a report or a summary but like the the difficulty with just me doing that is that I'm obviously have some views already that other people don't share and It would be nice if we could have the report of the experiment actually come to some Conclusions rather than just a new round of controversy and I'm not a hundred percent sure how to do that So I'm going to I've got some a kind of structure for the report that I hope might be useful Which I'm planning on blogging sometime after this session is finished and Then hopefully other people will help or if they don't then I'll do it on myself. I guess but whatever so AJ said that that one of the things that you end up doing is DPL is Indeed you you get all these people coming to you and saying will you please sort out my argument with so-and-so? And I always found those very tedious to deal with and didn't really want them So I wanted to ask Sam whether he had any plans to Set up anything to deal with those questions and possibly even to intervene in cases where a couple of people have Failed to email the DPL to ask them to Stop slapping each other Well, first I must say that I'm I'm not exactly overwhelmed with emails to the leader address for now, so So actually I don't think there have been more than two emails for the last two weeks Send to the leader address. I don't know whether my spam filters are too efficient or I don't know Well, I plan to address these issues on a case-to-case basis because Setting up something right now without knowing what kind of of Difficult interactions might appear I Don't know yet. That's my answer I'd like to make a comment about this this idea that you should set something up You know, you shouldn't set something up without knowing what the kind of dispute is in general if you want to persuade people that their Conflict has been resolved with resolved in a fair and reasonable way It's generally a good idea to set up the rules beforehand rather than make them up You know ad hoc. Yeah, well, I think we have rules. We don't have Policy of enforcing them in a very consistent way They are going to be at least two Bobs or talks. I don't know about Social committee idea and I will take part to to these to these books and talks so I have I will probably have a better answer after these talks have happened because You always end up with having Technical questions with about how that the The instance will will work and how to renew members and how to assure assure that everyone in in the these instance is representative of what Debian is and whether You want to prevent takeovers of of it and so on so well Generally speaking, I'm all for having something that deals with these issues. I Just not I'm just not sure how to to make sure it's the the best way to do it I say Let's do whatever comes from these books and see how it works and Well, so let's hope that we never have to to use it too much But if you want my my opinion on it, well, I'm all for having something like that. Yes, I just don't feel I I don't I don't have an opinion on how it should work Just having it would be would be a first step that I would agree with What ideas do you have about governmental reforms in Debian and? specifically AJ and yeah, he mentioned that he got overwhelmed by all kinds of silly small things in the beginning and also later on he only Mostly reacted and said that and he couldn't be really proactive about many things that he actually wanted to do Can you imagine using something like a DPL team? Seriously, I Have mixed feelings about a DPL team because in the past it has been It hasn't been so efficient. So For the moment, I don't believe there's a need for it But I may change my mind later, I don't know yet For the moment as I said, I'm not really overwhelmed. So I think I can handle everything that's happening It's not I'm not going to to just Disappear if the the task becomes too huge and I will not hesitate to delegate But I like to do it on a pro-task basis rather than just appointing Individuals that are going to the to be the DPL shadow for for this and this so I'd wait for huge tasks to appear and then decide whether I take the task or Delegate or look for candidacies to to work on it. That's The way I'd like it to to work Yes, there are huge tasks well Okay And I said that there are already huge tasks Okay, so the idea is that there are already Huge tasks like having graphical people be integrated into them in faster I hope to have a lot of things dealt with in depth conf Because it's the first time that I see everyone with my DPL hat and That I am in a position to to ask them what are they are going to do about that? So I guess just after depth conf I may already look for people to join Action teams to to work on these issues So so let's see in one week. I guess the time is up So if you have any more questions, I will be available the whole week Thank you very much for listening and see you