 So thank you everybody for attending and please welcome Christophe. We'll talk about how to contribute to disto tracker So Christophe, it's all to you Thank you. Thank you. Hello So today we are going to speak about distro tracker and also about how to contribute to it and maybe it gives a little feedback about how I experienced it and it can help in other projects too. So That's the menu We'll go through it So the main thing is Practically if you want to to help in distro tracker we have a documentation which is well written and Here is a little summary of it In Debian we like to use emails And use the bug tracking system. So every new feature or problems is listed there It can be intimidating to to email the publicly when you have questions, but that's the way we We we used to There is a pseudo package called tracker.debian.org Which you can use so tracker is not a package yet It's not package in Debian, but there's still a pseudo package you can use to refer to it in the BTS We have a list of of tasks suitable for newcomers The new newcomer tag is something new. It appeared last year. I think It's the idea is to to let new people Get in Debian and have some mentorship from people who are more experienced So it's it's a great way to To start volunteering for for packages or for projects and to to learn to interact with with each other Of course, you can install the distro tracker locally hack on it and share what you did It is maintained by the quality assurance team So we have a nice each channel and a mailing list feel free to join and and Please use it and give give us free feedback. So currently it's not the The package tracking by default. It's not the official package tracking But it will Maybe it will soon be maybe This is still a little more work mainly Around the mail system it could be Stronger, so we we're waiting to fix that before Before pushing it So what is this true tracker? It's a it's a tool that gives you a lot of information On packages Well, you can get this information with other tools like DPKG or our Madison or I don't know but Imagine you're you're an advanced user and you you need a software that more You need a recent version of a software You can go on tracker and look for that software You will see that unstable has such a version and testing has another one and also you can you can notice the differences and And yeah, I like I like to think of of the web page of tracker It's kind of a single point of contact with all the informations and all the other tools Allings there so it can be used for by contributors advanced users teams and upstreams to To know what's happening About when one package You can track several package that's that could be used by teams Yes, so the two main interfaces are The web interface and also there's a mail system. That's quite powerful You can subscribe to it and and get the same emails as maintainers do or just Just a set of it you can just opt for Specific emails about I don't translation the repetitive is bugs or what you care about So let's talk about the design It's really better than the old pts Which is good? It's yet better. This one has testing driven development So we we try to write the test first watch them fail and and then fix them fix the code I mean It uses Django which advertises itself as fast secure and reliable so it's really Something that helps to to build tools upon upon it and Yeah Yeah, we trust we trust to that using a such a framework gives us structure and and The possibility to to code well So we developed a few different modules Django modules. They are called applications But it's those are just Python Python application modules There's one about the user management Which could be used by other projects That it's interesting because it combines One user can can have several email addresses and it's often the case with the been collaborate collaborators The project is well documented in the code and outside It can be used by derivatives Currently, it's only used by it. It's already used by Kali and Yeah, maybe the idea is that all the beyond the derivatives could use the same tool to to manage the package and the distro So if you maintain if you're part of a derivative Try it in comparison with the previous pts. This one is dynamic The previous one computed the data a few times a day and It has user in instances so you can customize it for your own needs For the moment it doesn't go very far, but we can imagine to have Much more specific customization What are people involved? It's the quality assurance team and the project was started By Raphael, I think who was also one of the author of the previous pts and Yeah, there were two mentorship programs To try to have people Contributing to the project I was part of the second one. It's called the new contributor game. It was organized by the Debian France France and Initially, there was also a summer of codes and Marco Lalic Did the initial work and yeah, those programs are in my opinion really a great way to To learn to interact in the band and to learn to to program and a lot of other things because you have a Good relation with somebody who's already in in Debian and who understands all the all the things so if you have the opportunity to To do such programs or to use the newcomer tags You you should There have been 17 people contributing to to this short tracker until now The project has started two years ago in 2013 And the previous pts. I think it's in 2001 and those are the people who did one or more commits and You are welcome to join of course some thoughts about volunteering So Debian is about packaging free software, but there are a lot of other tasks, of course mice If I talk about my experience, I'm Django developer, so that was a really good opportunity for me to Contribute to Debian because that's something I really wanted to I Also tried to maintain a few packages, but I feel what what I can help the best is Such projects there. There are a lot of other projects using Django in Debian Summit for instance, we have our own instance of summit. I heard they're looking for Django developers And and we call has several Django projects. He needs help and Also, if you know HTML or CSS and all the web things, there's a strong need In various Debian projects, you can watch this address It's a census of all the services Debian has on the web and Basically, they all would be happy to have some help in In the HTML design and those kind of things Why should you do it? Because it's fun because it's an opportunity to learn In Debian we value communities so We tend to work in teams. There's a list of teams. Please read it if you haven't done yet And That's it I Was quite faster than I thought but we have a lot of time for questions Thank you So it's not really a question, but I want to thank Christophe for having made this talk because Actually, I was supposed to do it. Paul White asked me. I said, huh, not another talk Let's try to bring some new blood and Christophe, as he said, he joined us During a game, so it's not so long ago and he's doing really a great job On the digital tracker. There are not many people helping us or me rather than us Most of the code that was been written by Marco Lalic is the student who made the summer of code At that time he said he wanted to continue to contribute and he would help us but after the summer it is appealed and I'm basically Maintaining it alone with some time commit from Paul White and Christophe and a few people but I would really like more help and I took the time to talk about new criminals that he said so I Will review or your page is quite quickly, so you'll be if you want to help you can be sure that you will be you will have quick feedback and It will be quickly deployed because if the test passes, I just install it I Double-check that you have written tests first, but otherwise I deployed So if you have a few questions, we can ask I would have expected a few questions, but Did you measure how many people use the new tracker? No, you do some kind of survey or something because Personally, I use the old one. I have no idea why precisely because Basically the same functionality But that would be interesting maybe to see When you take me as a sample, it's 100% the old one. So maybe you could do some kind of survey It's more like a good idea. A lot of people told me they They tried and the even some of them are using the new one But actually the older links are pointing to the to the current one So they'll be one moment. We we're going to do the switch We're not so far from it, but let's do it properly Okay This I we have no statistics. I didn't bother looking at it, but it's clear That's the old one is going to disappear at some point The new one is doing pretty well. Well, it's dead at base base. So sometimes when the database is restarted for security reasons It won't work for a few minutes, but Otherwise, it's really really reliable and Mainly I don't trust fully the mail parts because during the summer of code we had some problems Due to the way Xeem Fox hundreds of processes when he gets hundreds of commit mails in the same second and it tends to Put server down. So I just want we just want to add a Mail queue in the front the processing I always think that I will be able to do it in next month, but well, I mean, that's like four to two years No, so I don't give you any date if you do it the sooner There's a link on the old tracker pointing to the new one. I Guess more people are using the new one No, but I can't be sure It's not bothered to look at the start Working What does it need to become the default tracking system as as Raphael says? I think the the main part is It wouldn't handle the load That's how I understand it for now it needs some parts of the of the mail handling Should be better The the web part is efficient, but yeah, what's really interested not true It's efficient enough for this for the load we have but it's not efficient So yeah, mostly the the mail parts needs to to be corrected and Yeah, I haven't looked deep into it. So maybe Raphael can say more about it. Well, I'll just explained it's the It does work many people are using it We did snub some exit configuration to avoid the problem on the most cases, but it's really The knob we can use is only the load of the machine. So basically it will Run under the process is bringing the machine really slow, but then he will stop processing and it will wait a bit So it doesn't kill the machine anymore, but it's not nice enough in my opinion Other people can come visit the other way, but I have not felt any urgency to switch And I rather I'd rather finish and fix this correctly first Okay, thank you Thank you, Christophe