Dear Debian community,

this are my bits from DPL for August.

Happy Birthday Debian

On 16th of August Debian celebrated its 31th birthday. Since I'm unable to write a better text than our great publicity team I'm simply linking to their article for those who might have missed it:

https://bits.debian.org/2024/08/debian-turns-31.html

Removing more packages from unstable

Helmut Grohne argued for more aggressive package removal and sought consensus on a way forward. He provided six examples of processes where packages that are candidates for removal are consuming valuable person-power. I’d like to add that the Bug of the Day initiative (see below) also frequently encounters long-unmaintained packages with popcon votes sometimes as low as zero, and often fewer than ten.

Helmut's email included a list of packages that would meet the suggested removal criteria. There was some discussion about whether a popcon vote should be included in these criteria, with arguments both for and against it. Although I support including popcon, I acknowledge that Helmut has a valid point in suggesting it be left out.

While I’ve read several emails in agreement, Scott Kitterman made a valid point "I don't think we need more process. We just need someone to do the work of finding the packages and filing the bugs." I agree that this is crucial to ensure an automated process doesn’t lead to unwanted removals. However, I don’t see "someone" stepping up to file RM bugs against other maintainers' packages. As long as we have strict ownership of packages, many people are hesitant to touch a package, even for fixing it. Asking for its removal might be even less well-received. Therefore, if an automated procedure were to create RM bugs based on defined criteria, it could help reduce some of the social pressure.

In this aspect the opinion of Niels Thykier is interesting: "As much as I want automation, I do not mind the prototype starting as a semi-automatic process if that is what it takes to get started."

The urgency of the problem to remove packages was put by CharlesPlessy into the words: "So as of today, it is much less work to keep a package rotting than removing it." My observation when trying to fix the Bug of the Day exactly fits this statement.

I would love for this discussion to lead to more aggressive removals that we can agree upon, whether they are automated, semi-automated, or managed by a person processing an automatically generated list (supported by an objective procedure). To use an analogy: I’ve found that every image collection improves with aggressive pruning. Similarly, I’m convinced that Debian will improve if we remove packages that no longer serve our users well.

DEP14 / DEP18

There are two DEPs that affect our workflow for maintaining packages—particularly for those who agree on using Git for Debian packages. DEP-14 recommends a standardized layout for Git packaging repositories, which benefits maintainers working across teams and makes it easier for newcomers to learn a consistent repository structure.

DEP-14 stalled for various reasons. Sam Hartman suspected it might be because 'it doesn't bring sufficient value.' However, the assumption that git-buildpackage is incompatible with DEP-14 is incorrect, as confirmed by its author, Guido Günther. As one of the two key tools for Debian Git repositories (besides dgit) fully supports DEP-14, though the migration from the previous default is somewhat complex.

Some investigation into mass-converting older formats to DEP-14 was conducted by the Perl team, as Gregor Hermann pointed out..

The discussion about DEP-14 resurfaced with the suggestion of DEP-18. Guido Günther proposed the title Encourage Continuous Integration and Merge Request-Based Collaboration for Debian Packages’, which more accurately reflects the DEP's technical intent.

Otto Kekäläinen, who initiated DEP-18 (thank you, Otto), provided a good summary of the current status. He also assembled a very helpful overview of Git and GitLab usage in other Linux distros.

More Salsa CI

As a result of the DEP-18 discussion, Otto Kekäläinen suggested implementing Salsa CI for our top popcon packages.

I believe it would be a good idea to enable CI by default across Salsa whenever a new repository is created.

Progress in Salsa migration

In my campaign, I stated that I aim to reduce the number of packages maintained outside Salsa to below 2,000. As of March 28, 2024, the count was 2,368. Today, it stands at 2,187 (UDD query: SELECT DISTINCT count(*) FROM sources WHERE release = 'sid' and vcs_url not like '%salsa%' ;).

After a third of my DPL term (OMG), we've made significant progress, reducing the amount in question (369 packages) by nearly half. I'm pleased with the support from the DDs who moved their packages to Salsa. Some packages were transferred as part of the Bug of the Day initiative (see below).

Bug of the Day

As announced in my 'Bits from the DPL' talk at DebConf, I started an initiative called Bug of the Day. The goal is to train newcomers in bug triaging by enabling them to tackle small, self-contained QA tasks. We have consistently identified target packages and resolved at least one bug per day, often addressing multiple bugs in a single package.

In several cases, we followed the Package Salvaging procedure outlined in the Developers Reference. Most instances were either welcomed by the maintainer or did not elicit a response. Unfortunately, there was one exception where the recipient of the Package Salvage bug expressed significant dissatisfaction. The takeaway is to balance formal procedures with consideration for the recipient’s perspective.

I'm pleased to confirm that the Matrix channel has seen an increase in active contributors. This aligns with my hope that our efforts would attract individuals interested in QA work. I’m particularly pleased that, within just one month, we have had help with both fixing bugs and improving the code that aids in bug selection.

As I aim to introduce newcomers to various teams within Debian, I also take the opportunity to learn about each team's specific policies myself. I rely on team members' assistance to adapt to these policies. I find that gaining this practical insight into team dynamics is an effective way to understand the different teams within Debian as DPL.

Another finding from this initiative, which aligns with my goal as DPL, is that many of the packages we addressed are already on Salsa but have not been uploaded, meaning their VCS fields are not published. This suggests that maintainers are generally open to managing their packages on Salsa. For packages that were not yet on Salsa, the move was generally welcomed.

Publicity team wants you

The publicity team has decided to resume regular meetings to coordinate their efforts. Given my high regard for their work, I plan to attend their meetings as frequently as possible, which I began doing with the first IRC meeting.

During discussions with some team members, I learned that the team could use additional help. If anyone interested in supporting Debian with non-packaging tasks reads this, please consider introducing yourself to debian-publicity@lists.debian.org. Note that this is a publicly archived mailing list, so it's not the best place for sharing private information.

Kind regards Andreas.

As the expression goes, "Time flies when you are having fun", meaning you do not normally account for the passage of time when you are distracted and enjoying yourself. The expression is a well established English idiom, though today for a moment the Debian Project pauses to reflect on that expression.

It has been 31 years now that we have been around.

It has been 31 amazing years of fun and amazement in watching the world around us grow and ourselves grow into the world.

Let us tell you, we have had a great time in doing so.

We have been invited to nearly every continent and country for over 25 Debian Developer Conferences, we have contributed to the sciences with our Debian Pure Blends; we have not given up on or discounted aged hardware with Long Term Support (LTS); we have encouraged and sponsored diversity with our Outreach Programs. We have contributed to exploration of this lovely planet and the vast vacuum of space (where no one hears Developers scream).

There is more to what we have done but from a cursory glance, we seem to have done it all.

But we never noticed it.

Time does fly or "escape irretrievably" when having a good time and making progress, though our pause at this moment is that we have also had a few moments of honest self-evaluation and reflection. Over the years the project has lost some significant loved ones who were dear to us - you may have called them Developers while we called them Friends, we called them Mentors, we hurt, we grieved, and in their memories we keep moving forward.

The course of the project has seen a few tragedies, has seen heated discourse in the public domain, has addressed and weathered concerns, and has still continually grown.

And we did that in the public sphere, because at the core this is an open project. Our code is public, our bugs and failings are public, our communications are public, our meetings are public, and our love of FLOSS is most definitely public.

And now more than ever the Debian Project realizes that the "we" that is sprinkled throughout this letter is just another way of saying: "you". You, the user, contributor, sponsor, developer, maintainer, bug squasher; all of you make the WE that is Debian. So what are WE waiting for? Lets celebrate!

Join the worldwide celebration or find an event local to you by visiting our DebianDay events page - see you there!

On Saturday 3 August 2024, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close.

Over 339 attendees representing 48 countries from around the world came together for a combined 108 events made up of more than 50 Talks and Discussions, 37 Birds of a Feather (BoF – informal meeting between developers and users) sessions, 12 workshops, and activities in support of furthering our distribution and free software (25 patches submitted to the Linux kernel), learning from our mentors and peers, building our community, and having a bit of fun.

The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp hacking session held July 21st through July 27th where Debian Developers and Contributors convened to focus on their Individual Debian-related projects or work in team sprints geared toward in-person collaboration in developing Debian.

This year featured a BootCamp that was held for newcomers with a GPG Workshop and a focus on Introduction to creating .deb files (Debian packaging) staged by a team of dedicated mentors who shared hands-on experience in Debian and offered a deeper understanding of how to work in and contribute to the community.

The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Sunday July 28 2024.

In addition to the traditional 'Bits from the DPL' talk, the continuous key-signing party, lightning talks and the announcement of next year's DebConf25, there were several update sessions shared by internal projects and teams.

Many of the hosted discussion sessions were presented by our technical core teams with the usual and useful meet the Technical Committee and the ftpteam and a set of BoFs about packaging policy and Debian infrastructure, including talk about APT and Debian Installer and an overview about the first eleven years of Reproducible Builds. Internationalization and localization have been subject of several talks. The Python, Perl, Ruby, and Go programming language teams, as well as Med team, also shared updates on their work and efforts.

More than fifteen BoFs and talks about community, diversity and local outreach highlighted the work of various team involved in the social aspect of our community. This year again, Debian Brazil shared strategy and action to attract and retain new contributors and members and opportunities both in Debian and F/OSS.

The schedule was updated each day with planned and ad-hoc activities introduced by attendees over the course of the conference. Several traditional activities took place: a job fair, a poetry performance, the traditional Cheese and Wine party, the group photos and the Day Trips.

For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were broadcast live and recorded and the videos made available through a link in their summary in the schedule. Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC messaging apps or online collaborative text documents which allowed remote attendees to 'be in the room' to ask questions or share comments with the speaker or assembled audience.

DebConf24 saw over 6.8 TiB (4.3 TiB in 2023) of data streamed, 91.25 hours (55 in 2023) of scheduled talks, 20 network access points, 1.6 km fibers (1 broken fiber...) and 2.2 km UTP cable deployed, more than 20 country Geoip viewers, 354 T-shirts, 3 day trips, and up to 200 meals planned per day.

All of these events, activities, conversations, and streams coupled with our love, interest, and participation in Debian and F/OSS certainly made this conference an overall success both here in Busan, South Korea and online around the world.

The DebConf24 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.

Next year, DebConf25 will be held in Brest, France, from Monday, July 7 to Monday, July 21, 2025. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in France will start the conference activities with DebCamp with particular focus on individual and team work towards improving the distribution.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf24 website for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf24, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak, Proxmox, and Wind River.

We also wish to thank our Video and Infrastructure teams, the DebConf24 and DebConf committees, our host nation of South Korea, and each and every person who helped contribute to this event and to Debian overall.

Thank you all for your work in helping Debian continue to be "The Universal Operating System".

See you next year!

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

About DebConf

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and India. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/.

About Infomaniak

Infomaniak is an independent cloud service provider recognized throughout Europe for its commitment to privacy, the local economy and the environment. Recording growth of 18% in 2023, the company is developing a suite of online collaborative tools and cloud hosting, streaming, marketing and events solutions. Infomaniak uses exclusively renewable energy, builds its own data centers and develops its solutions in Switzerland, without relocating. The company powers the website of the Belgian radio and TV service (RTBF) and provides streaming for more than 3,000 TV and radio stations in Europe.

About Proxmox

Proxmox provides powerful and user-friendly Open Source server software. Enterprises of all sizes and industries use Proxmox solutions to deploy efficient and simplified IT infrastructures, minimize total cost of ownership, and avoid vendor lock-in. Proxmox also offers commercial support, training services, and an extensive partner ecosystem to ensure business continuity for its customers. Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH was established in 2005 and is headquartered in Vienna, Austria. Proxmox builds its product offerings on top of the Debian operating system.

About Wind River

Wind River For nearly 20 years, Wind River has led in commercial Open Source Linux solutions for mission-critical enterprise edge computing. With expertise across aerospace, automotive, industrial, telecom, and more, the company is committed to Open Source through initiatives like eLxr, Yocto, Zephyr, and StarlingX.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the DebConf24 web page at https://debconf24.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.

Dear Debian community,

this are my bits from DPL written at my last day at another great DebConf.

DebConf attendance

At the beginning of July, there was some discussion with the bursary and content team about sponsoring attendees. The discussion continued at DebConf. I do not have much experience with these discussions. My summary is that while there is an honest attempt to be fair to everyone, it did not seem to work for all, and some critical points for future discussion remained. In any case, I'm thankful to the bursary team for doing such a time-draining and tedious job.

Popular packages not yet on Salsa at all

Otto Kekäläinen did some interesting investigation about Popular packages not yet on Salsa at all. I think I might provide some more up to date list soon by some UDD query which considers more recent uploads than the trends data soon. For instance wget was meanwhile moved to Salsa (thanks to Noël Köthe for this).

Keep on contacting more teams

I kept on contacting teams in July. Despite I managed to contact way less teams than I was hoping I was able to present some conclusions in the Debian Teams exchange BoF and Slide 16/23 of my Bits from the DPL talk. I intend to do further contacts next months.

Nominating Jeremy Bícha for GNOME Advisory Board

I've nominated Jeremy Bícha to GNOME Advisory Board. Jeremy has volunteered to represent Debian at GUADEC in Denver.

DebCamp / DebConf

I attended DebCamp starting from 22 July evening and had a lot of fun with other attendees. As always DebConf is some important event nearly every year for me. I enjoyed Korean food, Korean bath, nature at the costline and other things.

I had a small event without video coverage Creating web galleries including maps from a geo-tagged photo collection. At least two attendees of this workshop confirmed success in creating their own web galleries.

I used DebCamp and DebConf for several discussions. My main focus was on discussions with FTP master team members Luke Faraone, Sean Whitton, and Utkarsh Gupta. I'm really happy that the four of us absolutely agree on some proposed changes to the structure of the FTP master team, as well as changes that might be fruitful for the work of the FTP master team itself and for Debian developers regarding the processing of new packages.

My explicit thanks go to Luke Faraone, who gave a great introduction to FTP master work in their BoF. It was very instructive for the attending developers to understand how the FTP master team checks licenses and copyright and what workflow is used for accepting new packages.

In the first days of DebConf, I talked to representatives of DebConf platinum sponsor WindRiver, who announced the derivative eLxr. I warmly welcome this new derivative and look forward to some great cooperation. I also talked to the representative of our gold sponsor, Microsoft.

My first own event was the Debian Med BoF. I'd like to repeat that it might not only be interesting for people working in medicine and microbiology but always contains some hints how to work together in a team.

As said above I was trying to summarise some first results of my team contacts and got some further input from other teams in the Debian Teams exchange BoF.

Finally, I had my Bits from DPL talk. I received positive responses from attendees as well as from remote participants, which makes me quite happy. For those who were not able to join the events on-site or remotely, the videos of all events will be available on the DebConf site soon. I'd like to repeat the explicit need for some volunteers to join the Lintian team. I'd also like to point out the "Tiny tasks" initiative I'd like to start (see below).

BTW, if someone might happen to solve my quiz for the background images there is a summary page in my slides which might help to assign every slide to some DebConf. I could assume that if you pool your knowledge you can solve more than just the simple ones. Just let me know if you have some solution. You can add numbers to the rows and letters to the columns and send me:

 2000/2001:  Uv + Wx
 2002: not attended
 2003: Yz
 2004: not attended
 2005:
 2006: not attended
 2007:
 ...
 2024: A1

This list provides some additional information for DebConfs I did not attend and when no video stream was available. It also reminds you about the one I uncovered this year and that I used two images from 2001 since I did not have one from 2000. Have fun reassembling good memories.

Tiny tasks: Bug of the day

As I mentioned in my Bits from DPL talk, I'd like to start a "Tiny tasks" effort within Debian. The first type of tasks will be the Bug of the day initiative. For those who would like to join, please join the corresponding Matrix channel. I'm curious to see how this might work out and am eager to gain some initial experiences with newcomers. I won't be available until next Monday, as I'll start traveling soon and have a family event (which is why I need to leave DebConf today after the formal dinner).

Kind regards from DebConf in Busan Andreas.

DebConf24, the 25th annual Debian Developer Conference, is taking place in Busan, Republic of Korea from July 28th to August 4th, 2024. Debian contributors from all over the world have come together at Pukyong National University, Busan, to participate and work in a conference exclusively ran by volunteers.

Today the main conference starts with around 340 expected attendants and over 100 scheduled activities, including 45-minute and 20-minute talks, Bird of a Feather ("BoF") team meetings, workshops, a job fair, as well as a variety of other events. The full schedule is updated each day, including activities planned ad-hoc by attendees over the course of the conference.

If you would like to engage remotely, you can follow the video streams available from the DebConf24 website for the events happening in the three talk rooms: Bada, Somin and Pado. Or you can join the conversations happening inside the talk rooms via the OFTC IRC network in the #debconf-bada, #debconf-somin, and #debconf-pado channels. Please also join us in the #debconf channel for common discussions related to DebConf.

You can also follow the live coverage of news about DebConf24 provided by our micronews service or the @debian profile on your favorite social network.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcoming environment for all participants. Please see our Code of Conduct page for more information on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf24, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Proxmox, Infomaniak and Wind River.