Raphaël Hertzog: People behind Debian: Michael Vogt, synaptic and APT developer
Michael and his daughter Marie
I mostly like Debian the way it is. What
frustrated me in the past were flamewars that could have been
avoided. To me being respectful to each other is important, I don t
like flames and insults because I like solving problems and fighting
like this rarely helps that. The other attitude I don t like is to
blame people and complain instead of trying to help and be positive
(the difference between it sucks because it does not support
$foo instead of it would be so helpful if we had $foo because it
enables me to let me do $bar ).
For a long time, I had the feeling you were mostly alone working on APT and were just ensuring that it keeps working. Did you also had this feeling and are things better nowadays ?
I felt a bit alone sometimes That being said, there were great
people like Eugene V. Lyubimkin and Otavio Salvador during my time who
did do a lot of good work (especially at release crunch times) and
helped me with the maintenance (but got interested in other area than
apt later). And now we have the unstoppable David Kalnischkies and
Julian Andres Klode.
Apt is too big for a single person, so I m very happy that especially
David is doing superb work on the day-to-day tasks and fixes (plus big
project like multiarch and the important but not very thankful
testsuite work). We talk about apt stuff almost daily, doing code
reviews and discuss bugs. This makes the development process much
more fun and healthy. Julian Andres Klode is doing interesting work
around making the resolver more plugable and Christian Perrier is as
tireless as always when it comes to the translations merging.
I did a quick grep over the bzr log output (including all branch
merges) and count around ~4300 total commits (including all revisions
of branches merged). Of that there ~950 commits from me plus an
additional ~500 merges. It was more than just ensuring that it keeps
working but I can see where this feeling comes from as I was never
very verbose. Apt also was never my only project, I am involved in
other upstream work like synaptic or update-manager or python-apt
etc). This naturally reduced the time available to hack on apt and
spend time doing the important day-to-day bug triage, response to
mailing list messages etc.
One the python-apt side Julian Andres Klode did great work to improve
the code and the documentation. It s a really nice interface and if you
need to do anything related to packages and love python I encourage
you to try it. Its as simple as:
import apt cache = apt.Cache() cache["update-manager"].mark_install() cache.commit()
When it comes to cooperation there is always
room for improvement. I think (with my Canonical hat on) we do a lot
better than we did in the past. And it s great to see the current DPL
coming to Ubuntu events and talking about ways to improve the
collaboration. One area that I feel that Debian would benefit is to be
more positive about NMUs and shared source repositories (collab-maint
and LowThresholdNmu are good steps here). The lower the cost is to
push a patch/fix (e.g. via direct commit or upload) the more there
will be.
When it comes to getting packages into Debian I think the best
solution is to have a person in Debian as a point of contact to help
with that. Usually the amount of work is pretty small as the software
will have a debian/* dir already with useful stuff in it. But it helps
me a lot to have someone doing the Debian uploads, responding to the
bugmail etc (even if the bugmail is just forwarded as upstream
bugreports IMO it is a great opportunity especially for new
packagers as they will not have to do a lot of packaging work to get
those apps into Debian. This model works very well for me for
e.g. gdebi (where Luca Falavigna is really helpful on the Debian
side).
Is there someone in Debian that you admire for his contributions?
There are many people I admire. Probably too many to mention them
all. I always find it hard to single out individual people because
the project as a whole can be so proud of their achievements.
The first name that comes to my mind is Jason Gunthorpe (the original
apt author) who I ve never met. The next is Daniel Burrows who I met
and was inspired by. David Kalnischkies is doing great work on
apt. From contributing his first (small) patch to being able to
virtually fix any problem and adding big features like multiarch
support in about a year. Sebastian Heinlein for aptdaemon.
Christian Perrier has always be one of my heroes because he cares so
much about i18n. Christoph Haas for screenshots.debian.net, Michael
Bramer for his work on debian translated package descriptions.
Thank you to Michael for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.
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