David writes that, while momentum is a very good way to keep flames away, it's really solidified by proper code of conduct. I don't disagree with either of these positions, but they're both characteristics of a good culture that enables things to get done in a productive atmosphere, rather than the causes themselves.

One of the problems is that you can't enshrine, 'don't be a tool' in a code of conduct. Yes, you can legislate away personal attacks, so there's no more Serious problems with Mr. Troup, but it's still entirely possible to completely subvert the development process while still remaining within the bounds of any particular code of conduct. The key here is that the code of conduct is just a rough guide to, and a method of enforcement of, any given culture that you wish to enforce.

If you want to change Debian's current developmental culture, you'll need more than just a document: you'll need a landslide mindshift within the entire developer base, which will be extremely difficult to achieve, given that some particular developers seem to champion their lack of social skills, delight in annoying others, and glorify petty arguments on mailing lists as being superior to actually achieving anything. When you get this, the code of conduct is really just fluff, because it becomes almost entirely self-enforcing. The general tone of the list and attitude of the developers discourages people from being idiots, and you don't have to point to the code of conduct except in serious cases.

So that's the really hard part. Debian has a destructive culture that has led to debian-devel and debian-private becoming the pointless landfill it is today. Which is no slight on Debian developers as a group, or any particular developers; it's just the way it is today. How it got that way is entirely unclear, but how it's going to move on from there is an equally perplexing question.

And, in response to Joss, the two go hand in hand. Once you've stopped arguing for the sake of it, you're infinitely more productive as a result. So I don't think calling people advocating change in Debian's social norms 'teletubbies' is at all useful: these people aren't advocating turning Debian into a sewing club where we all turn up and talk about how much we love each particular developer. What they're advocating is change of the current Debian social culture such that trainwreck threads full of personal attacks, mindless bitching, and argument for the sake of it, don't exist anymore. You can have robust debate within that framework, and you don't have to completely vet every statement you make so it's a glowing reflection on everyone and everything mentioned. If you have the right culture, you can simply tell trolls once to go away, and they get utterly ignored, instead of having their threads blown up into huge all-consuming flamewars by people who seem to love seeing their name in the mailing list index. I don't see how you conclude that any hypothetical code of conduct exists purely to facilitate trolling either, but maybe I'm missing something.

The current problems in Debian with people being unable to relate to fellow developers, so instead getting bored and flaming them into the ground instead, isn't a techincal problem in the least. It's a social problem. The entire point of this debate isn't, 'which MTA should we install by default, if any', but 'how do we fix Debian's current culture?'. I don't see how this is a technical problem, but it does have technical ramifications (e.g. releases take years of banging our collective head against a very large wall).

Josselin Mouette thinks name-calling makes his point. I quite disagree. His approach does nothing to make Debian better; in fact, it only serves to reduce many people's interest in working on Debian at all. David's point about development momentum is very good. I completely agree with it. I sort of started on this line of thought in my DPL platform draft, although David took it further and said it better. Momentum can only be increased if the people involved are having fun; they will have fun if momentum is increased. If something prevents development from gathering momentum, or saps the fun out of working on Debian in some other way, things fall apart. For quite a number of people, flame wars are fun suckers. "Stop energy" sounds like a good term to me. I'm talking about flame wars. I'm not talking about discussion, debate, or disagreement. It's perfectly possible to have those without getting actively aggressive, passively aggressive, repeating your opinion 75 times per day, resorting to name calling, or employing any of the other charming tricks that Debian mailing lists see. That's enough talk, and enough attention paid to bumps in the road. Time to enhance my tools so that I can find and fix all the remaining bugs in Debian.

I am a little disappointed with the new Thinkpad X40 I have from work. I wanted a MacBook Pro, but their availability and price in Korea is bad. Unplugging the mains leaves me about 2:30hrs. That’s almost the same as my personal T30 machine! My T30 has about 2 hours of battery life, although it also has about twice the CPU power (going by Bogomips)! If I do processor intensive stuff like compiling and watching videos then we can half those times… (!) My T30 also has better wireless performance after my little tests. I’m also wary of this little X40 keyboard. I don’t think it’s good for my RSI. Though it’s too early to tell. You can get a bigger battery pack for the X40. But it will probably be expensive. :/ The X40 is brand new and is branded IBM thinkpad. The build quality is excellent, just like my other thinkpads I’ve used. It does say “Lenovo” on all the copyright stickers. I whipped out the hard drive and I thought I might upgrade to a quieter Seagate Momentus. I was surprised to see a 2” drive that was about half the height. I didn’t know about this form factor! I’ll miss my T30’s roomy 100G. It was tricky installing Debian without a CDROM. I managed in the end with an external USB hard drive and my experiences are documented in debian-boot threads starting here and here. One major redeeming thing about the X40 is that I get 18371880.31 bytes/sec compared with the T30’s 959174.47 bytes/sec for USB throughput. That’s an amazing 20x speed up! So I’ll be using external USB drives to compensate for the tiny 30GB hard drive. I am giving away my old T30 to my sister. I just wish the X40 fealt a little more like an upgrade from the T30. The X40 is my workplace’s equipment after all. I think I will aim to get a Mac Pro still if I visit Japan in the next weeks for myself.

Via Luis, I really like this article. Debian has become way too corporate in a lot of ways it seems, and many of us are forgetting what it's like to try and do something daring. It's one of the reasons I find aj's DPL platform compelling, even though he hasn't said how he's actually going to encourage a faster tempo. People got really excited when I simply updated Debian's X packages to the latest upstream version. Granted, this is cool, but it's far from the exciting stuff I'm looking to do once we're finally caught up with upstream for real (almost there!) It doesn't have to be revolutionary or anything, but I want the XSF to be a center for exciting things to happen. Unfortunately, the most exciting X stuff is happening everywhere but Debian right now, despite my best efforts to open it up further.

And while I share helix's hate for the term "stop energy", the vast and deep flamefests that periodically consume the project really do seem to slow down our development noticeably when I just look at daily changelogs in sid. Julien may call me a teletubby for this (a metaphor I loathe for its utter stupidity) but debian-x has been almost 100% free of flamewars for the past year or so since I came on, and we've gotten a remarkable amount done. Contrast that with the previous era in which the fighting seemed to sap the will of the most productive and capable members of the team, all of whom seemed to focus much of their energy elsewhere as a result. While I think a mailing list code of conduct will be an important step in achieving this effect project-wide, I think a more fundamental solution is for individuals to attempt to build momentum themselves. Momentum like what I've tried to build with X seems to stop these energy-sucking flamewars dead in their tracks, and makes the project seem like a lot more fun place to be. I know that with all the flames going on with ndiswrapper and such I've been able to retreat in to XSF-land and find my happy place and be productive.

FOSDEM 2006 This year, the days before FOSDEM were the stressful ones, as I got to organize accomodation. Initially, we wanted to have similar appartments as last year, but by the time I was less busy at uni to actually look into it, most of them were already booked, so we had to put up with a youth hostel instead. The positive sides of this were the much lower expenses and a location in the city centre, making us actually look at Bruxelles a bit in detail this time. "Us" were the Hurd people, including Martin "earliest Hurd adopter present" Michlmayr. I got to FOSDEM by car again, picking up Marcus Brinkmann, Neal Walfield and Olaf Buddenhagen on the way in Cologne. Finding the youth hostel seemed to be pretty hard as we just had a street address and a map without street names, but we managed to find it pretty quickly to my great surprise (driving around in Bruxelles usually ended up being a complete disaster over the last years). After a strange encounter with a Guillem Jover lookalike in front of the hostel, we met the other guys (Thomas Schwinge, Marco Gerards, Stefan Siegl and Ognyan Kulev) and had a discussion about Neal's and Marcus' plan to move to a persistent system. After dinner, I met the other Debian people in the Roi d'Espagne and hat some longer chats with Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Rob Bradford, Martin Michlmayr and Jordi Mallach, who I finally met for the first time and who did not cop out of FOSDEM this year as usual... The pub is getting more and more crowded each year, all the hackers barely fit even though they opened the balustrade this time as well. It was great to see everybody again and have a few beers. Martin and I then managed to find the way back to the hostel by foot. We had no developer room, and no talks in the Debian room either, so FOSDEM was a pretty relaxed event this year. I met some more familiar faces like Noel Koethe and Andreas Mueller and listened to a couple of talks, most notably Richard Stallman's and Jeff Waugh's keynotes and Hanna Wallach's talk about FLOSSPOLS. Stefan Siegl also managed to get GNU Mach working for both my 3Com PCMCIA NIC and my Orinoco PCMCIA WLAN card, confirming his title as Hurd "hacker of the month". On Saturday evening, we (at this time, Guillem Jover, Gianluca Guida, Bas Wijnen and Jeroen Dekkers had joined) had dinner with the french Hurd guys (Manuel Menal, Marc Dequenes, Richard Braun, Arnaud Fontaine and others) in an italian restaurant. At 10:40 PM, the waiter told us in a rather unfriendly tone that they would close at 11 and presented us with the bill, along with handing out the menu again so that we could look up our share. By the time the bill arrived the french part of the table (at 10:55 PM), the guys were pretty surprised by this whole business and complained loudly that they did not have a dessert yet and insistent on having one. After some more minutes of discussion, the waiter gave in and served their desserts, after which each of them paid his share with his carte bleue. I believe we left the restaurant around 11:30. On Sunday evening, we had dinner again (the french guys had left Bruxelles already) and then drove back to Germany after having desserts and coffee in a bar. We left Bruxelles at around midnight and arrived in Duesseldorf at 2:30 PM, so we were glad that Neal offered us to stay at his place. We had breakfast the next morning with him and Isabel and then I proceeded to drive back to Frankfurt in the early afternoon. FOSDEM rocked, as usual. After being with the Debian crowd for the first three years or so, and mostly sticking with the Hurd crowd last year, I think I managed a pretty good balance between the two this year. This will not have been my last FOSDEM.

So, I just wrote some code that had a subtle bug in it: if you hit ^C at the wrong time, it would run kill(-1, SIGTERM), which kills every process you're running. I discovered this, recovered the damage, and started my session anew. Once I'd done this, I checked my email, where there was a new email awaiting me, entitled 'Competence Development News'. HR are taunting me.

As I mentioned on debian-project recently, Broadcom has been very supportive of our MIPS port. They donated several fast MIPS development boards (dual-core 800 MHz) to a number of Debian developers as well as machines for our mips and mipsel buildd network. Without those boards, we'd have a hell of a time keeping up and certainly wouldn't meet the Vancouver requirements. Broadcom recently released a new chip, the 1480, which is a quad-core CPU, and I managed to get hold of a development board based on this chip. I had some trouble with FedEx because they weren't sure how to handle a shipment worth several grant to an individual who is a volunteer working on a project which legally doesn't exist in the UK. However, the FedEx lady was really nice and said she'd sort it out... and the next day the board turned up. Unfortunately, SMP support in the MIPS kernel was broken so I was only able to run the board in non-SMP mode: it really sucks having a quad-core CPU and then you can only use one core! There were also DMA errors when using an IDE PCI card. Fortunately, the SMP problems got solved in the meantime, and using the generic IDE driver works. Now that I have the board running, I compiled GCC 4.1 and my next step will be to build the Debian archive to see how well GCC 4.1 work on MIPS.

Rock. I've now got the LCD on my E3 working; blurry picture at http://www.earth.li/~noodles/images/e3-lcd.jpg (I couldn't convince the camera to both focus well and shoot the flash in a way that made the text visible). I've updated my Amstrad E3 page with a few of the recent 2.6 developments as well. I'm quite chuffed with myself; while Mark did the original work of getting it booting with serial and USB I've managed to write the NAND driver, the LCD driver and sort out the keypad keymap. There's still quite a lot left though:

• Get u-boot onto the actual device rather than having to load it over the serial port on each reboot.
• Add NAND support to u-boot.
• Get the modem setup.
• Sound
• Handset - both mic/speaker and off-hook detection.
• Mailboard (the pull out keyboard)
• Camera

And then I can worry about the application layer. :)

Earlier this week, my cousin, who is a medical resident in New York City, came to visit my office in Downtown Boston after work. After giving him a quick tour of my office, we thought we’d chat over a cup of coffee. I’m not aware of any locally-owned downtown cafés or coffee shops, so we thought we’d have to settle for a Starbucks. The Starbucks across the street from my office, however, had just closed at 6pm. Although I’d been to the Peet’s Coffee around the corner dozens of times, it wasn’t until I actually tried to go there with my cousin that I realized that they don’t have any seating. We attempted to go to five other similar venues, and they were all either closed or without seating (including an Au Bon Pain right near Downtown Crossing that just has a walk-up counter). Finally, we settled for a Dunkin’ Donuts that had two tables and was open for another half hour. The staff were busy mopping up and listening to a loud radio that was half-tuned to pure FM static. I realize Downtown Boston isn’t the most residential area, but aren’t there other people who want to meet up after work at some place other than a bar? Isn’t this supposed to be a world class city? What about all the luxury condominiums that have been built recently in walking distance to the financial district… is it all a fiction? It’s times like this that I have to admit feelings of New York envy.

Joey replies to my post from yesterday with his own example of leaving:

The technical details remain as irrelivant today as they were at the time, the relevant problem being that developers who are not involved in the installer development rarely consider how their actions can affect it. When a policy gets int the way of solving a problem, it’s time to leave, that’s all.

His posted logs suffer from unescaped angle brackets so aren’t very easy to follow; and also from the fact that for rather obvious reasons they don’t include any of the conversation that took place after he left. Extended logs and the other side of that story below the fold: Read the rest ...

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it’s a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath’s presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there. Saturday (25th February 2006) RMS Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can’t understand all the GPL3 changes but I’ll try to read some more articles about it. Putting ‘Free’ into JFreeChart The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I’d like to find some charts to do just to use it! Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the “Don’t build automatically” hack. Everything should be on the Classpath’s wiki. Xen A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn’t know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing! Sunday (26th February 2006) I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I’m sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway. Women in Free Software I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing . So maybe I’d better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don’t know *BSD… I’m sorry but I don’t know more. And I still don’t know the difference with Linux and don’t know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port? Debian-Java Meeting After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom… and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM — the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don’t understant these thing During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian’s talk. Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)… I’ll send an email about the meeting, don’t worry Future of Classpath It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It’s a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It’s wonderful. Maybe it’s the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the ‘Classpath’ (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect. Then came the camera… A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy , nobody tells me 100 times I’m sexy ). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works. Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I’m not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses. Back! I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don’t know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on… I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)… we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday. I’ll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I’ll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

So, I guess this is an example of the sort of self-recusement from debian-tech that aj is <a href="http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2006/02/28#2006-02-28-debiantech">referring to: @1130344829 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> aj: sigh, did you realy have to break d-i yet again right as we're trying ot release it?
@1130344847 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> ?
@1130344881 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: (also, please try to avoid making things overly personal on this channel, cf the charter)
@1130344919 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> fine, did one have to ignore the d-i release and make a package upload with lots of changes that broke d-i internalls. Yes one did
@1130344928 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> for at least two values of one
@1130344967 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: please explain what you're talking about, in technical terms
@1130344989 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: if you do so, it might get fixed
@1130345337 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: hello?
@1130345448 <h01ger!~holger@bone.digitalis.org> joeyh, i guess you're referring to the debootstrap-upload of aj ?! /me wonders why an upload to unstable breaks the d-i beta, isnt that build+based on etch ?
@1130345451 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> sorry, busy fixing the beakage
@1130345474 <Sledge!steve@217.147.81.17> looks like a debootstrap change is causing problems in CD builds
@1130345481 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> well, there has not been a usable combination of apt, debootstrap, and d-i in testing for well over a week
@1130345634 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> so you're saying i didn't break it just as you're trying to release?
@1130345720 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> no you broke it just as the fixed NMU was ready to go into testing
@1130345758 <h01ger!~holger@bone.digitalis.org> .oO( ah )
@1130345783 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> sigh
@1130345792 <neuro!~rmurray@h24-80-164-222.sbm.shawcable.net> ...and we're still waiting for the technical details
@1130345813 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: second warning. this channel's for technical discussions, eg "here's what broke: ...", not accusations, eg "you broke it" "why'd you have to break it" "yes one did".
@1130345869 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: if you want, there's still time to put 0.3.1.9 into testing
* Logging finished Wed, 26 Oct 2005 12:58:19 -0400
It's worth noting that the d-i release in question was etch beta 1, which eventually released 2 weeks after the above conversation. Probably my fault for not being a big believer in ridigly defined topics for communications channels. After all, I still filter all of my 20-some Debian mailing lists into a single folder; I'll happily talk about anything on the one irc channel (typically #debian-boot) that I nowdadys limit myself to; and so #debian-tech seemed like the obvious place to bring up the issue since aj, sledge, and other relevant people were active on it at the time. The technical details remain as irrelivant today as they were at the time, the relevant problem being that developers who are not involved in the installer development rarely consider how their actions can affect it. When a policy gets int the way of solving a problem, it's time to leave, that's all.

Some might have read recent news such as Novell SELinux killer rattles Red Hat, or Dan Walsh's critique of Novells AppArmor release, concerned with "unix like fragmentation in the security sector". While I also do think that SELinux is both more mature in the core system and more powerful than AppArmor (with a big plus being that SELinux is in the vanilla kernel) - I do think that AppArmor can quickly become a true SELinux killer, by just being better documented and easier to use. SELinux has serious deficiencies in documentation and development community. Almost all the available SELinux documentation is based around the policy as published by the NSA, which is "superseded by the reference policy project". This is the policy currently in Debian and used in the Gentoo SELinux docs - which hasn't received any updates in months now. The newer "reference policy" is updated every few days, by exporting Tresys' internal SVN into a public CVS on sourceforge. Dan Walsh claimed "multiple distributions shipping with SELinux including Fedora Core (2,3,4 and soon 5), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse and Slackware. " Which is not entirely true. SuSE has AppArmor now, Fedora and RHEL are pretty much the same, and apparently neither Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware are up to date with SELinux. Or actually involved in the current development. So that basically makes 1 distribution using current SELinux and 1 distribution using AppArmor... Looks like a tie to me. Also with the development it's pretty much down. AppArmor was developed by a small company called Immunix, and is now backed by big Novell, owner of SuSE. Current SELinux is mostly developed by a small company called Tresys, and somewhat backed and used by RedHat. Both have the feeling of "closed door" commercial development, which may be the reason why it reminds some people of the old Unix wars. Both of course claim to do an open development, with for example the current SELinux Symposium. But if you look closely at the Agenda and the speakers, it's fairly obvious that this is pretty much a business meeting, with some university speakers talking about the security concepts used. Just one quote from the site:

Developer Summit
An invitation only meeting for the core developers of SELinux to discuss future plans for SELinux and upcoming technologies.

The winner of this "war" between AppArmor and SELinux will be whoever manages to incorporate community development best, and get the other distributions like Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware to support their efforts. Currently neither of them has the air of actively supporting them, which is really bad. Widespread adoption is also where grSecurity has failed before.

I'm trying to put together a SELinux packaging team for Debian and Ubuntu. Current SELinux is still a major pita to get running... so we need to join our efforts in adopting policy to our needs and such. Upstream development is of an rather "uncooperative" model: both the selinux libraries and the reference policy are updated by a single person each, by exporting an internal VCS to a public CVS on sourceforge. If you want to add patches, you always have to send them through a mailing list, and hope for them to appear in the archive sometime soon. Or not. While this works okay for the libraries and utilities - which are fairly stable by now - I have doubts that this is appropriate for the policy. Given the amount of fixes/additions we'll need at least for the reference policy, I think more people should have write access to a shared repository. For this I've setup a subversion repository on svn.debian.org, with currently two branches: unmodified upstream and a debian branch. Note that we might also switch to an arch repository, when some big contributors prefer so. If users of other distributions (Gentoo?) want to join, they are welcome to do so. They can have their own branch, of course, albeit I don't think it's really necessary (maybe I should have named the "debian" branch "alioth-trunk" or so...) Basically anything is okay with me, that helps the reference policy and SELinux in picking up speed. If you'd like to get write access, send me an email with your alioth user id. Given the "unmodified upstream" branch, it should be fairly easy to extract patches from our repository to be included upstream, too.

Projects vs Business I read something via reddit recently that hit a nerve: In this article: Meeting the founders of reddit he says that: "Reddit, like many other initiatives is more a project than a company/business" Like everyone, I get inspired by Paul Graham's writings, and like the idea of making money doing something cool, but my brain seems to be much better at generating ideas for fun projects/cool hacks, as opposed to businesses. I wonder if it's possible or worth it to make that change. Sometimes trying to "be what you aren't" is unpleasant and unsuccessful. On the other hand, perhaps it's more of an acquired skill that doesn't really conflict with the 'hacker' mentality... Agile methods for introducing Agile Development? Something else I found on reddit: An Agile Approach to a Legacy System (pdf) seems interesting because it deals with crappy, real world code, rather than some ideal workplace that exists only in fantasyland. I wish that they'd explained a bit more, at the technical level, of how they managed to integrate their new system with the old one, as that is often a difficult task when the code always has to be up and running, and the old system is in production. I have a Big Ball of Mud to deal with myself, and a development process that is not agile, nor much of anything else really. It's the kind of situation that is only going to change 'in small iterations', rather than trying (and quite possibly failing) to impose a new way of doing things in one fell swoop. So perhaps what I need is an agile methodology for introduction agile development in small iterations?

Some people may have noticed that a thread has recently started about Xen on debian-devel. To sum up the whole story, here it is. Guido Trotter and myself asked Adam Heath, the current official maintainer of Xen, if it was possible to help him (bug #342249) to package Xen 3.
He did not answer to our messages, as he seems to be MIA, so we started with Jeremy Bouse, Ralph Passgang and Yvette Chanco to work and we created a project on Alioth in order to package the latest release. We started our development from the package Ralph made previously. We don't know really why, but Bastian Blank, from the Debian kernel team, uploaded his own package of Xen 3, ignoring our request to work on our side, arguing that this was the work of kernel team to maintain Xen. It seems that actually, the kernel team only pretend to maintain the Dom0 and DomU kernel images, probably as soon as Xen in included in the vanilla kernel, and that Bastian took the decision alone to maintain the hypervizor and userspace tools. Today, we have functionnal and splitted packages of Xen 3, available on the Subversion repository. I made Xen packages with the latest development version of our packages and the Xen testing version. They are available from:

deb http://naquadah.org/~jd/debian/xen stable main

Official backports will be uploaded to backports.org as soon as we will have uploaded a version to sid. But for now, we have to cancel or bypass the upload Bastian made...