skyrocketing how-can-i-help popcon count how-can-i-help by Lucas Nussbaum is one of the best things that happened in the area of attracting contributions to Debian in quite a while. It can be used both as a standalone tool to list opportunities for contributing to Debian which are related to your installed packages, and as an APT hook (which is also the default configuration) that at each upgrade will inform you of new contribution opportunities. how-can-i-help is great for newbies who are looking for ways to give back to Debian which are a good match for their skills: among other things, how-can-i-help shows bugs tagged "gift" related to packages you use. how-can-i-help is also great for experienced developers, as it allows them to find out, in a timely manner, that packages they use are in dire need of help: RC bugs, pending removals, adoptions needed, requests for sponsor, etc. (As highly unscientific evidence: I've noticed a rather quick turnover of RFA/O/ITA bugs on packages installed on my machine. I suspect how-can-i-help is somehow responsible for that, due to the fact that it increases awareness of ongoing package issues directly with the people using them.) So, if you haven't yet, please apt-get install how-can-i-help RIGHT NOW. I daresay that we should aim at installing how-can-i-help by default on all Debian machines, but that might be an ambitious initial goal. In the meantime I'll settle for making how-can-i-help's popcon count skyrocket. As of today, it looks like this: which is definitely too low for my taste. Please spread the word about how-can-i-help. And let's see what we can collectively do to that graph. how-can-i-help is just a tiny teeny helper, but I'm convinced it can do wonders in liberating dormant contributions to the Debian Project.

One of my pet projects in Debian is the Debian Maintainer Dashboard. Built on top of UDD, DMD provides a maintainer-centric view to answer the I have a few hours for Debian, what should I do now? question (see example). Christophe Siraut did a lot of great work recently on DMD, rewriting much of the internals. As a result, he also added a RSS feed feature: you can now get notified of new TODO list items by subscribing to that feed. If you have suggestions or comments, please use the debian-qa@ list (see this thread). Thanks, Christophe!

Appointed to the Debian Tech Committee I m pleased to announce that I ve been appointed to serve on the Debain Technical Committee. I d like to thank the other committee members and the Debian project leader, Lucas Nussbaum, for giving me this opportunity to serve. I look forward to working within the committee to further Debian s goals as the universal operating system.

I attended Open World Forum last week (thanks to Inria for funding my travel). It was a fantastic opportunity to meet many people, and to watch great talks. If I had to single out just one talk, it would clearly be John Sullivan s What do you mean you can t Skype?!. On Saturday, I delivered a talk presenting the Debian project. It was my first DPL-ish talk to the general public, so it still needs some tuning, but I think it went quite well (slides available). Next opportunity to talk about Debian: LORIA, Nancy, France, 2013-10-17 13:30 (iPAC seminar).

Some time ago, Ubuntu had Ubuntu Brainstorm, a website where non-developers could submit ideas of improvements, and other people could comment and vote on them. I was wondering if there was existing software to deploy a similar service, e.g. as a plugin to popular forum software. I ve found ideascale.com, but relying on the Cloud for that is not acceptable for my planned use. (For clarification: my immediate interest for that is unrelated to Debian work)

I have just uploaded Lintian 2.5.18 to unstable. While fixing 22 bugs, it only features 5 new tags.

• debian-changelog-has-wrong-weekday
• debian-rules-missing-good-practice-target-dfsg
• empty-udeb-package
• file-name-in-PATH-is-not-ASCII
• misplaced-extra-member-in-deb

The release also include fixes to some false-positives, such as python:any dependencies triggering python-script-but-no-python-dep, a rewritten README file. We also included a patch to make Lintian accept the Original-Maintainer field by default for non-Debian vendors (even if they do not have a profile and Lintian ends up loading the debian/main profile). We also added support for running Lintian directly from a git checkout or source tree without setting LINTIAN_ROOT (or passing root). Since that was the primary use-case for root that option has now been deprecated. I also had lintian and lintian-info require the include-dir and [no-]user-dir options as the first if given at all. I would like to thank Bastien Roucari s, Gaudenz Steinlin, Gunnar Wolf, J r my Bobbio and Lucas Nussbaum for contributing to Lintian and the many who submitted reports or suggestions for improvements. I would also like to thank Brian hugmeir Fraser, who assisted me in identifying and working around a bug in Perl s glob function when run under threads (filed upstream as RT#119897).

"I think that we need to be better at accepting mistakes. It's OK to not know everything, it's OK to not be perfect right from the start, but it's better to be vocal about things you don't know, things you are unsure, than to just hide it under the carpet and hope nobody will notice."
Lucas Nussbaum, Bits from the DPL "This is my definition for a team: waking up in the morning and realizing that somebody else has solved your problem from yesterday."
Andreas Tille, How to attract new developers for your team

While working on English subtitles for DC13 talks, you can stumble upon some real gems. The subtitling work is progressing nicely: four talks have now subtitles available (you can find them here), thanks to the work of Daniel, Gunnar and myself (as well as the reviews from Justin, Andreas and Michael!). In the meanwhile we created an alioth group and a related repository for the sub team, and there are several subtitles in progress! How can you help?

• you can claim a talk and create the English subtitles for it (more info here)
• you can translate in your language the subtitles already available
• if you are hearing impaired, please send us some feedback: we are trying to create subtitles that are also useful for people with hearing problems, but we've not much experience in the field :)

So, I m back from DebConf, which probably translated to the 10 busiest days of my life, but also to one of the best times of my life. The Le Camp venue clearly contributed to this success: having everybody at the same place, but at the same time many opportunities for quiet chat or just enjoying the view, was really a good idea. Everybody who made DebConf possible deserve a huge thank you , as well as all attendees: it is really a honor to be a part of such a fantastic community. Now, let s go back to daily life, and to my re-filled Debian TODO list!

This upload was the first one of my very first package in Debian. It was sponsored by Dafydd Harries, who I ve finally met at DebConf13, and got out of NEW on 2005-08-16. Exactly 8 years ago today. I only realized that yesterday evening, and Debian s birthday feels even more special to me now. Dafydd, it looks like I owe you a lot! :)

This DebConf is obviously quite special for me, being the DPL. It has really been great so far to talk to meet so many people, and especially to meet so many new Debian contributors or Developers. I m really happy to see that the next generation is ready! :) On Sunday, I delivered my Bits from the DPL talk. The video is available, and I ve finally uploaded the slides (working link here, it seems that Penta ate my slides). I hope you enjoyed it/will enjoy it!

DebConf! The venue here at Le Camp is pretty much perfect. Short walking distances, organic layout of the buildings, and a stunning view of the lake. I would be hard pressed to think of other venues which could be as nice... After arriving Fri/Sat night at 0330, Saturday was spent setting up the Access points: This little green valve caused a power outage in the server room, messing with servers, and resetting several switches to old configs. Xtaran had a lot of fun as a result of this. The ikiwiki BoF on sunday was rather interesting. I will try to publish some notes from this BoF and the other Git-related ones towards the end of the week. The Gitify ALL the things BoF managed to fill the room from "full-ish" over "good thing we don't need the beamer and can use the space in front of the whitescreen" over "out of chairs" over "the chairs from other rooms won't fit any more" to the final state of "people stand around near the walls and in the doors". At a total of 54 people, turnout has been... unexpectedly high.. The BoF started at 1130 and usually, slots are 45 minutes long. We extended our BoF into lunch time (I chose the slot just prior to lunch for precisely that reason) and finally finished at around 1245, i.e. 30 minutes late. After a quick show of hands on if there's interest in another BoF, I applied for and got the next slot, tomorrow at 11:30, once again in BoF room 1 and just before lunch. It's called Gitify EVEN MORE of the things and will expand on use cases and best practices. At a guess, we will focus on managing configurations and photos in default and complex situations. Sadly, neither of those BoF are taped. Afterwards, I had a chance to sit down with Lucas Nussbaum to talk over some points regarding the Debian Trademark Team. Finally, during Why Debian should (or should not) make systemd the default (it probably should not, but that's a different story), my kernel panicked. 3.9 and 3.10 have been less than ideal on my new X1 Carbon, but this was the first panic. I was not even done cussing and Ben Hutchings suddenly appeared on my side, telling me that yes, this particular module (mei) has been causing issues recently. As a closing note, I am really enjoying my first DebConf. Great venue, great people, great content, winebeer and cheese party tonight, and I found out that we have a fire place and fire wood...

[no pictures here, just a short report]. Today DebConf, this year's edition of the annual Debian developer conference, started with two inspiring talks about Debian proper, one by Lucas Nussbaum, the other by Joey Hess. This also means that yesterday DebCamp ended, the period preceeding DebConf and dedicated to working on Debian together with others. Here's a short report from my point of view: I arrived here on Tuesday, the first day of DebCamp. I immediately fell in love with the venue, & despite the early stage of setup, everything I needed was working fine for me from the very start. Like in previous years, I used the time to do work in the Debian Perl Group, especially taking advantage of the presence of other team members. That's the great thing about DebCamp & DebConf: collaborating in real-life & real-time, from quickly asking a question over sitting together to think about solutions for a problem to "just" chatting & thereby developping ideas for the future. In the previous days I

• tried to get down the amount of packages with not-yet uploaded new upstram releases;
• looked into the pending bugs around the Perl 5.18 transition;
• investigated with others the details of the upcoming new timezone file handling in the Perl world, which will make our lives easier but still needs some work on the Debian side;
• prepared with others the Perl Group's BoF that will take place during DebConf on Thursday;
• helped with the creation of a new pkg-perl-tools package.

I really enjoy my time here, & I'm especially happy to meet some people for the first time in meat space. This is only possible due to the generous support of the DebConf sponsors & the immense efforts of the DebConf team. Thank you!

A week after the Euro LLVM conference, I am glad to share the results I presented and discussed during the event. 1) Parallel building infrastructure using clang instead of gcc Based on the work that Alexander Pashaliyski and I did during the GSoC 2012, we are now able to automatically rebuild each package uploaded in Unstable transparently. Results are published here:
http://buildd-clang.debian.net/
This provides a quick and easy way to any Debian contributors or upstream packaged in Debian to check how the package behaves with clang.
For Debian Developer and maintainer, a per maintainer view is also provided. This will list all packages maintained by a Debian packager. My page as example Here is an example of the list of package:
And an example of package failing:
At time of writing, most of the packages in unstable have been rebuilt (16 % are remaining). However, due to resource constraints, only amd64 packages are built. Contact me if you have resources to share for other architectures. Thanks to Paul Wise, the PTS (Debian package tracking system) proposes a link to the clang build logs (failing or not). A repository will be automatically updated with the results of these builds (once I find the time to get into buildd). 2) clang-built repository
Thanks to the Amazon Cloud, with our new DPL (Debian Project Leader), Lucas Nussbaum, we rebuilt unstable last April and published it at the following address:

deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main

This allows some cool stuff like:

$ echo "deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main">>/etc/apt/sources.list
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install coreutils/unstable-clang
$ ls
$ awk

Note that this repository was only one-shoot and does not get updated. Quality of the binary produced (performance and size) can be tested thanks to this repository. Feedbacks are welcome!

A week after the Euro LLVM conference, I am glad to share the results I presented and discussed during the event. 1) Parallel building infrastructure using clang instead of gcc Based on the work that Alexander Pashaliyski and I did during the GSoC 2012, we are now able to automatically rebuild each package uploaded in Unstable transparently. Results are published here:
http://buildd-clang.debian.net/
This provides a quick and easy way to any Debian contributors or upstream packaged in Debian to check how the package behaves with clang.
For Debian Developer and maintainer, a per maintainer view is also provided. This will list all packages maintained by a Debian packager. My page as example Here is an example of the list of package:
And an example of package failing:
At time of writing, most of the packages in unstable have been rebuilt (16 % are remaining). However, due to resource constraints, only amd64 packages are built. Contact me if you have resources to share for other architectures. Thanks to Paul Wise, the PTS (Debian package tracking system) proposes a link to the clang build logs (failing or not). A repository will be automatically updated with the results of these builds (once I find the time to get into buildd). 2) clang-built repository
Thanks to the Amazon Cloud, with our new DPL (Debian Project Leader), Lucas Nussbaum, we rebuilt unstable last April and published it at the following address:

deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main

This allows some cool stuff like:

$ echo "deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main">>/etc/apt/sources.list
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install coreutils/unstable-clang
$ ls
$ awk

Note that this repository was only one-shoot and does not get updated. Quality of the binary produced (performance and size) can be tested thanks to this repository. Feedbacks are welcome!

A week after the Euro LLVM conference, I am glad to share the results I presented and discussed during the event. 1) Parallel building infrastructure using clang instead of gcc Based on the work that Alexander Pashaliyski and I did during the GSoC 2012, we are now able to automatically rebuild each package uploaded in Unstable transparently. Results are published here:
http://buildd-clang.debian.net/
This provides a quick and easy way to any Debian contributors or upstream packaged in Debian to check how the package behaves with clang.
For Debian Developer and maintainer, a per maintainer view is also provided. This will list all packages maintained by a Debian packager. My page as example Here is an example of the list of package:
And an example of package failing:
At time of writing, most of the packages in unstable have been rebuilt (16 % are remaining). However, due to resource constraints, only amd64 packages are built. Contact me if you have resources to share for other architectures. Thanks to Paul Wise, the PTS (Debian package tracking system) proposes a link to the clang build logs (failing or not). A repository will be automatically updated with the results of these builds (once I find the time to get into buildd). 2) clang-built repository
Thanks to the Amazon Cloud, with our new DPL (Debian Project Leader), Lucas Nussbaum, we rebuilt unstable last April and published it at the following address:

deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main

This allows some cool stuff like:

$ echo "deb http://clang.debian.net/repository-2013-04-07/ unstable-clang main">>/etc/apt/sources.list
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install coreutils/unstable-clang
$ ls
$ awk

Note that this repository was only one-shoot and does not get updated. Quality of the binary produced (performance and size) can be tested thanks to this repository. Feedbacks are welcome!

I totally forgot it, but as the DPL elections are now done, we have a winner for the #DPL game. Of the (more or less) fifteen persons who participated to the game (thank you!), only four received points for having at least one of their Fantastic Four running for DPL:

• M nica Ramirez Arceda proposing Moray Allan
• Mehdi Dogguy proposing Lucas Nussbaum
• Paul Tagliamonte proposing Gergely Nagy
• Tiago Bortoletto Vaz proposing Moray Allan

As Lucas is now the new DPL, our one and only winner of the DPL game is... ... Mehdi Dogguy! Congrats!

Michael Stapelberg recently posted a blog post about looking into the number of Debian Developers actively working on RC bugs for the upcoming wheezy release. In this blog post I analyze the data shared by Michael and provide the R commands used to generate the plots & findings. If you are interested into looking into the data yourself, but don t like R, I suggest using ipython notebook + numpy instead.

Analysis After parsing the data file we typically want to get an understanding of the data, by using summary(bugs) we get the minimum(1), median(5), mean(15.4), max(716) and quantiles of the data. This shows that the number of messages is wide-spread and a few people contribute a lot. To visualize the dispersion of the data we can create a box plot showing the range of messages: As the first and third quantile are close together we can assume that the majority of the work is done by a few, especially since the second quantile is 5. This is supported by the histogram below, where the x axis is the number of recorded messages and y is the number of developers.

Top 10 contributors The TOP 10 contributors, according to the dataset, are:

1. Lucas Nussbaum - 716 messages
2. Gregor Herrmann - 270 messages
2. Jakub Wilk - 270 messages
4. Andreas Beckmann - 225 messages
5. Julien Cristau - 205 messages
6. Cyril Brulebois - 169 messages
7. Moritz Muehlenhoff - 162 messages
8. Michael Biebl - 159 messages
9. Salvatore Bonaccorso - 158 messages
10. Christoph Egger - 142 messages

r commands These are the commands used to generate the plots and information in this plot:

bugs <- read.csv("by-msg.csv")
summary(bugs)
boxplot(bugs$rcbugmsg, log='y', range=0, ylab="# bugs")
quantile(bugs$rcbugmsg)
0%  25%  50%  75% 100%
1    2    5   12  716
# create histogram
llibrary('ggplot2')
ggplot(bugs, aes(x=rcbugmsg)) + geom_histogram(binwidth=.5, colour="black", fill="black") + scale_x_sqrt()
top10 <- tail(bugs[order(bugs$rcbugmsg),], 10)
top10

Michael Stapelberg recently posted a blog post about looking into the number of Debian Developers actively working on RC bugs for the upcoming wheezy release. In this blog post I analyze the data shared by Michael and provide the R commands used to generate the plots & findings. If you are interested into looking into the data yourself, but don t like R, I suggest using ipython notebook + numpy instead.

Analysis After parsing the data file we typically want to get an understanding of the data, by using summary(bugs) we get the minimum(1), median(5), mean(15.4), max(716) and quantiles of the data. This shows that the number of messages is wide-spread and a few people contribute a lot. To visualize the dispersion of the data we can create a box plot showing the range of messages: As the first and third quantile are close together we can assume that the majority of the work is done by a few, especially since the second quantile is 5. This is supported by the histogram below, where the x axis is the number of recorded messages and y is the number of developers.

Top 10 contributors The TOP 10 contributors, according to the dataset, are:

1. Lucas Nussbaum - 716 messages
2. Gregor Herrmann - 270 messages
2. Jakub Wilk - 270 messages
4. Andreas Beckmann - 225 messages
5. Julien Cristau - 205 messages
6. Cyril Brulebois - 169 messages
7. Moritz Muehlenhoff - 162 messages
8. Michael Biebl - 159 messages
9. Salvatore Bonaccorso - 158 messages
10. Christoph Egger - 142 messages

r commands These are the commands used to generate the plots and information in this plot:

bugs <- read.csv("by-msg.csv")
summary(bugs)
boxplot(bugs$rcbugmsg, log='y', range=0, ylab="# bugs")
quantile(bugs$rcbugmsg)
0%  25%  50%  75% 100%
1    2    5   12  716
# create histogram
llibrary('ggplot2')
ggplot(bugs, aes(x=rcbugmsg)) + geom_histogram(binwidth=.5, colour="black", fill="black") + scale_x_sqrt()
top10 <- tail(bugs[order(bugs$rcbugmsg),], 10)
top10

The Debian Project Leader election has concluded and the winner is Lucas Nussbaum. Of a total of 988 developers, 390 developers voted using the Condorcet method. More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2013 page. The new term for the project leader will start on April 17th and expire on April 17th 2014.

The graph below is generated from popcon submissions. Since they include the version of the popularity-contest package, one can determine the Debian release that was used by the submitter (a new version of the popularity-contest package is generally uploaded just after the release to make that tracking possible). The graph is similar to the one found on popcon, except that versions newer than the latest stable release are aggregated as testing/unstable . Comments:

• Popcon submitters might not be representative of Debian users, of course.
• There s quite a lot of testing/unstable users, and their proportion is quite stable:
  • Today: testing/unstable: 43119 submissions (31.4%); squeeze: 75454 (54.9%); lenny: 13603 (9.9%)
  • 2011-02-04 (just before the squeeze release): testing/unstable: 29012 (29.7%); lenny: 57262 (58.6%); etch: 10032 (10.3%)
  • 2009-02-13 (just before the lenny release): testing/unstable: 30108 (36.9%); etch: 49996 (61.2%)
• I don t understand why the number of Debian stable installations does not increase, except when a new release is made. It s as if people installed Debian, upgraded directly to testing, and switched back to tracking stable after the release. Or maybe people don t update their systems? A more detailed analysis could be done by looking at the raw popcon data.
• Upgrading to the next stable release takes time. Looking at the proportion of users still using oldstable one year after the release, it would be better not to remove oldstable from mirrors too early.

Scripts are available on git.debian.org.