Last year, I invited you all to walk the plank with me, to follow me on a road, a road that even I was unsure where it led. I had a vision, I had ideas, but I had little to show for a plan. Even worse, some of my ideas, some of the things I've thought I knew, turned out to be wrong this past year. While my original plan was to pursue the goals I set out in my previous platform, I did none of that, and before I get to the meat of the platform, I owe you an explanation why: After walking the plank last year, I spent some time swimming to the shore, determined that no matter what, I will get things done. But how shall I do that? And when, with whom? Those questions needed an answer, therefore I took on a coat of an ordinary hacker, and started a journey to find the answers.That is how the past year's been spent: looking and learning. I was - and still am - following every major Debian list, I'm on IRC, absorbing all the information that fits into my tiny mind. I see now, that there's a lot more to be done than I thought last year, that some of the assumptions I made then, were wrong. And having spent a long time learning, it is my hope, that I did learn, and that this time, the plans I came up with will serve the same goal I had last year, better.That goal is as simple as growing Debian from a community of mostly technical folk to something much bigger, a community of enthusiastic, bright-eyed people who all want to do their part of making the world a better place. Big words, big task.The problemOne of the most fundamental problems with the project is that it is old, and hasn't grown up yet. We're still very focused on technical merit - don't get me wrong, that is important too, but there's much more we can do than that! We have tremendous amounts of talent, but pretty much every team is suffering from lack of people, and we seem to be slow and ineffective in recruiting new contributors (either from within the project, or outside of it), and even worse at keeping them motivated. This is not new, I worried about it last year, and I'm not the only one to see things this way, respectable members of the project expressed their pessimism publicly too.This is our biggest issue. We can be excellent at the technical level, but not being able to keep people motivated, failing to find new contributors is hurting us more and more, and it is my firm belief that without quick improvement in these areas, it won't be just me virtually walking the plank.On the flip side, we have every tool in our possession to steer ourselves into a better, brighter direction. We have excellent hackers, we have people who are terrific at communication, we have people who inspire others (just see the pattern on the dpl-game!), we have everything we need. Read on then, dear reader, and see my plan!Dancing on a tightropeTo tread on a path we have not taken so consciously before, we need to have a vision to strive for. A vision for the project as a whole, and a vision for ourselves, to see where we'd like to be a few years from now.As Stefano put it so well in his platform last year, Debian is a very unique member of the larger Free Software ecosystem - go and read his description, it can hardly be written better. This is the same vision I share, where Debian grows up to be much more than hundreds of talented people putting together a distribution. I want to see Debian becoming more than that, something that attracts not only the technical geniuses, but those who wield the power of speech and inspiration too, for these traits rarely go together.I envision a project, where people recognise each other's strengths, and make use of these strengths; where we can - and will - turn to each other, and work closely together, to achieve such good balance of skills of all kinds, as we already achieved in creating and maintaining the distribution itself.Let's dance!But alas, a vision is useless without a plan. That is a mistake I made last year, one that I will not repeat again. The approaches I choose may seem strange, or weird at first, but rest assured, they were carefully considered, and most of them tried out in a smaller setting. CommunicationWhat I've seen and experienced over the past year (and thinking back, far more than that - I just didn't know where to put the experience at that time) is that written communication is rarely the best medium to reach out to people. In this age we live in, written text reaches those who were already curious, it rarely reaches those who're still waiting for enlightenment. And even if it does, more often than not, there is no direct channel between the writer and the reader, which hurts not only the latency of the communication, but the quality too. Not to mention, that - however sad it may sound - the recipient is often too shy to engage.What does help, is face to face time. Events, where we can reach out to people, and receive immediate feedback, where we can notice the shy ones, and help them. Where we can immediately adapt to expectations.For this reason, I feel it necessary to encourage and help local teams in every possible way, to organise hackfests, code retreats, and all kinds of events that they feel will attract the bright-eyed youth (be them 20 or 80, it's the spirit that counts) we so direly need. These events need not be technical at all: a session about Debian publicity, about representing the project in press or on conferences is just as useful (if not more). Along with hackfests, we could - and should - have events focused on improving communication, for that is just as important.With strong focus placed on non-technical matters, I believe we can step on a path of rapid progress: my experience shows that techies and non-techies can inspire one another very well, much more than two techies would. With a focus on areas we are lacking in, we are indirectly improving those we are already good at. Inspiration & motivationBut finding new contributors, be them technically-sawwy or not is only part of the task, and the easier one too. It is much harder to keep people interested and motivated over a long period of time, than to find them once.On one hand, I would like to rely on those members of our community, who we all hold in high esteem (including, but not limited to those mentioned during the dpl-game). They know what keeps them going, they know what drives them away, we need to learn from that. I'd like to hear them speak more often, on conferences, if possible, as they are, I believe, a much more credible source than any elected official, at least in some situations.I'd also like to hear everyone's voice, from old members to the newest ones, I'd like to read - and if so need be, conduct - interviews with people who recently became Debian Developers, to hear about their experience, to learn what they think is good or bad, because a fresh view is just as important as a decade long experience.On the other hand, we need to act on the issues discovered too. We already know that quite a lot of trouble stems from lack of time, overburden and eventually burn out. We know the solution to this: recruit more people, and utilise the resources we do have better. Part of that can be solved by expanding our numbers, but for the other part, we may need deeper changes. What those may be, I cannot tell yet, there simply wasn't enough time to dig deeper, and I'm likely not the best person to undertake the task, either. I am, however, confident that we'll discover the solution as we travel along.The first step is gaining knowledge, without this, no further plans can be made. RecruitmentI already touched the recruitment part earlier, at least the how of the approach. What I'd like to expand on is the why, in particular: why encourage recruiting non-packaging contributors, when we are building a distribution, and we're lacking packaging manpower too?Let me answer those questions separately.First of all, I still like to think - but perhaps I am wrong - that we have an unbelievable amount of packaging manpower, which we fail to use to its full extent. We can use more, we always will be able to. But it also helps if we manage to put our existing resources to better use.And that is where non-packaging contributions come in. If we improve our skills in areas we're lacking in, that in turn, will improve the general quality of the project, which in turns improves morale, and a vibrant, well functioning, welcoming community attracts even more people, and keeps us motivated in the long run too.Mouse on the tightropeWith all that out, you may be wondering who I may be, and why you have not seen my name over the mailing lists in recent years. I'm not a terribly vocal person anymore, not a hot-headed teen I used to be some ten years ago. Most who know me, know me by my online nick name, algernon, and in most cases, I prefer that in real life too, for silly reasons I'd rather not dive into (but the primary one being that people have a hard time correctly pronouncing my name, and I have a hard time recognising my name unless pronounced the way I learnt it). Nevertheless, my name is Gergely Nagy, and I'm a recovering hacker, who intends to become a bachelor of (hungarian) arts, by majoring in Hungarian grammar & literature sometime in the next three to five years.Over the course of the past year, I also strived to observe and learn from exceptional leaders at my day job, because there, I have the advantage of meeting with them face to face, to interact with them on a daily basis. Fortunately for me, there are people among them from whom I learned a great deal about not only motivation, but about behind-the-scenes politics too - both a valuable lesson.And while I still have a tremendous amount of things to learn, I like to believe that I can do that. I know I can learn technical things extremely quickly (my day job depends on that, I would be out of a job if I failed at that), I'm positive that I can do the same in other areas as well, at least as long as it doesn't involve extreme amounts of economics. That proved to be a major barrier in the past.But back to the more important point: my organising, presentation and leading skills. I'm a co-organiser of the Budapest Clojure User Group meetups, I started to encourage GSoC participation at my day job last year (we participated thanks to OpenSUSE who gave us a slot), and I'm driving it this year, aiming to become a mentoring organisation of our own. I'm doing regular talks and presentations, participate in code retreats, meetups and other similar events where I can both practice and learn the art of interacting with people, and the fine art of organising events.

Last year, I invited you all to walk the plank with me, to follow me on a road, a road that even I was unsure where it led. I had a vision, I had ideas, but I had little to show for a plan. Even worse, some of my ideas, some of the things I've thought I knew, turned out to be wrong this past year. While my original plan was to pursue the goals I set out in my previous platform, I did none of that, and before I get to the meat of the platform, I owe you an explanation why: After walking the plank last year, I spent some time swimming to the shore, determined that no matter what, I will get things done. But how shall I do that? And when, with whom? Those questions needed an answer, therefore I took on a coat of an ordinary hacker, and started a journey to find the answers.That is how the past year's been spent: looking and learning. I was - and still am - following every major Debian list, I'm on IRC, absorbing all the information that fits into my tiny mind. I see now, that there's a lot more to be done than I thought last year, that some of the assumptions I made then, were wrong. And having spent a long time learning, it is my hope, that I did learn, and that this time, the plans I came up with will serve the same goal I had last year, better.That goal is as simple as growing Debian from a community of mostly technical folk to something much bigger, a community of enthusiastic, bright-eyed people who all want to do their part of making the world a better place. Big words, big task.The problemOne of the most fundamental problems with the project is that it is old, and hasn't grown up yet. We're still very focused on technical merit - don't get me wrong, that is important too, but there's much more we can do than that! We have tremendous amounts of talent, but pretty much every team is suffering from lack of people, and we seem to be slow and ineffective in recruiting new contributors (either from within the project, or outside of it), and even worse at keeping them motivated. This is not new, I worried about it last year, and I'm not the only one to see things this way, respectable members of the project expressed their pessimism publicly too.This is our biggest issue. We can be excellent at the technical level, but not being able to keep people motivated, failing to find new contributors is hurting us more and more, and it is my firm belief that without quick improvement in these areas, it won't be just me virtually walking the plank.On the flip side, we have every tool in our possession to steer ourselves into a better, brighter direction. We have excellent hackers, we have people who are terrific at communication, we have people who inspire others (just see the pattern on the dpl-game!), we have everything we need. Read on then, dear reader, and see my plan!Dancing on a tightropeTo tread on a path we have not taken so consciously before, we need to have a vision to strive for. A vision for the project as a whole, and a vision for ourselves, to see where we'd like to be a few years from now.As Stefano put it so well in his platform last year, Debian is a very unique member of the larger Free Software ecosystem - go and read his description, it can hardly be written better. This is the same vision I share, where Debian grows up to be much more than hundreds of talented people putting together a distribution. I want to see Debian becoming more than that, something that attracts not only the technical geniuses, but those who wield the power of speech and inspiration too, for these traits rarely go together.I envision a project, where people recognise each other's strengths, and make use of these strengths; where we can - and will - turn to each other, and work closely together, to achieve such good balance of skills of all kinds, as we already achieved in creating and maintaining the distribution itself.Let's dance!But alas, a vision is useless without a plan. That is a mistake I made last year, one that I will not repeat again. The approaches I choose may seem strange, or weird at first, but rest assured, they were carefully considered, and most of them tried out in a smaller setting. CommunicationWhat I've seen and experienced over the past year (and thinking back, far more than that - I just didn't know where to put the experience at that time) is that written communication is rarely the best medium to reach out to people. In this age we live in, written text reaches those who were already curious, it rarely reaches those who're still waiting for enlightenment. And even if it does, more often than not, there is no direct channel between the writer and the reader, which hurts not only the latency of the communication, but the quality too. Not to mention, that - however sad it may sound - the recipient is often too shy to engage.What does help, is face to face time. Events, where we can reach out to people, and receive immediate feedback, where we can notice the shy ones, and help them. Where we can immediately adapt to expectations.For this reason, I feel it necessary to encourage and help local teams in every possible way, to organise hackfests, code retreats, and all kinds of events that they feel will attract the bright-eyed youth (be them 20 or 80, it's the spirit that counts) we so direly need. These events need not be technical at all: a session about Debian publicity, about representing the project in press or on conferences is just as useful (if not more). Along with hackfests, we could - and should - have events focused on improving communication, for that is just as important.With strong focus placed on non-technical matters, I believe we can step on a path of rapid progress: my experience shows that techies and non-techies can inspire one another very well, much more than two techies would. With a focus on areas we are lacking in, we are indirectly improving those we are already good at. Inspiration & motivationBut finding new contributors, be them technically-sawwy or not is only part of the task, and the easier one too. It is much harder to keep people interested and motivated over a long period of time, than to find them once.On one hand, I would like to rely on those members of our community, who we all hold in high esteem (including, but not limited to those mentioned during the dpl-game). They know what keeps them going, they know what drives them away, we need to learn from that. I'd like to hear them speak more often, on conferences, if possible, as they are, I believe, a much more credible source than any elected official, at least in some situations.I'd also like to hear everyone's voice, from old members to the newest ones, I'd like to read - and if so need be, conduct - interviews with people who recently became Debian Developers, to hear about their experience, to learn what they think is good or bad, because a fresh view is just as important as a decade long experience.On the other hand, we need to act on the issues discovered too. We already know that quite a lot of trouble stems from lack of time, overburden and eventually burn out. We know the solution to this: recruit more people, and utilise the resources we do have better. Part of that can be solved by expanding our numbers, but for the other part, we may need deeper changes. What those may be, I cannot tell yet, there simply wasn't enough time to dig deeper, and I'm likely not the best person to undertake the task, either. I am, however, confident that we'll discover the solution as we travel along.The first step is gaining knowledge, without this, no further plans can be made. RecruitmentI already touched the recruitment part earlier, at least the how of the approach. What I'd like to expand on is the why, in particular: why encourage recruiting non-packaging contributors, when we are building a distribution, and we're lacking packaging manpower too?Let me answer those questions separately.First of all, I still like to think - but perhaps I am wrong - that we have an unbelievable amount of packaging manpower, which we fail to use to its full extent. We can use more, we always will be able to. But it also helps if we manage to put our existing resources to better use.And that is where non-packaging contributions come in. If we improve our skills in areas we're lacking in, that in turn, will improve the general quality of the project, which in turns improves morale, and a vibrant, well functioning, welcoming community attracts even more people, and keeps us motivated in the long run too.Mouse on the tightropeWith all that out, you may be wondering who I may be, and why you have not seen my name over the mailing lists in recent years. I'm not a terribly vocal person anymore, not a hot-headed teen I used to be some ten years ago. Most who know me, know me by my online nick name, algernon, and in most cases, I prefer that in real life too, for silly reasons I'd rather not dive into (but the primary one being that people have a hard time correctly pronouncing my name, and I have a hard time recognising my name unless pronounced the way I learnt it). Nevertheless, my name is Gergely Nagy, and I'm a recovering hacker, who intends to become a bachelor of (hungarian) arts, by majoring in Hungarian grammar & literature sometime in the next three to five years.Over the course of the past year, I also strived to observe and learn from exceptional leaders at my day job, because there, I have the advantage of meeting with them face to face, to interact with them on a daily basis. Fortunately for me, there are people among them from whom I learned a great deal about not only motivation, but about behind-the-scenes politics too - both a valuable lesson.And while I still have a tremendous amount of things to learn, I like to believe that I can do that. I know I can learn technical things extremely quickly (my day job depends on that, I would be out of a job if I failed at that), I'm positive that I can do the same in other areas as well, at least as long as it doesn't involve extreme amounts of economics. That proved to be a major barrier in the past.But back to the more important point: my organising, presentation and leading skills. I'm a co-organiser of the Budapest Clojure User Group meetups, I started to encourage GSoC participation at my day job last year (we participated thanks to OpenSUSE who gave us a slot), and I'm driving it this year, aiming to become a mentoring organisation of our own. I'm doing regular talks and presentations, participate in code retreats, meetups and other similar events where I can both practice and learn the art of interacting with people, and the fine art of organising events.

Thanks for the group hug! Francesca started a DPL game and I've been mentioned a few times, by people I like deeply. Thank you! However I don't intend to run, and I hope I won't disappoint those who nominated me by saying so. But I don't think of it in terms of letting people down: I can't let anyone down since I never mentioned I'd like to run in the first place. Rather, I like to think that I've just received a wonderful group hug, and hey, wow, come here and let me hug you back! <3 And let me hug some more:

• Gregor Herrmann, I'm in a constant state of awe for what you have done with the Perl team. If you think that some of what you did could also be done as a DPL, please go for it!
• Bdale Garbee, I didn't think there could be such a thing as a reliable source of common sense until I got to know you. And you've been DPL and quite a good deal of other things and definitely know the drill. And you can't say you're busy with your day job. The last thing I want is for you to get bored after your retirement! :P
• Paul Tagliamonte, you seem to bring an incredible energy in everything you get involved with. Let's admit it: Zack's been a perfect DPL in many aspects, he has been incredibly, inhumanly smooth, but he was a bit boring. Zack has left Debian as a perfectly working train steaming on professionally towards awesomeness. Let's give it colours! Let's give it excitement! Let's give it creativity, and silliness! We need someone to cheer Christian up, and I if you can't do it, I can't think of anyone else who can!

I cannot think of a fourth DPL candidate right now and I don't want to postpone this post indefinitely. Think about it this way: you three are so good I can't think of a fourth one right now There are actually lots of people I admire in Debian. I tried to name a few without thinking, but I wasn't thinking so I lost count as soon as I ran out of fingers. I know however that many enjoy to stay out of the spotlight and keep their fun focused on a few specific things. I am one of those myself. Oh dear, FOSDEM was too short, can I have DebConf soon? In the meantime, let's have some fun with the DPL campaign.

(insert here: I've been to FOSDEM, I got a nasty flu, and other $lame_excuses for the delay in sending out this report) Dear Project Members, here's the monthly DPL activity report, this time for January 2013. About the next DPL This is the last DPL report before the start of the election process for the next term: around early March, about 20 days from now, the Secretary will send out the call for nominations. I'd like to respond (also) here to inquiries I'm receiving these days: I will not run again as DPL. So you have about 20 days to mob^Wconvince other DDs to run, or decide to run yourself. Do not to wait for the vary last minute, as that makes for lousy campaigns. I'm available to give feedback about my DPL experience to prospective candidates, ... and also to join mobbing^Wconvincing actions toward potential candidates. Just contact me. Call for helps

• Last year delegation for Google Summer of Code Admins 1 has expired and the program for 2013 will likely start soon. I'm looking for volunteer admins for this year, to organize Debian activities in the program. If you're interested, please contact me.
• In January we had a couple of related discussions on -project about DFSG 10 and maintaining an authoritative list of DFSG-free licenses. The latter would be an important contribution to the Free Software "political" ecosystem. An ikiwiki-based infrastructure to maintain such a list has been created by ftp-masters but needs to be populated. At this point we need volunteers willing to review licenses already present in main and fill them in. If you're interested, please review the discussion and manifest yourself on debian-dak@lists.d.o, where coordination about this work will happen.

Assets

• The long standing issue of writing a proper (outbound) trademark policy for Debian marks has been completed. I've reviewed on -project outstanding items from the last discussion, and documented how they've been implemented in a new policy draft. Later on, I've published the updated policy draft on our website.
• Complementary to the above, Ian Jackson has summarized the state of the discussion about our (inbound) trademark policy, i.e. what to do when accepting in the Debian archive software subject to trademark. It looks like we are close to conclusion on that front too.
• I've worked with representatives of Debian France, on the shared interest in having the association become a Debian Trusted Organization (per Constitution 9.3). We're not yet ready to start the 2 weeks discussion period to accept the orga as such (see Constitution 5.1.11), but I'd like to do that soon. So I encourage all of you to find out about the association, which is run by well-known project members.

Cloud Images Work has gone on also on the front of supporting Debian installation in public "clouds". Thanks to Arnaud Patard, Jose Miguel Parrella Romero, Pierre Couzy, and Gianugo Rabellino, we now have Debian testing images for Microsoft Azure. Together with Amazon EC2, this is the second large provider supporting Debian via images maintained by Debian Developers. More providers are welcome, exactly as more hardware/CD vendors shipping Debian are always welcome. If you want to contribute support for other providers just show up on the -cloud mailing list and say so. Some documentation effort in view of Wheezy are in need of help too, in order to let our users know about "cloud" options, see #695681. DPL helpers The DPL helpers experiment goes on. We have had 2 more IRC meetings in January (see the minutes). Documentation of the "team" communication channels (mailing list, IRC, Git, etc.) is now available from the DPL wiki page. Talks I've given an invited Debian talk at Polytech'Grenoble, as part of a free software event organized for students of local universities. Slides of the talk are available. I'd like to thank Vincent Danjean for the event organization. Let's release Wheezy now!
Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity log for January 2013 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201301

& again, I was not very active in my RCBW work this week. at least one bug fixed, & another one will be taken care of by the package maintainers.

• #683312 uif: "[PATCH] uif uses depricated position of ! to negate rules"
  ask submitter for further info, later upload with improved patch to DELAYED/5
• #694015 geda: "geda: copyright file missing after upgrade (policy 12.5)"
  next try to fix the directory -> symlink change, this time with a postinst script, upload to DELAYED/2, later cancelled after feedback from maintainers

Happy new year, Debian! To celebrate, here are some freshly posted, bits from the DPL for December 2012.

---

Dear Project Members, happy new year! Here goes another report of DPL activities, this time for December 2012. This issue of the DPL-monthly is skinnier than usual: during the past month I've been struck by the catastrophe also known as "family holiday season", enjoying a solid 10 day break from computer-related activities. Talks

• I've been invited to talk about Debian and its opportunities in the field of education (for both students and teachers) at the fOSSa conference in Lille, France. Slides of the talk I delivered there are available.
• On related news, I've gladly accepted an invitation to talk at the next LibrePlanet conference in Boston, next March. It will be the occasion to discuss the status of collaboration with the FSF and the GNU Project. (FWIW, I'm trying to secure travel sponsorship with the conference organizers, but if that won't turn out to be possible I plan to go on Debian funds, as I consider this event important enough to do so.)

Assets

• The debian.eu saga is over! DNS is now under control of DSA, currently as a redirection to debian.org as for many other ccTLD, and we have now paid the corresponding transfer costs.
• The saga about the relicensing of www.d.o content, on the other hand, is still ongoing. But we made progress! Bradley Kuhn has kindly offered his experience to complete the relicensing part --- and most notably for dealing with contributions from people we haven't been able to contact. Due to busy-ness we will proceed further only in a few months, but in the meantime there is some work to do on our side, as documented in #388141.
• In conformance with the periodic hardware maintenance plan (the goal of which is, I remind you, having all Debian hardware under warranty) we have bought extended warranty for the storage array that serves project machines hosted at UBC ECE (~830 CAD). Thanks goes to Luca Filipozzi for taking care of the order part.
• As they did last year, Amazon kindly renewed their offer of AWS credit to be used for Debian related purposes, such as QA rebuilds. This year they offered us 8'000 USD of credit which, according to projections from last year usage, should be enough for QA rebuilds and buildd usage for events like BSP. Many thanks to Lucas Nussbaum and James Bromberger for reaching out to Amazon contacts and making this possible.

DPL helpers

• The experiment of sharing the load of DPL responsibilities within a larger team still ongoing. We held one more IRC meeting in December (and skipped one due to holiday season ). Logs are available at the usual place.
• Also, I've now started moving the DPL-related part of my own TODO list to the dpl-helpers.git repository. The idea is to further reduce SPOF and ease the transition to the next DPL. BTW: this is my last-3 report as DPL. If you haven't yet started encouraging project members you think could do a good job as DPL to apply, you should better hurry up!

Collaboration with the outer world

• I've signed the OSI affiliate membership agreement on behalf of Debian. This is just a long overdue formalization of the decision to join of a few months ago. The signed version is available in the DPL document archive on master.d.o, and it has been publicly discussed with other projects on the OSI affiliates mailing list.
• As requested, I've provided a quote for FSF's restricted boot campaign, that we have subscribed as a project a while ago.
• Thanks to the prod of various people (hi, Sune!), I've noticed an interesting call by the Italian government to representatives of FOSS communities, to form a group of experts that will have to decide the criteria to adopt in the public administration. The call is in Italian, but an article in English on the matter has been posted on the Joinup website of the European Commission. I've therefore submitted an application as Debian representative and, if accepted, I'll be happy to push for criteria that too often leaves high quality and well reputed community-based distributions out of the door for futile reasons (e.g. corporate "certifications").

That's all for last year, enjoy the new one, which will soon see a new Debian release out of the door. And to make it happen sooner, let's go back fix RC bugs! Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity log for December 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201212

A bit more than two weeks after the Mini Debconf in Paris, I am glad to say that the videos of the event are finally published (the sound is not very good for the 4 first presentations, sorry about that).
They will be also available on the new IRILL website with a video player when ready.
All slides are also available on the page of the event. I believe that there is a consensus about the quality of the event. We had around 150 people attending to the event, many interesting and various talks.
As usual, it was nice to meet some old and new friends from Debian.
Group picture by Frederic Lehobey
For those who wonder, I am confident there will be a 2013 Parisian Mini Debconf. Various feedbacks about the event:
Lucas Nussbaum
Stefano Zacchiroli
Vincent Untz
Raphael Hertzog
Pietro Abate
Logilab (Julien Cristau)
The 'official' Debian news And, once more, many thanks to the sponsors!

Just posted, bits from the DPL for November 2012.

---

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/ Pop-up advertisement. Breaking news. Help the Release Team [0] by reviewing     \
  pending unblock requests. Oh, and by fixing RC bugs too.                         
                                                                                   
  [0]: http://nthykier.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/wheezy-release-progress-december/  
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

Dear Project Members, here is another (delayed) monthly report of DPL activities, this time for November 2012. Highlights

• In November, I've kept on helping the work of the debian-cloud initiative that I've announced last month. Some work went into setting up the usual infrastructure pieces (mailing list, pseudo-package in the BTS), some other into paperwork: on behalf of Debian, James Bromberger has opened an account on the Amazon Marketplace. That enabled us to deliver the first milestone: official Debian Squeeze images for Amazon EC2 (I keep it short here, but you can find more info in various places). More work is needed, and ongoing, to support other public clouds, better document Debian availability there, etc. You can help! Just show up on -cloud.
• I've then spent quite some time in November getting up to speed with the status of DebConf13 organization. For the first time, this year we have implemented the "budget approval" process that I've introduced a couple of years ago. The budget I've reviewed looked good and it's balanced (meaning that the event should be self-sustained, at least that's the theory); so I've been happy to approve it. I'm looking forward, once again, to meet many of you in Switzerland this summer!
• Together with Enrico Zini (with his DAM hat on) I've also helped Kevin Carrillo, a PhD student from New Zealand, to finalize and advertise a survey of newcomer experiences in Debian. The hope is to learn more about what works and what can be improved in our NM process, possibly learning from other FOSS projects that are also participating in the survey.
• As a last highlight, the "dpl-helpers" initiative I've spam-ed you with several times is keep on going. We held 2 more IRC meetings during November and we have also worked on the infrastructure: we now have a mailing list and a Git repo associated to the "dpl" project on Alioth. To ease handing over pending tasks to the next DPL, I'm also working with DSA to set up some DPL related request tracker queues. BTW, this is my last-4 report as DPL, if you haven't yet thought at who you want as next DPL and started bothered him/her, you better hurry up!

Events

• I've participated in the mini-DebConf Paris and held a couple of lightning talks there: one about RC Bugs squashing for Wheezy, and another about debian-cloud.
• I've given an invited talk about Debian and our relationships with companies at the yearly FOSS seminar of France Telecom / Orange
• on related news, the minutes of the Debian/Ubuntu relationship session at the last UDS have now been posted to -derviatives; some addendum has been discussed in the resulting thread

Assets

• We have finally got the certificate from the Japan Patent Office, confirming that ownership of Debian trademark there has been transferred to SPI. Many thanks to Kenshi Muto for his help on this matter over the past several months.
• We have also finally been transferred ownership of the debian.eu domain, from its previous owner (formally: the domain is now owned by FFIS, the Trusted Organization we rely upon the most in Europe).
• We got our first "donation" from DuckDuckGo for revenue sharing over the past 3 months. It's about 150 USD, which answers the worries that excessive profit from this kind of deals might influence our judgement. The precondition is far from being satisfied.
• I've been happy to approve the tentative budget for the forthcoming DebianMed sprint, for ~1400 EUR. Reminder: you can haz your sprint too, just read the fine manual.

That's all for now,
let's go back releasing Wheezy,
Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity log for November 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201211

rc bugs, cloud, and getting involved This past week-end has been rather intense. In addition to another, non free software related event I was volunteering for, I had the pleasure to participate in the 2nd Paris mini DebConf. Once again, the organization has been great and the average quality of the talks have been very high. I'd say talk quality is now totally up to par with the yearly full blown DebConf (and yes, talks have been in English ). If I had to single the talk that intrigued me the most, I'd name Joss' talk on large GNOME deployments: it's full of insights on the GNOME architecture and of tips useful to all power users, no matter the size of your GNOME "deployment". For more info on the talks have a look at the program. To catch up with the talks you missed you can peruse the slides there and/or keep an eye on http://video.debian.net, where we usually post conference videos "when they are ready". At the conference I've also witnessed the usual healthy mix of country origins that I remember from the previous Paris mini DebConf. Once again I've been happy to meet (and host!) Debian friends from many countries including Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Finland, you name it. Kudos to the organizers (hi Sylvestre and Mehdi!) and to all the volunteers who made this possible. On my part, I didn't have any full blown talk scheduled (ETOOMANYTALKS struck me this month ) but I did book two lightning talks slots that I've used for:

• rambling on RC bugs and the effects of long freezes on Debian
• presenting the debian-cloud initiative, which is rather new but incredibly active and effective despite its infancy

On the subject of lightning talks, I also recommend to promote Lucas' talk on how to get involved in Debian. It's dense and straight to the point, able to both convey useful tips and point wannabe contributors to the most useful contributions they can make to Debian.

In recent times we have worked quite a bit to improve the NM process, i.e. the process newcomers go through to become members of the Debian Project. As it happens, I've just read Nathan's recent post on his NM experience and I think it is a perfect example of the joining experience we are trying to offer to all newcomers. But examples, be them positive or negative, are only anecdotal. To evaluate a process one needs actual data and someone analyzing them, ideally with a scientific approach. This is why I'm happy to host below a guest blog post by Kevin Carillo, who is doing a pretty thorough scientific study about how newcomers join a wide range of Free Software projects, including KDE, OpenSUSE, GNOME, and Debian, of course! TL;DR: if you started contributing to Debian after January 2010, there's a survey for you; participating will help us improving the NM process even further. Kevin's guest blog post follows.

---

Newcomer experience in Debian and other FOSS communities - Survey My name is Kevin Carillo. I am a PhD student currently living in Wellington (New Zealand) and I am doing some research on Free/Open Source Software communities. If you have started contributing to the Debian project after January 2010 (within approximately the last 3 years), I would like to kindly request your help. I am interested in hearing from people who are either technical or non-technical contributors, and who have had either positive or negative newcomer experiences. The purpose of the research is to work out how newcomers to a FOSS community become valued sustainable contributors. The survey is online and will be available until Tuesday, 27 November, 2012. Inspiration from Debian New Member Debian is a successful community that keeps attracting new contributors and that relies on a very unique way to handle the integration of new contributors: the New Member process. The idea behind the NM process is that it is some sort of filtering procedure allowing to only retain the individuals who have the potential to become valued sustainable contributors in Debian. Within Debian, there is a lot of enthusiasm and pride around the NM process as it seems to be functioning pretty well but the question is: Is this really enough to ensure that Debian remains a healthy and growing community? How does it compare to the way newcomers are integrated in other large projects such as KDE, GNOME, or in other non-Linux related communities such as Mozilla? I have to admit that the Debian NM process has been among the main sources of inspiration that made me embark in this research project. I have kept being quite impressed when talking to people who had gone through the process as all of them came out of it with a real passion for the project and love for its community. When reflecting on the reasons why the NM process succeeds, I have a feeling it is some instance of ritualized socialization. In other words, barriers and initiation rituals that require some effort from newcomers, generate members with higher commitment and sense of identification towards the Debian community. What do newcomers really experience? The main assumption that motivated this project is that attracting new members has become crucial for a large majority of FOSS communities but this is not a sufficient condition to ensure the success and prosperity of a project. A proportion of a community's newcomers must contribute to the well-being and growth of the community. Keeping all that in mind, FOSS projects have thus to do a good job at "socializing" their newcomers and turning them into 'good' contributors. Doing a good job here means that FOSS projects shall ensure that they help generate citizenship-like behaviors from newcomers by designing appropriate newcomer programs and procedures. FOSS communities rely on a wide array of initiatives to facilitate the integration of newcomers but it seems like the other side of the coin is less understood: What do newcomers really experience? And how does this influence their contributions and actions within a project? How is this study going to help Debian? The data will help gain insights about the experience of newcomers within the Debian community. In addition, it will allow to understand how to design effective newcomer initiatives to ensure that Debian will remain a successful and healthy community. The dataset will be released under a share-alike ODbL license so that Debian contributors can extract as much value as possible from the data. Since this survey also involves other large FOSS projects such as Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, and NetBSD, it will also be possible to compare practices across projects in order to identify what works from what does not work when facilitating the integration of newcomers. About the survey This survey is anonymous. The raw dataset of everything one fills in the survey will be released under the ODbL. Since all the questions but one are optional, one is free to control the amount of information they are giving away about themselves. I expect the survey to take around 20 minutes of your time. If you know members of the Debian community who you think would be interested in completing it, please do not hesitate to let them know about this research. I will post news about my progress with this research, and the results on my blog. Don't hesitate to contact me. --- Kevin Carillo

again, not one of my best RCBW weeks. still, here's the short report:

• #683100 pnp4nagios-web: "pnp4nagios-web: libjs-jquery-ui (>= 1.8.14) may be not enough"
  add a comment to the bug report
• #683138 pnp4nagios-web: "pnp4nagios-web: crashes immediately due to debian/patches/adjust-template-path"
  add a comment to the bug report
• #689687 src:guile-1.6: "guile-1.6: FTBFS on i386, kfreebsd-i386: testsuite failures"
  sponsor NMU prepared by Daniel Hartwig, upload to DELAYED/2
• #690128 inn2: "inn2: conffile disappearing during squeeze->wheezy upgrade: /etc/news/motd.news"
  some triaging
• #691215 pinpoint: "X request failed: BadDrawable"
  try to reproduce, unsuccessful
• #691535 mumble: "Plugins: Failed to load libmumble.so: Cannot load library /usr/lib/mumble/libmumble.so: (/usr/lib/mumble/libmumble.so: undefined symbol: glPopClientAttrib)"
  send a patch proposal to the BTS, then upload to unstable with maintainer's approval

Today, I officially got approved by the Debian Account Managers as a Debian Developer (still waiting on keyring-maint and DSA). Over the years, I have seen many people complain about the New Member Process. The most common complaint was with regards to the (usually) long amount of time the process can take to complete. I am writing this blog post to provide one more perspective on this process. Hopefully, it will prove useful to people considering starting the New Member Process. The most difficult part about the New Member Process for me had to do with getting my GPG key signed by Debian Developers. I have not been able to attend any large conferences, which are great places to get your key signed. I also have not been able to meet up with the few Debian Developers living in/around Chicago. As a result, I was forced to patiently wait to start the NM process. This waiting period lasted a couple of years. It wasn't until this October, at the [Association for Computing Machinery at Urbana-Champaign's Reflections Projections Conference], that this changed. Stefano Zacchiroli was present to give a talk about Debian. Asheesh Laroia was also present to lead an OpenHatch Workshop about contributing to open source projects. Both of these Developers were more than willing to sign my key when I asked. If you look at my key, you will see that these signatures were made on October 7 and October 9, 2012. With the signatures out of the way, the next step in the process was to actually apply. Since I did not already have an account in the system, I had to send an email to the Front Desk and have them enter my information into the system. Details on this step, along with a sample email are available here. Once I was in the system, the next step was to get some Debian Developers to serve as my advocates. Advocates should be Debian Developers you have worked closely with, and usually include your sponsor(s). If these people believe you are ready to become a Debian Developer, they write a message describing the work you have been doing with them and why they feel you are ready. Paul Tagliamonte had helped review and sponsor a number of my uploads. I had been working with him for a number of years, and he really helped encourage and help me to reach this milestone. He served as my first advocate. Gregor Herrmann is responsible for getting me started in contributing to Debian. When I first tried to get involved, I had a hard time finding sponsors for my uploads and bugs to work on. Eventually, I discovered the Debian Perl Group. This team collectively maintains most of the Perl modules that are included in the Debian repositories. Gregor and the other Debian Developers on the team were really good about reviewing and sponsoring uploads in a very timely manner. This allowed me to learn quickly and make a number of contributions to Debian. He served as my second advocate. With my advocations taken care of, the next step in the process was for the Front Desk to assign me an Application Manager and for the Application Manager to accept the appointment. Thijs Kinkhorst was appointed as my Application Manager. He also agreed to take on this task. For those of you who might not know, the Application Manager is in charge of asking the applicant questions, collecting information, and ultimately making a recommendation to the Debian Account Managers about whether or not they should accept the applicant as a Developer. They can go about this in a variety of ways, but most choose to utilize a set of template questions that are adjusted slightly on a per-applicant basis. Remember that period of waiting to get my GPG key signed? I had used that time to go through and prepare answers to most of the template questions. This served two purposes. First, it allowed me to prove to myself that I had the knowledge to become a Debian Developer. Second, it helped to greatly speed up the New Member process once I actually applied. There were some questions that were added/removed/modified, but by answering the template questions befrehoand, I had become quite familiar with documents such as the Debian Policy and the Debian Developer's Rerference. These documents are the basis for almost all questions that are asked. After several rounds of questions, testing my knowledge of Debian's philosophy and procedures as well as my technical knowledge and skills, some of my uploads were reviewed. This is a pretty standard step. Be prepared to explain any changes you made (or chose not to make) in your uploads. If you have any outstanding bugs or issues with your packages, you might also be asked to resolve them. Eventually, once your Application Manager has collected enough information to ensure you are capable of becoming a Debian Developer, they will send their recommendation and a brief biography about you to the debian-newmaint mailing list and forward all information and emails from you to the Debian Account Managers (after the Front Desk checks and confirms that all of the important information is present). The Debian Account Managers have the actual authority to approve new Debian Developers. They will review all information sent to them and reach their own decision. If they approve your application, they will submit requests for your GPG key to be added to the Debian Keyring and for an account to be created for you in the Debian systems. At this point, the New Member process is complete. For me, it took exactly 1 month from the time I officially applied to become a Debian Developer until the time of my application being approved by the Debian Account Managers. Hopefully, it will not be long until my GPG key is added to the keyring and my account is created. I feel the entire process went by very quickly and was pain-free. Hopefully, this blog post will help to encourage more people to apply to become Debian Developers.

Freshly baked, bits from the DPL for October 2012.

---

Dear Project Members,
another month, another periodic report of DPL-ish activities, this time for October 2012. Highlights Debian on public clouds I've spent quite some time to improve Debian presence on the so called "public clouds". Following up to an inquiry of a fellow developer, I've reached out to Microsoft to investigate the possibility of having Debian as an option on Windows Azure. Around the same time, I've been approached by Amazon to have Debian as an option on the AWS marketplace. In both cases, we will need to overcome challenges of various kinds, at the technical (e.g. image preparation), bureaucratic (e.g. terms of the agreements we'll need to accept to be present), and political (e.g. chain of trust, platform freedom) levels. Up to now, discussions have been going on mostly in private, simply because they started as 1-to-1 inquiries and continued from there, but there is no good reason they should remain so. Hence, thanks to the listmasters and in particular Alexander Wirt, we have setup the new debian-cloud mailing list. If you are interested in these topics please join the list. For both Azure and AWS there is good progress on the technical part already; summaries will soon be posted on the list so that we are all on the same page. Similarly, I'll post there status reports about the bureaucratic requirements. And of course there is no reason to focus on specific clouds, if you'd like to support others and are willing to put some work to that end, please join the list and let us know. DPL helpers meeting I've already bothered you at least in my last platform and DebConf13 talk with observations about how non-scalable the DPL job is. After having collected applications of DPL helpers for a while, I've finally sat down and tried to put those applications into good use. The idea is simple: to the extend of possible, we should shift from a one-man-band job to a more "board-like" job, with people sharing an agenda, a list of outstanding tasks, and public communication. We have started slowly, setting up the #debian-dpl IRC channel and running periodic bi-weekly meetings there. You can find the meeting minutes and full logs at the usual place. We are still ramping up, so we don't have yet "fancy" stuff like a mailing list or an issue tracker entry, but they're in the working. Some of the outcome are starting to show, too (e.g. as part of recent discussions on 3rd party orphaning, or on our inbound trademark policy, or even in the forthcoming DMCA policy to make mentors.d.n an official project service). It's an experiment and a big challenge. I'm, for one thing, not yet convinced there are enough people interested in sharing the load of DPL duties (that look boring, for many tech geeks) in the long run. But I'm also convinced that the sustainability of the Debian organization model depends on this, so it's worth trying. If you're interested in the challenge and willing to volunteer some of your time, please join us on #debian-dpl . I'll take care of keeping the project informed of further evolution, in particular about the communication channels we will pick for day to day activities and accountability. Events / public communication I've spent most of my remaining Debian time in October attending events on behalf of the Project, in particular:

• I've attended and delivered a Debian speech at ACM Reflections Projections conference in Urbana-Champaign, USA. Slides and even a video of my talk there are available.
• I've attended and delivered a Debian speech at the yearly LinuxDay event in Turin, Italy. Slides of my talk are available
• I've then attended the by-yearly Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Copenhagen, representing Debian there. I've met a bunch of people there, generally vouching for more (and more (and more )) collaborating at the Debian-Ubuntu border. I've also attended the traditional Debian-Ubuntu "health check" session, presenting there the topics I've collected on the -derivatives list. A report of the session is pending, but I should have successfully talked Stefano Rivera into posting it to -derivatives soon g.

On the topic of public communication, I've also coordinated with the press team an answer to a press inquiry about Secure Boot (which has become part of this article), and happily vouched for the Ubuntu charity marathon, adding some Debian challenges to it. Delegations As largely overdue matters, I've finalized the delegations mentioned last month, namely: FTP masters, New Members Front Desk, and Policy editors. Assets and legal stuff

• on the logo relicensing, one pending matter from last month was the non-free-ness of the so called "official" logo. Discussion continued, but we had no consensus in ditching it completely. Rather, I've proposed to bless as "official" Debian logo the free one, and rename the other for what it is, a "restricted" Debian logo. The change was consensual and has been implemented
• our account creation request to softchoice.com has been approved, meaning that we can now more easily buy hardware in North America, reducing a bit the bureaucratic burden associated to individual purchases. Thanks to DSA, and Luca Filipozzi in particular, for his help with this matter
• there are a couple of legal matters on which there have been progress, but still inconclusive. Just to mention that they haven't been forgotten, they are the DMCA policy for mentors.d.o and the appropriate presentation for a forthcoming libdvdcss installer package in the archive

Miscellanea

• sadly, we have found no volunteer admin for the Google Code-In initiative, so we won't participate this year
• the end of 2012 is approaching, sprint-wise, we have had roughly the same number of sprints than the previous year (8 vs 9). Please start planning your sprints for 2013, so that we can minimize travel costs and bring more people at the event!

Now let's all go back to RC Bug squashing to make Wheezy a reality. SPAM-my link of the month is http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi and its various "views" at the bottom of the page. Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity log for October 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201210

as zack has mentioned earlier today, the count of RC bugs is falling. & the release team is again proposing RC buggy packages for removal from testing.

these were my RC bug related activities during the last week:

• #623578 gadfly: "gadfly: build wrong version of the packaging during a binNMU"
  apply patch from Guillem Jover, upload to DELAYED/2
• #675971 mumble: "Cannot communicate with the vast majority of Mumble servers due to lack of required baseline codec"
  file pre-approval unblock request #691098
• #677943 munin: "/etc/apache2/conf.d/munin removed on upgrade"
  send a patch to the BTS
• #685632 liquidsoap: "liquidsoap: missing versioned depend on libcamomile-ocaml-data"
  make dependency versioned, upload to DELAYED/2
• #688891 psad: "psad: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/psad/psad.conf"
  send a patch to the BTS
• #689537 pdnsd: "pdnsd: deletes conffiles on package removal (policy 10.7.3): /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/002_NetMan_pdnsd"
  include patch from Stuart Prescott, do a QA upload
• #689683 prelude-manager: "prelude-manager: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/prelude-manager/prelude-manager.conf"
  fix conffile handling, upload to DELAYED/2
• #690368 pdnsd: "pdnsd: postinst overwrites admin changes to /etc/default/pdnsd"
  fix conffile handling, do a QA upload
• #691015 conserver-client: "conserver-client: fails to upgrade from testing: Can't locate Tie/Hash/NamedCapture.pm in @INC"
  propose a patch to fix the mistake in my NMU

Just posted to d-d-a, bits from the DPL for Septemer 2012.

---

Heya,
here is the periodic report of DPL activities, this time related to September 2012 (posted here with some delay, as I've been traveling oversea on behalf of Debian for the past few days). Help needed: Google Code-In The Google Code-In (GCI) initiative is about to start again. We don't have a great track record of participating into it, and that's a pity. The initiative revolves around small tasks that other Free Software projects have come to call "easy hacks", showing how effective they're in attracting new volunteers. To participate, we need both mentors and admins. If you're interested see Ana's call for help and please volunteer on the soc-coordination list. Related to this, you've probably seen the report of our participation in GSoC 2012. I'd like to thank all students, mentors, and admins for a very well organized edition. Logo relicensing & other assets The DFSG-relicensing of the Debian logo, which I've mentioned in recent updates, has now happened. The so called Debian "Open Use" logo, in both variants (with and without "Debian") is now dually licensed under LGPL3+ / CC-BY-SA 3.0. The change has been made effective with a resolution of the SPI Board of Directors. Note that the so called "official" logo, which we seem to use very little, is still released under the terms of a non-free license. Discussion is ongoing on -project to stop promoting it. If you're using it or if you've arguments in favor of against that, please participate in the discussion. I've got from SFLC an updated draft of the new proposed trademark policy, implementing most of the changes requested during related August discussions on -project. I'll post it for review there shortly. The Japanese Trademark Office (JPO) has sent us the final confirmation that trademark transfer request (from individuals Debian contributors in the area to SPI) has happened. We've paid the needed fee of 457 CHF to conclude the transaction. We finally settled a domain transfer agreement with the current owner of the debian.eu. Technically, the domain will be transferred to FFIS in the coming weeks. Core teams (non-)news Quite some core teams are in the process of changing their formations these weeks, but most are still pending proper delegation (or equivalent). So here are just a few "teasers":

• as you might have read in the ftp-master sprint report, we have a new ftp-master: congrats Ansgar! (delegation update pending, but no suspense here)
• we have a new front-desk member (delegation pending + suspense)
• we have a new debian policy team (delegation pending + suspense)
• the tech-ctte is in the process of selecting a new candidate to fill the vacant seat. I've nominated a couple of candidates myself, and I'm now waiting for tech-ctte recommendations as per Constitution 6.2. On related news, the tech-ctte has now dealt with the conflict on Python interpreter maintenership, which was also the longest standing issue brought before them. Having invested quite some energy in that issue myself, I'm delighted to see it finally addressed.

I hope to finalize all the pending tasks above this month. Future events I've spent quite some time to plan my participation in events I'll be attending during October on behalf of Debian, such as the ACM Reflections conference in Urbana-Champaign (at the time of writing, this has already happened), the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen, and the LinuxDay event in Turin. Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity log for September 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201209

A Debian package contains some metadata about the packaged program. For instance, its homepage URL is stored in the source package control file (debian/control) and propagated through the Debian source control file (.dsc). The problem with this approach is that to update the metadata, one has to update the whole package. Today, thousands of Debian source packages are developed in a version control system, most often Subversion or Git. The repository's URL is also propagated through the control files mentioned above. It is then possible to monitor the main branch to detect and propagate changes without needing to upload to the Debian archive. In 2009, I proposed to centralise metadata about Upstream in a YAML-formatted file, debian/upstream. We are now using it in the Debian Med project to propagate bibliographic references about the manuscripts describing the packaged programs. The references can be seen on our web sentinels for our metapackages. The data transits through the Ultimate Debian Database (UDD). Let's imagine that the concept gains success and that thousands of packages provide a debian/upstream file. How can we avoid thousands of daily requests on Alioth to keep the database up to date ? I am developing a system called Umegaya, for Umegaya is a MEtadata GAtherer using YAml. Umegaya provides a web interface with a simple URL structure to retrieve data. For instance, http://upstream-metadata.debian.net/emboss/reference-year returns 2000, the year where the first scientific article describing EMBOSS was published. If at the time of retrieval, the previous update was older than one hour, the system will read the package's debian/upstream file again. It is therefore by reading the data that it is kept up to date. Conversely, to update the database after modifying debian/upstream, one just has to access it. Umegaya is still a draft, and many things may change. But the service is already up for more than a year at the address upstream-metadata.debian.net. It is used to fill the Subversion repository called packages-metadata, with gathers the debian/upstream, debian/control and debian/copyright files from recently uploaded packages (since a few months). One can see there that among the 3,646 copyright files, 1,218 declare themselves conformant to the machine-readable format 1.0. Because I like a lot the principle package what you use, use what you package, umegaya entered the Debian archive a few days ago.

Fellow geeks of the Canonical community team will be doing something pretty weird this week. They're fund-raising for charity, for causes ranging from environment to autism, from homeless support to kids education, from poverty fight to water supplies. But that's not weird. What's weird is that the fund-raising will culminate in a 24-hour work marathon stream live, which will kick off tomorrow (Thursday) at 10:00 UTC. As I like charity, and as I like contributing to Free Software, I gladly accepted to rely here a challenge to the Debian community by one of the marathon "horsemen", Michael Hall:

• if Michael receives at least 5 Debian-tagged donations for the cause he has chosen to support (Autism Research Trust - donate), he'll do his marathon day wearing a Debian t-shirt (which apparently is also the first Free Software t-shirt he has ever owned). I've already donated, so that makes only 4 donations to go to add some Debian promotion salt to an Ubuntu marathon . To "tag" your donation as originating from the Debian community, just leave a message containing the word "debian" at the end of the donation process. The work Michael will be doing tomorrow is not entirely Debian-specific, but Michael is Canonical's responsible for relationship with upstream. I've worked with him in the past on a range of topics, and I can testify that part of his work is generally useful to Debian.

Raising the stakes, Nick Skaggs has decided to propose a similar challenge:

• for every 5 Debian-tagged donations to Nick's cause (WaterAid - donate), Nick will write a manpage for a Debian package that is in dire need of one. As above, just mention "debian" in your post-donation message to tag your donation as originating from the Debian community.

Wanna take the challenge? And how about the other 4 horsemen? No challenges to the Debian community? Feel free to leave a comment and I'll raise the stakes even more, updating the list above. Update 4/10/2012, 13:35 +0200: Daniel Holbach added his own challenge to the Debian community:

• for every Debian-tagged donation to Daniel's cause (Oxfam - donate), Daniel will (triage and) forward a patch from Ubuntu to the Debian BTS.

DPL August report, posted on d-d-a a while ago (yep, I forgot to blog it up to now!, sorry for the oldies).

---

Dear project members, August has been a month with a good deal of vacations for many of us, including yours truly. Therefore the monthly report of DPL activities will be briefer than usual. Which is good, as it'll leave all my readers more time to do NMUs and fix RC bugs! Ongoing discussions

• Discussion about the new trademark policy has continued on -project. I've collected quite some feedback and summarized it in a request for change that I've passed on to SFLC. I'm waiting for a second draft from them, before reviving the thread.
• on the long-running issue of de-duplicating DebConf infrastructure wrt Debian's, I've been happy to support the proposal of moving DebConf's list to Debian's software and infrastructure. There seems to be interest and consensus, but the DebConf team could probably use a couple more helping hands to make it real
• starting from the practical need of dealing with minified JavaScript files, an interesting discussion sparkled on -devel. It quickly turned in both musing on the notion of archive-wide DFSG-freeness and some new devscript tooling by Andreas Tille. AFAIU some extra testing would be welcome

Assets

• The DFGS-free logo relicensing I've mentioned last month is now on its way. Following advice from SFLC, I've slightly patched the current trademark policy (mainly to clarify scope), just enough to decouple logo relicensing under LGPLv3/CC-BY-SA 3.0 from the finalization of a new trademark policy (see above). I've also verified that the license choice is fine with teams that regularly deal with the logos. Ball is now in SPI camp (as copyright holder). They should finalize the relicensing during the forthcoming board meeting, on September 13th.
• We heard back from the trademark office in Japan, who accepted our request to transfer it from local Debian contributors to SPI. That being mainly a bureaucratic acknowledgement, we'll now need to way for a while until they confirm the transfer has been finalized. My eternal thanks for help with this matter goes to Kenshi Muto.

Core teams

• Manoj Srivastava has stepped down as tech-ctte member. I hereby thank him for his long and valuable service in that capacity. The tech-ctte has now one vacant seat, and I've encouraged present tech-ctte members to propose to me a suitable candidate. In an attempt to promote diversity of views within the tech-ctte, they are now considering various ways to solicit candidatures. You'll hear from them about this soon, I suspect.
• In the meantime, monthly IRC meetings of the tech-ctte are continuing, as you might have noticed from tech-ctte decision reports posted on this list. As it seemed to be lingering, at the last meeting I've solicited progress on the Python maintenance issue.
• The auditors have noticed the unclear situation of the Policy Editor delegation, which seems to rely on a "base" delegation dating back to Antony Towns' office and various subsequent delegation "patches". After discussion with Russ Allbery I've then proceeded to a public "ping" to assess the interest of current editors in continuing their work in such capacity, and encourage new volunteers to apply as editors. Based on the feedback I've got, I'm now preparing a new Policy Editor delegation.

Legal and RC fun

• Solicited by Jonathan Nieder and Helge Kreutzmann, I've looked into #555168 and sought legal advice to answer various questions related to the non-copyrightability of locale data. Aaron Williamson of SFLC has been blazing fast in answering them (thanks!), and Jonathan and Helge has now all the needed information to help addressing that (RC) issue. Keep an eye on the bug log for more details.

Hardware

• I've approved buying 6 console servers to improve DSA ability to act on remote machines, without having to bother^Wrely on local admins when not strictly needed. ~550 USD well spent.

See? It's been quick(er)! Talk to you here next month, with a much lower count of Wheezy RC Bugs on the horizon, hopefully.
Cheers.

---

PS the boring day-to-day activity log for August 2012 is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201208

I didn't get very far this week with my RCBW efforts, but luckily we have BSPs going on :) Here's my short list:

• #639565 liboauth-dev: "liboauth-dev: please make loose libcurl dependency"
  further investigation
• #642903 nodm: "nodm: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 10"
  fix .config, upload to DELAYED/5
• #652084 gosmore: "gosmore use 100% CPU and does nothing"
  sponsor NMU from Kai L ke, upload to DELAYED/2
• #657465 conserver-client: "conserver-client: prompting due to modified conffiles which where not modified by the user"
  private mail from maintainer
• #682412 dynamips: "dynamips: FTBFS with multiarch paths: cc: error: /usr/lib/libelf.a: No such file or directory"
  uploaded to DELAYED/3 with my patch by a fellow DD during the Berlin BSP
• #683925 src:ocp: "FTBFS with gcc-4.7 on i386"
  add patch from Kumar Appaiah, upload to DELAYED/2
• #684144 sauerbraten: "sauerbraten: security issues with transmitted map cfgs"
  unsuccessfully apply upstream patch

In late July, the Awesome Foundations invited me to participate in an interesting conversation about open brands at their conference. Awesome is a young collection of organizations struggling with the idea of if, and how, they want to try to control who gets call themselves Awesome. I was asked to talk about how the free software community approaches the issue. Guidance from free software is surprisingly unclear. I have watched and participated in struggles over issues of branding in every successful free software project I've worked in. Many years ago, Greg Pomerantz and I wrote a draft trademark policy for the Debian distribution over a couple beers. Over the last year, I've been working with Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli and lawyers at the Software Freedom Law Center to help draft a trademark policy for the Debian project. Through that process, I've come up with three principles which I think lead to more clear discussion about whether a free culture or free software should register a trademark and, if they do, how they should think about licensing it. I've listed those principles below in order of importance. 1. We want people to use our brands. Conversation about trademarks seem to turn into an exercise in imagining all the horrible ways in which a brand might be misused. This is silly and wrong. It is worth being extremely clear on this point: Our problem is not that people will misuse our brands. Our problem is that not enough people will use them at all. The most important goal of a trademark policy should be to make legitimate use possible and easy. We want people to make t-shirts with our logos. We want people to write books about our products. We want people to create user groups and hold conferences. We want people to use, talk about, and promote our projects both commercially and non-commercially. Trademarks will limit the diffusion of our brand and, in that way, will hurt our projects. Sometimes, after carefully considering these drawbacks, we think the trade-off is worth making. And sometimes it is. However, projects are generally overly risk averse and, as a result, almost always err on the side of too much control. I am confident that free software and free culture projects' desire to control their brands has done more damage than all brand misuse put together. 2. We want our projects to be able to evolve. The creation of a trademark puts legal power to control a brand in the hands of an individual, firm, or a non-profit. Although it might not seem like such a big deal, this power is, fundamentally, the ability to determine what a project is and is not. By doing this, it creates a single point of failure and a new position of authority and, in that process, limits projects' ability to shift and grow organically over time. I've heard that in US politics, there is no trademark for the terms Republican or Democrat and that you do not need permission to create an organization that claims to be part of either party. And that does not mean that everybody is confused. Through social and organizational structures, it is clear who is in, who is out, and who is on the fringes. More importantly, this structure allows for new branches and groups outside of the orthodoxy to grow and develop on the margins. Both parties have been around since the nineteenth century, have swapped places on the political spectrum on a large number of issues, and have played host to major internal ideological disagreements. Almost any organization should aspire to such longevity, internal debate, and flexibility. 3. We should not confuse our communities. Although they are often abused, trademarks are fundamentally pro-consumer. The point of legally protected brands is to help consumers from being confused as the source of a product or service. Users might love software from the Debian project, or might hate it, but it's nice for them to be able to know that they're getting "Debian Quality" when they download a distribution. Of course, legally protected trademarks aren't the only way to ensure this. Domains names, internal policies, and laws against fraud and misrepresentation all serve this purpose as well. The Open Source Initiative applied for a trademark on the term open source and had their application rejected. The lack of a registered trademark has not kept folks from policing use of the term. Folks try to call their stuff "open source" when it is not and are kept in line by a community of folks who know better. And since lawyers are rarely involved, it is hardly clear that a registered trademark would help in the vast majority of these these situations. It is also the case that most free software/culture organizations lack the money, lawyers, or time, to enforce trademarks in any case. Keeping your communities of users and developers clear on what is, and what isn't, your product and your project is deeply important. But how we choose to do this is something we should never take for granted.