The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two
months:
thanks to lucas & his
trainees, we're seeing archive rebuilds & tons of new RC bugs again.
besides that, there are still some patches in the BTS.
here goes my list of recently worked on bugs; most of them in the
pkg-perl group
Out of curiosity, and because it is Sunday morning and I have a cold and
can't get my brain to do anything tricky, I counted the number of
candidates in each year's DPL elections.
| Year | Count | Names |
|---|---|---|
| 1999 | 4 | Joseph Carter, Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Richard Braakman |
| 2000 | 4 | Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Joel Klecker, Matthew Vernon |
| 2001 | 4 | Branden Robinson, Anand Kumria, Ben Collins, Bdale Garbee |
| 2002 | 3 | Branden Robinson, Rapha l Hertzog, Bdale Garbee |
| 2003 | 4 | Moshe Zadka, Bdale Garbee, Branden Robinson, Martin Michlmayr |
| 2004 | 3 | Martin Michlmayr, Gergely Nagy, Branden Robinson |
| 2005 | 6 | Matthew Garrett, Andreas Schuldei, Angus Lees, Anthony Towns, Jonathan Walther, Branden Robinson |
| 2006 | 7 | Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ari Pollak, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Towns, Andreas Schuldei, Jonathan (Ted) Walther, Bill Allombert |
| 2007 | 8 | Wouter Verhelst, Aigars Mahinovs, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Steve McIntyre, Rapha l Hertzog, Anthony Towns, Simon Richter |
| 2008 | 3 | Marc Brockschmidt, Rapha l Hertzog, Steve McIntyre |
| 2009 | 2 | Stefano Zacchiroli, Steve McIntyre |
| 2010 | 4 | Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy, Margarita Manterola |
| 2011 | 1 | Stefano Zacchiroli (no vote yet) |
Continuing from where we left off…
The lower bound for me becoming a DD was 8th Feb ‘98 when I applied;
for comparison, the upper bound as best I can make out was 23rd Feb,
when I would have received this mail through the debian-private list:
Resent-Date: 23 Feb 1998 18:18:57 -0000
From: Martin Schulze
To: Debian Private
Subject: New accepted maintainers
Hi folks,
I wish you a pleasant beginning of the week. Here are the first good
news of the week (probably).
This is the weekly progress report about new-maintainers. These people
have been accepted as new maintainer for Debian GNU/Linux within the
last week.
[...]
Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
Anthony is going to package the personal proxy from
distributed.net - we don't have the source... He may adopt the
transproxy package, too.
Regards,
Joey
I never did adopt transproxy – apparently Adam Heath started fixing
bugs in it a few days later anyway, and it was later taken over by Bernd
Eckenfels (ifconfig upstream!) who’s maintained it ever since. Obviously I
did do other things instead, which brings us back to where we left off…
(The mails have always been sent with Ben's name attached) That mail was followed by another suggesting a phone conversation; unfortunately nobody seemed to notice the mail, at least until a year later (to the day!) when Joerg pointed out he was getting bounces form the BXA email address we'd been using... (Since then, based on the above mail, we've been recording notifications, but not passing them on; I sent a reply to the mails above indicating that, but didn't receive a response. There's been about 5000 notifications since then)From: Encryption Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 12:51:02 -0400 Subject: Addition to Debian Source Code updates Dear Mr. Collins, Your diligent reporting of updates to the Debian source code to the Bureau of Industry and Security has been an excellent example of perspicacity. However, you no longer need to do so per the following update to the EAR: [...]
Yesterday I was invited onto the group that administers the Debian bug tracking system. I can't decide whether to be intimidated or excited. There's a great deal to do: my first couple of major projects look set to be integrating some of the existing QA interfaces to release-critical bug tracking, and developing a tool to help us edit spam out of bug histories.There's a lot to be said for grabbing people at the point where they're still intimidated by what they're joining; sure there's a definite risk that they'll break something you'll have to clean up, but that's pretty easy to deal with, and well worth all the extra excitement and energy that comes with a little bit of nerves. I did a talk on debbugs a few years later, at the 2005 DebConf, at which point we managed to entice Pascal Hakim and Don Armstrong into signing up, if I'm remembering right. At the same time Colin rolled out his implementation of version tracking support for debbugs (which I'd specced up a while ago, and helped design, but cannily avoided actually coding). Shortly after, Pasc put together bug subscriptions, and these days Don's pretty much the primary maintainer of debbugs. How cool is that? Passing on release managership was a bit less fortuitous though; it's a big job, and it's not something that you can offer "patches" for, generally. So after a bit of cogitating on just how to do it, I went with an open recruitment call in March 2003, and then a bunch of practical assignments to get the volunteers used to what RM work actually entailed and to see whether they actually like it. The recruitment call was mostly focussed on all the negatives, half to avoid people volunteering to be RM for the power (to decide which release policy wins, to tell maintainers what to do, to drop packages, or to just decide what name/number the next release gets) instead of wanting to actually do the work to get the next release out and keep developers happy; and the other half was the theory that if you make a job look hard, technical, but not terribly risky, it starts looking interesting to the right kind of people. The assignments generally were two parters -- first to introduce some stuff about release management that they mightn't be familiar with, and the second a bunch of problems that needed resolving that'd use those skills. The first set was RC bug fixing, followed by working out why packages aren't getting into testing, followed by dealing with packages with mutual dependencies and removing packages. At some point that evolved into the testing scripts accepting "hints" from the release team as to what packages to try in combination, or which packages to force out of testing. That turned out pretty successful, with Steve Langasek, Colin Watson and Joey Hess becoming official release assistants in August, and Colin and Steve replacing me as RM in mid-2004. It was also pretty satisfying to see Andi Barth do some more release assistant recruiting in 2005 following much the same model, and indeed using much of my mail verbatim. You can't really ask for better than that, I figure.
Recently I saw somewhere a link to Google Video about a very nice video: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too). So please, if you didn't see this go and watch it now: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645. It is a little bit large (~50 min) but I found some nice information from real experiences that could really help to improve our communication inside Debian. So, for the curious and impatient, it is a Google TechTalk with Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick, SubVersion Developers, based on their experiences they show situations that can drain Project resources and they gave valuable tips, ideas and directions on how to protect the "Attention and Focus" of the Project. It is very interesting to find a lot of factors and points that we can see from time to time on Debian. Don't get me wrong, I'm really not whining, I don't think that whining would solve any problem (except if you are a 6-month hungry child), but I would love if it could give us some momentum and maybe a starting point to leave aside some old unresolved issues, giving a chance to new ideas! Which basically means, keep working together to keep building the best Operating System. :-) (But doing that with even more fun for even more people). We can too! On a totally unrelated note: my primary MX is back for quite some time, I should report that earlier, anyway, sorry about the lack of posts, thanks for your attention and see you soon. Over.
Bug in script checksecurity in package cron, on 25 Oct 1995. Once in, I rapidly went to the next phase: Here is the sum toto of the NM process I went through: my Hello, World mail. Those were the days :-). There was nothing between my ITP and the upload. My first significant package was
kernel-package, since I
was always missing something in the series of steps
needed to build a kernel, and I started getting into it in the summer
of ‘96. This is where the second part of my apprenticeship started –
even though I had 3-4 packages in the archive, my kernel images were
not yet trusted; so I sent my images to my sponsor(Hi Simon), who then uploaded the images to master. Somewhat later, I also was involved in the early design stages of apt, and the dependency sorting algorithms. While I was fairly silent during the whole DFSG/SC debates (to the extent I was labelled a mindless follower of Bruce –heh), I took an active part in the constitution debates (possibly due to the fallout of the beach story. Anyway, I seemed to want to get us a constitution, after it had seemed stalled for months. It is interesting to note how the technical committee was initially setup, there was a proposal, and then Ian Jackson responded by saying he wanted to appoint the ctte members, since he had been around for a while and was also the DPL. The earliest data I can find is from June of ‘98, as seen in a mail later that year, when the initial list of committee members was created (I also seem to recall I was not on the list initially, but I was added in the early days, before the committee was actually formed). I was interested in the technical policy fairly early, taking a stance that policy was more than just a bunch of ignorable guidelines. Eventually, a [thread that tried to reach a compromise][other] gave us something like the views we (well, I) hold today – including what happens when packages do not follow policy, and about policy editors. And abuse of power. About this time, the policy Czar resigned, burned out, and hounded by accusations of delusion of power. So I first proposed the whole policy editor and consensus approach to letting policy evolve, which eventually led to a formal delegation recently. Brian Basset was our very first secretary. My first involvement with things that would lead on to the secretaries job started with trying to do voting for policy. Then, around 2000, our the secretary and treasurer Darren Benham went MIA, and Raul, as the chair of the technical committee, had to take over and run the DPL election for 2001 – and forgot that DPL elections are supposed to be secret ballots. Ben Collins tapped me for the secretaries position mid-2001, as I recall. It is hard, in a decade or so, to find anything I have not touched – but NM is one such area. Apart from an early pre-current-NM mail, I have not been very involved in NM. Or the Debian installer. Or Debconf. Hmm. I seem to have drifted away from things that Joey Hess is involved in, which is a pity, he is high on the list of people I respect in the project, and this lack of interaction with as time goes on irks me.