Raphaël Hertzog: People behind Debian: Mehdi Dogguy, release assistant
Debian Release Team. His story is quite typical in that he started there by trying to help while observing the team do its work. That s a recurrent pattern for people who get co-opted in free software teams.
Read on for more info about the release team, and Mehdi s opinion on many topics. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Mehdi (except for the additional information that I inserted in italics).
Who are you?
I m 27 years old. I grew up in Ariana in northern Tunisia, but have been living in Paris, France, since 2002.
I m a PhD Student at the PPS laboratory where I study synchronous concurrent process calculi.
I became interested in Debian when I saw one of my colleagues, Samuel Mimram (first sponsor and advocate) trying to resolve #440469, which is a bug reported against a program I wrote. We have never been able to resolve it but my intent to contribute was born there. Since then, I started to maintain some packages and help where I can.
What s your biggest achievement within Debian?
I don t think I had time to accomplish a lot yet I ve been mostly active in the OCaml team where we designed a tool to compute automatically the dependencies between OCaml packages, called dh-ocaml. This was a joint work with St phane Glondu, Sylvain Le Gall and Stefano Zacchiroli. I really appreciated the time spent with them while developing dh-ocaml. Some of the bits included in dh-ocaml have been included upstream in their latest release.
I ve also tried to give a second life to the Buildd Status Pages because they were (kind of) abandoned. I intend to keep them alive and add new features to them.
If you had a wand and could change one thing in Debian, what would that be?
Make OCaml part of a default Debian installation
But, since I m not a magician yet, I d stick to more realistic plans:
Thank you to Mehdi for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.
Mehdi is a Debian developer for a bit more than a year, and he s already part of the - A lot of desktop users fear Debian. I think that the Desktop installation offered by Debian today is very user-friendly and we should be able to attract more and more desktop users. Still, there is some work to be done in various places to make it even more attractive. The idea is trying to enhance the usability and integration of various tools together. Each fix could be easy or trivial but the final result would be an improved Desktop experience for our users. Our packaged software run well. So, each person can participate since the most difficult part is to find the broken scenarios. Fixes could be found together with maintainers, upstream or other interested people.
I ll try to come up with a plan, a list of things that need polishing or fixes and gather a group of people to work on it. I d definitely be interested in participating in such a project and I hope that I ll find other people to help. If the plan is clear enough and has well described objectives and criteria, it could be proposed to the Release Team to consider it as a Release Goal for Wheezy. - NMUs are a great way to make things move forward. But, sometimes, an NMU could break things or have some undesirable effects. For now, NMUers have to manually track the package s status for some time to be sure that everything is alright. It could be a good idea to be auto-subscribed to the bugs notifications of NMUed packages for some period of time (let s say for a month) to be aware of any new issues and try to fix them. NMUing a package is not just applying a patch and hitting enter after dput. It s also about making sure that the changes are correct and that no regressions have been introduced, etc
- Orphaned packages: It could be considered as too strict and not desired, but what about not keeping orphaned and buggy packages in Testing? What about removing them from the archive if they are buggy and still unmaintained for some period? Our ftp archive is growing. It could make sense to do some (more strict) housekeeping. I believe that this question can be raised during the next QA meeting. We should think about what we want to do with those packages before they rot in the archive.
- Taking care of transitions during the development cycle, which means making sure that some set of packages are correctly (re-)built or fixed against a specific (to each transition) set of packages, and finding a way to tell Britney that those packages can migrate and it would be great if she also shared the same opinion. [Raphael Hertzog: britney is the name of the software that controls the content of the Testing distribution.]
- Paying attention to what is happening in the archive (uploads, reported RC bugs, etc ). The idea is to try to detect unexpected transitions, blocked packages, make sure that RC bug fixes reach Testing in a reasonable period of time, etc
- During a freeze, making sure that unblock requests and freeze exceptions are not forgotten and try to make the RC bug count decrease.
Thank you to Mehdi for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.
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