J rg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones) Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers. Check out his interview to learn more about some of the numerous ways one can get involved in Debian, managing its infrastructure and without having to be a packager. Raphael: Who are you? J rg: My name is J rg Jaspert and I m 35 years old working for a small company doing system administration and consulting work for our customers. I m married for a little while now and sometime soon a little Ganneff will be crawling out of my wife. (Whoever didn t think of the movie Alien now is just boring). Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? J rg: I started using Debian somewhere around 2000, 2001. Before that I had the misfortune to try SuSE and RedHat, both with a user experience that let me fully understand why people think Linux is unusable. (Due to my work I m in the unfortunate situation to have to use RedHat on two machines. Funny how they are still utter crap and worse than bad toys). And all of this lets get a Linux running here came up because I was trying to find a replacement for my beloved OS/2 installation, which I had for some years. So after I got Debian installed, good old Potato, I got myself active on our mailing lists, starting with the German user one. A bit later I replied to a question if someone can help as staff for a Debian booth somewhere. It was the most boring event I ever visited (very nice orga, unfortunately no visitors), but I got a few important things there:

• a signature from a DD on my key (Hi grisu),
• a discussion with an upstream author with some useful piece of software to package and
• an impression that this can be fun, if there are just some visitors for an event. So I tried again and did help as staff on a LinuxTag booth a while later.

The software I packaged, found me a sponsor and voila, maintainer I was. Some more packages got added and at some point my sponsor turned out to be my advocate. The NM process run around 2 months, and mid April 2002 I got THE MAIL. Raphael: Some Debian developers believe that you have too many responsibilities within Debian (DAM, FTPMaster, Debconf, Partners, Planet Debian, Mirrors, ). Do you agree that it can be problematic, and if yes, are you trying to scale down? J rg: It s DebConf, tssk. And yes, I do have some extra groups and roles. And you even only list some, leaving out all I do outside Debian. But simply counting number of roles is a plain stupid way to go. Way more interesting is how much work is behind a role and how many other people are involved. And looking at those you listed I don t see any I am a SPOF. Let s look at those you listed: DAM: Here I did start out assisting James to get the huge backload down which had accumulated over time. Nowadays I am merely the one with the longest term as DAM. Christoph Berg joined in April 2008 and Enrico Zini followed during October 2010, both very active. Especially Enrico, lately with the redesign of the NM webpages. FTPMaster: The basic outline of the FTPMaster history is similar to the DAM one. I joined as an assistant, after the oh-so-famous Vancouver meeting in 2004. Together with Jeroen, we both then got the backload down which had accumulated there. He did most of the removals while I had a fun time cleaning up NEW. And we both prepared patches for the codebase. And in 2007, as the last action as DPL, Sam made me FTPMaster. Since then I haven t been alone either. In fact we have much more rotation in the team than ever before, which is a good thing. Today we are 3 FTPMasters, 4 FTP Assistants and 1 Trainee. Though we always like new blood and would welcome more volunteers. DebConf: I am very far outside the central DebConf team. I am not even a delegate here. Currently I am merely an admin, though there are 4 others with the same rights on the DebConf machines. I ve not taken any extra jobs this year, nor will I. Probably for next year again, but not 2012. Planet: I am one of three again, but then Planet is mostly running itself. Debian developers can just edit the config, cron is doing the work, not much needed here. Occasional cleanups, every now and then a mail to answer, done. In short: No real workload attached. Mirrors: My main part here is the ftpsync scriptset. Which is a small part of the actual work. The majority of it, like checking mirrors, getting them to fix errors, etc. is done by Simon Paillard (and since some time, Raphael Geissert is active there too, you might have heard about his http.debian.net). Having said that, there is stuff I could have handled better or probably faster. There always is. Right now I have 2 outstanding things I want to do a (last) cleanup on and then give away. Raphael: You got married last year. I know by experience that entertaining a relationship and/or a family takes time. How do you manage to combine this with your Debian involvement? J rg: Oh well, I first met my wife at the International Conference on OpenSource 2009 in Taiwan. So OpenSource, Debian and me being some tiny wheel in the system wasn t entirely news to her. And in the time since then she learned that there is much more behind when you are in a community like Debian, instead of just doing it for work. Even better that she met Debian people multiple times already, and knows with who I am quarreling Also, she is currently attending a language school having lots of homework in the evening. Gives me time for Debian stuff. How that turns out with the baby I have no idea yet. I do want to train it to like pressing the M key, so little-Ganneff can deal with NEW all on its own (M being Manual reject), but it might take a day or twenty before it gets so far. Raphael: Thanks to the continuous work of many new volunteers, the NEW queue is no longer a bottleneck. What are the next challenges for the FTPmaster team? J rg: Bad link, try this one. Also, no longer sounds like its recent. It s not, it s just that people usually recognize the negative only and not the positive parts. Well, there are a few challenges actually. The first one, even if it sounds simple, is an ongoing one: We need Debian Developers willing to do the work that is hidden behind those simple graphs. Yes, we are currently having a great FTP Team doing a splendid work in keeping that queue reasonably small this is a/THE sisyphean task per excellence. There will always be something waiting for NEW, even if you just cleaned the queue, you turn around and there is something else back in already. Spreading this workload to more people helps not burning one out. So if one or more of the readers is interested, we always like new volunteers. You simply need to be an uploading DD and have a bit of free time. For the rest we do have training procedures in place. Another one is getting the multi-archive stuff done. The goal is to end up with ONE host for all our archives. One dak installation. But separate overrides, trees, mirrors, policies and people (think RMs, backports team, security team). While this is halfway easy to think of in terms of merging backports into main it gets an interesting side note when you think of merging security into main . The security archive does have information that is limited to few people before public release of a security announce, and so we must make sure our database isn t leaking information. Or our filesystem layer handling. Or logs. Etc. Especially as the database is synced in (near) realtime to a DD accessible machine. And the filesystem data too, just a little less often. There is also a discussion about a good way to setup a PPA for Debian service. We do have a very far developed proposal here how it should work, and I really should do the finishing touches and get it to the public. Might even get a GSoC project on it. So far for some short to middle term goals. If you want to go really long term, I do think that we should get to the point where we get rid of the classical view of a source package being one (or more) tarballs plus the Debian changes. Where a new version requires the full upload of one or more of those parts of the source package. I don t know exactly where it should end up. Sure, stuff like one central DVCS, maintainers push there, the archive generates the source tarballs and prepares the mirrors do sound good for a quick glance. But there are lots of trouble and pitfalls and probably some dragons hidden here. Raphael: The Debian repositories are managed by DAK (Debian Archive Kit) which is not packaged. Thus Debian users pick tools like reprepro to manage their package repositories. Is that how things should be? J rg: Oh, Mark Hymers wants to do a package again. More power to him if he does, though yes, DAK is not exactly a quick-and-easy thing to install. But nowadays it is a trillion times easier than the past thanks to Mark s work people can now follow the instructions, scripts and whatever they find inside the setup directory. Still, it really depends on the archive size you are managing. A complex tool like dak does not make sense for someone who wants to publish one or a dozen of his own packages somewhere. Thats just like doing a finger amputation with a chainsaw it certainly works and is fun for the one with the chainsaw but you probably end up a little overdoing it. I myself am using dpkg-scan[packages sources] from a shell script but also mini-dinstall in places (never got friend with reprepro when I looked at it). Works, and for the few dozen packages those places manage it is more than enough. Also, using dak forces you into some ways of behaviour that are just what Debian wants but might not be what a user wants. Like inability to overwrite an existing file. One of the reasons why mentors.debian.net won t work with dak. Or the use of a postgres database. Or that of gpg. Sure, if you end up having more than just a dozen packages, if you have many suites and also movement between them, then dak is sure a thing to look at. And how should things be : however the user and admins of that certain install of reprepro, mini-dinstall, dak, whatever want it. This is not one-tool-for-all land Raphael: What is the role of Debian Account Managers (DAM)? Do you believe that DAMs have a responsibility to shape Debian by defining limits in terms of who can join and what can be done within Debian? J rg: Quote from https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/10/msg00010.html:

The Debian Account Managers (DAM) are responsible for maintaining the list of members of the Debian Project, also known as Debian Developers. DAMs are authoritative in deciding who is a member of the Debian Project and can take subsequent actions such as approving and expelling Project members.

Now, aside from this quote, my OWN PERSONAL OPINION, without wearing anything even vaguely resembling a DAM hat: DAM is the one post that is entitled to decide who is a member or not. Usually that is in the way of joining (or not), which is simple enough. But every now and then this also means acting on a request to do something about whatever behaviour of a Debian Project member. I hate that (and i think one can easily replace I with WE there). But it s our job. We usually aren t quick about it. And we don t act on our own initiative when we do, we always have (numerous) other DDs complain/appeal/talk/whatever to us first. The expulsion procedure , luckily not invoked that often, does guarantee a slow process and lots of input from others. Are we the best for it? Probably not, we are just some people out of a thousand who happen to have a very similar hobby Debian. We aren t trained in dealing with the situations that can come up. But we are THE role inside Debian that is empowered to make such decisions, so naturally it ends up with us. Raphael: You did a lot of things for Debian over the years. What did bring you the most joy? Are there things that you re still bitter about? J rg: The most joy? Hrm, without being involved in Debian and SPI I would never have met my wife.
Or my current job. Or a GR against me. Not many running around with that badge, though I m still missing my own personal Serious problems with Mr. Jaspert thread. Bad you all.
Or visited so many places. Think of all the DebConfs, QA meetings, BSPs and whatever events.
Or met so many people.
Or learned so many things I would never even have come near without being DD. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? J rg: Yes.

---

Thank you to J rg for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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Since I m soliciting donations to support my Debian work, the least I can do is explain what I do. You can thus expect to see an article like this one every month. Multi-Arch work I updated the code to use another layout for the control files stored in /var/lib/dpkg/info/. Instead of using a sub-directory per architecture (arch/package.type), we decided to use package:arch.type but only for packages which are Multi-Arch: same. dpkg is taking care to rename the files the first time it is executed with write rights and then updates /var/lib/dpkg/info/format to remember that the upgrade has been done and that we can rely on the new structure. I filed a few bugs on packages that are improperly accessing those internal files instead of using the appropriate dpkg-query interface. I sent a heads-up mail on -devel to make other people aware of those problems in the hope to discover most of them as early as possible. After that, the work stalled because Guillem went away for 2 weeks and thus stopped his review of my work. I hope he will quickly resume the review and that we will get something final this month. With the arrival of dpkg 1.16.0, it s now possible to start converting libraries to multi-arch even if full multi-arch support has not yet landed in dpkg proper. See http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Bootstrapping for the detailed plan. If you re curious about Multi-Arch, you might want to read this article of Steve Langasek as well. Bug triage for dpkg in launchpad At the start of the month, there was close to 500 bugs reported against the dpkg package in Launchpad. Unfortunately most of it is noise many of the reported bugs are misfiled, they show an upgrade problem of a random package and that upgrade problem confuses update-manager which tries to configure an already configured package. This generates a second error that apport attributes to dpkg and the resulting bug report is thus filed on dpkg. There are literally hundreds of those that have to be reclassified. Michael Vogt and Brian Murray did some triaging, and I also spend quite some hours on this task. It s a bit frustrating as I tend to mark many reports Incomplete because there s no way they can be acted upon and many of them are so old that the reporter is unlikely to be able to provide supplementary information. But in the middle of this noise, there are some useful bug reports, like LP#739179 which enabled me to fix a regression even before it reached Debian Unstable (because Ubuntu runs a snapshot of dpkg with multiarch support). I subscribed to the Launchpad bugs for dpkg via the Debian Package Tracking System (thanks to the derivatives-bugs keyword) and will try to keep up with the incoming reports. Misc dpkg work The ftpmasters came up with a request for a new field (see 619131) in source packages. After a quick discussion and a round of review on debian-policy@l.d.o, I implemented the new Package-List field. This should allow the ftpmasters to save some time in NEW processing, but we deferred the change for the next dpkg version (1.16.1) to ponder a bit more on the design of the field. I also fixed a bunch of bugs (#619541, #605719, #598922, #616096) and merged a patch of Mark Hymers to recognize the new Built-Using field. Developers-reference work The review process for changes to the developers-reference is not working as it should. And I suffered from it while trying to integrate the patch I wrote for the Developer duties chapter (see #548867). We purposely changed the maintainer field from debian-doc to debian-policy in the hope to have more reviews of suggested changes and to seek some sort of consensus before committing anything. But we don t get more reviews and deciding to commit a patch is now even harder than it was (except for trivial stuff where personal opinions can t interfere). In my case, I only got the feedback of Charles Plessy which was very mixed to say the least. I tried to improve my patch based on what he expressed but I also clearly disagreed with some of his assertions and was convinced that my wording was in line with the dominant point of view within Debian. We tried to involve the release team in the discussion because most of what I documented was about helping making stable release happen, but nobody of the team answered. Instead of letting the situation (and my patch) rot, I solicited feedback from the DPL and from another developers-reference editor to see whether my patch was an improvement or not. After some more time, I went ahead and committed it. It was not pleasant for anyone. I don t know how we can improve this. Contrary to the policy, the developers-reference is a document that is not normative, I believe the result is better when we put some soul into it. But it s a real challenge when you seek a consensus and that the interest in reviewing changes is so low. DVD shop listed on debian.org In February, I launched a DVD shop whose benefits are used to fund my Debian work. Shortly after the launch I used the official form to be added to the official listing of Debian CD vendors and offered a few suggestions to deal with vendors who are selling unofficial images (with firmware in my case). A few weeks later, I got no answers: neither for my request nor for my suggestions, I mailed the cdvendors@debian.org team directly asking for a status update and quickly got an answer suggesting that Simon Paillard usually does the work and can t process the backlog due to some injury. At this point no concerns had been raised about adding me to the list. To save some time and some work for the team, I added myself to the list since I had commit rights and I informed them that I did it, so that they can review it. Shortly after I did that, Martin Zobel Helas objected to my addition. I cleared some misunderstandings but the discussion also lead to some changes to please everybody: the listing now indicates that some images are unofficial and I have prepared a special landing page for people coming from the Debian website through this listing. Debian column on OMG! Ubuntu I have always been a firm believer that it s important for Debian to reach out to the widest public with its message of freedom. Thus when Benjamin Humphrey contacted the debian-publicity team to find volunteers to write a Debian column on OMG! Ubuntu, I immediately jumped in. I wrote 4 articles over there. The tone is very different from my articles on my blog and I like that duality. Check out Debian is dying! Oh my word!, Debian or Ubuntu, which is the best place to contribute?, Are you contributing your share? and Ubuntu s CTO reveals DEX: an effort to close the gap with Debian. It s a great win-win situation, OMG! Ubuntu benefits from my articles, Debian s values are relayed further, and OMG! Ubuntu s large audience also helps me develop my own blog. Work on my book I had lots of paperwork to do this month (annual accounting stuff for my company) and I did not have as much time as I hoped for my book. Still I have a updated a few more chapters of my French book and I certainly hope to complete the update during April. This means that the work on the English translation could start in may. Work on my blog Just like for my book, it has been relatively difficult for me to cope with my policy of two articles every week. But I still managed to get quite some good stuff out. I interviewed Christian Perrier (Debian s translation coordinator) and also Bdale Garbee (chair of Debian s technical committee). I finished my series of Debian Cleanup Tips with 2 supplementary articles:

• Identify cruft that can be removed from your Debian system
• Remove automatically installed packages

The removal of firmware is causing troubles to quite some users so I wrote an article explaining how to deal with the problem. A regular reader also asked me to write an article about Jigdo, I executed myself because it was a good idea and that he has been very nice with me: Download ISO images of Debian CD/DVD at light speed with Jigdo. Last but not least, I shared my package maintainer pledge which inspired my developers-reference patch (see discussion above). Thanks Many thanks to all the people who showed their appreciation of my work. The 324.37 EUR that you gave me in February represented 2 days and a half of my time that I have spent working on the above projects. See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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This blog post is actually a response to a talk that was given at the debconf last week. It was marga's talk about Making Debian Rule, again. Now that the beta versions of the talks are available for download I'm able to proper quote what I want to respond to: Is there a reason why we haven't yet updated the website?, perhaps someone can answer. I feel the need to respond to this as I am the main person driving that effort. Unfortunately the question was asked in a talk with no-one involved in that work around instead of addressing those people directly, and the question wasn't brought to my attention before the talk so that I could have provided an answer to offer in the presentation already. Also, as disclaimer, this is my personal story for it and doesn't need to get shared by the other people involved. I hope it can be seen as an answer anyway. As a little of background, Kalle's proposal went a long path before even I found out about it. I was simply in awe in several ways about it because it wasn't just a great mockup of the page (which it actually is, IMHO) but was accompanied by thoughts about not only the main site but also about several sub sites. Also, it was accompanied by patches, so it was seemingly ready to get deployed right ahead. I started working on it, got accused of being discouraging while doing that, got told that it would require a proper vote for a decision and can't happen just as, but those are just the Debian way of communication. I nevertheless did set up several test sites for some over the time to play with it. Some did work out better (like the git one, though this one came last and Kalle improved the CSS over time a fair bit), some weren't ready yet (like wiki, missing e.g. the coloring for the version diff, or the packages one where the separation between the different sections isn't that visible yet). Time passed, other things demanded their attention too. Like the thing where our system administrators did send me a request along about a new www-master server that needs to get set up from scratch. Given that the documentation about the required packages for the website was lacking a fair bit (to say the least) it did require a lot of attention, especially when doing things from scratch the wish to document the dependencies properly is just natural. There are still some issues with that as can e.g. be seen on this page in the empty table at the bottom. The same issue also appears on my testsite for the new design. The last part though is currently the biggest blocking issue for both efforts. There is no way to move forward with either without having that addressed. Simon Paillard did a great job on helping the move along so far, keeping the thread about the server move requirements that I started on the debian-www mailinglist updated with information about what's still pending. Unfortunately Kalle, Simon and me are also facing some private time constraints (amongst other duties that require attention) which weren't helping to move forward at a bigger pace. Unfortunately not very many people actually has shown interest in helping out neither, after all it's easier to go and ask questions about why it's not done yet to the completely wrong audience. My plan is to switch many sites at the same time instead of one after the other simply for the effect but also for less distraction for our users, including less people repeatedly pestering about when this or that site gets done, too. At least we need a final discussion on what should go into the header links and what should be at the bottom before a switch can be made anyway. And for some there is still the opinion that such a switch is nothing that we are rightfully allowed to decide without a vote, so that's also part of the reason to not just deploy it. I hope this answers the question to some extend and like said, if only I would had been addressed about this before the talk was given an answer to it would had been ready for presentation right ahead instead of having a pretty terse statement getting relayed through IRC (thanks, Yoe!) because I was fortunate enough to be around and watching the talk at that time. Feel free to discuss it further or offer your help on debian-www, especially if you are familiar with working on CSS files.

/debian permanent link Comments: 3