As we're doing trends today, I got curious about Debian. I don't particularly care about popularity contests other than popcon, and Debian choices surely aren't driven by them. But hey, curiosity is curiosity, right? So, here are today's w3techs trends for websites using GNU/Linux, with all lines shown: (As thou shall always read methodologies before stats, here is the technologies overview page.) Debian is the top entrant with 30% of the websites using GNU/Linux. What I find interesting is that Debian has jumped at first place in January 2012, significantly after the release of our current stable release, Squeeze, that dates back to February 2011. It is also interesting to see community distros (Debian and CentOS) starkly ahead of commercially backed distros. That is what I find most fascinating about our projects. Whether that will remain the case or not is, for me, one of the big questions of the decade for the self-determination of Free Software communities.

The statistics of the "who wrote Linux x.y.z" series date back to at least 2.6.20. According to my experience talking with users and Free Software enthusiasts, those statistics really make a dent in the public perception of who is giving back upstream. Obviously, one should not take a single upstream, even if it is as important as the Linux kernel, as a measure of how much a given Free Software entity is giving back upstream overall. But users still seem to be fascinated by them. As a result, I have often had to answer the question: why Debian doesn't show up on those statistics?. My answer has always been something along the lines that Debian Developers who maintain Linux kernel packages, the almighty Debian Kernel Team, do that mostly as part of their volunteer engagement in Debian. As a consequence, they do not earmark their contributions as if they worked for a company and they add up to the hobbyist count instead (although you can you can routinely spot individual Debian Kernel Team members among the most active contributors for specific Linux releases). The above is the true and honest answer. But every time I've given it, I couldn't help feeling that the user who asked went home with a "yeah, well" afterthought. If you don't want to take my word of it, fine. Here is what Greg K-H had to say about Debian contributions in a recent blog post about the stable Linux kernel:

I would personally like to thank the Debian kernel developers, specifically Ben Hutchings, Maximilian Attems, Dann Frazier, Bastian Blank, and Moritz Muehlenhoff. They went above and beyond what any "normal" developer would have done, ferreting patches out of the kernel.org releases and the different vendor kernels and bug tracking systems, backporting them to the 2.6.32 kernel, testing, and then forwarding them on to me. Their dedication to their user community is amazing for such a "volunteer" group of developers. I firmly believe that without their help, the 2.6.32 kernel would not have been the success that it was. The users of Red Hat and SuSE products owe them a great debt. Buy them a beer the next time you see them, they more than deserve it.

I'll take good care of following his wise advice. Please do the same.

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(Thanks to Sylvestre for pointing me to Greg's blog post.)

I followed Gregor s evolution within Debian because I used to be somewhat active in the Perl team. His case is exemplar because it shows that you don t need to be an IT professional to join Debian and to make a difference. His QA page is impressive with hundreds of packages maintained and hundreds of non-maintainer uploads too. While he started out slowly, I remember meeting him at Debconf 7 in Edinburgh and after that he really got more implicated. Again a case of someone joining for technical reasons but getting more involved and staying there for social reasons! Let s jump into the interview and learn more about him. Raphael: Who are you? Gregor: I m 41 years old, and I live in Innsbruck, Austria, in a shared apartment with a friend of mine. In my day job, I m working at the regional addiction prevention agency, so I m one of the few Debian guys who s not an IT student or professional. I started maintaining packages in 2006, and I am a DD since April 2008. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Gregor: After having used Debian on servers for some years, I finally switched to it on the desktop after some procrastinating. Soon afterwards I wanted to know more about the making-of , started to join mailing lists, filed bugs, and tried to learn packaging. Luckily I quickly found a permanent sponsor Tony Mancill, and we re still co-maintaining each others packages. And when I packaged my first Perl modules, Gunnar Wolf invited me to join the Debian Perl Group, an offer I accepted a few days later. And I m still there Later, the NM process, although it involved some waiting times, was also a good learning experience due to my AM Wouter Verhelst. (And in the meantime the organization of the NM process has vastly improved, from what I hear.) So my starting point for joining Debian was my curiosity but what really helped me to find my way into the project was the support of the people who invited and helped me. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu? Gregor: I m not sure I can name a single big achievement but I guess I can say that my contributions to the Debian Perl Group have helped to make and keep the team a success story. Raphael: The pkg-perl team seems to work very well. As an active member, can you explain us how it is organized? How do you explain its success? In particular it seems to be a great entry point for new contributors. Gregor: The team is huge, both in numbers of members and packages (over 2200). Since last DebConf we manage our source packages in git, we have 2 mailing lists and an IRC channel, and we manage to keep an overview by using PET, the Package Entropy Tracker. It s true that we get new members on a regular basis; we try to invite people (like it happened to me 6 years ago ) but there are also quite a few new contributors who find our docs and introduce themselves on the mailing list. Maybe someone should conduct a study and ask them what motivated them to join. We hand out group membership/commit access quickly, and we try to mentor new contributors actively during their early times in the group. Some of them leave for other projects after some time, but many also stay and become DDs later. I m not sure what the reasons for the group s success are, maybe a combination of:

• a culture in the group (and also in the upstream Perl community) that s based on fun, cooperation, and respect;
• the fact that packaging Perl modules is most of the time quite easy;
• a great set of tools, and also (hopefully) useful documentation;
• a bunch of relaxed people who are open to newcomers and try to help each other.

For everyone interested in joining the Debian Perl Group, our Welcome page on the wiki is a good starting point. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Nothing overly exciting. What I should do is getting a newer JabRef into Debian (which involves packaging some new Java libraries any takers?). A solution for libdatetime-timezone-perl (which ships timezone data converted to Perl modules and tends to get outdated when the timezone data change) would be nice; let s see if #660404 leads to some results And some Perl packages will also need a bit of work for the hardening build flags release goal (cf. #657853). Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Gregor: Inertia. While I really like the fact that Debian is a volunteer project, and that every contributor works when and on what they decide to work on, I get the feeling that Debian could do better in moving forward, innovating, taking decisions. I also think that more uniformity in managing source packages would make things easier; it s quite amazing to see how many source formats, packaging helpers, patch systems, RCSs etc. are used all over the archive. I m not advocating for mono-cultures, and I consider this diversity a strength in general, but having to find out first how this particular package works when preparing a bug fix can be annoying. On the bright side, I think that the myth Debian and its mailing lists are mostly about flames can be seen as dispelled in the meantime. Sure, sometimes the tone could be a bit more civil, but in general most of the interactions I ve seen in the last years were friendly and helpful. IMO, the Debian Project consists of mostly nice and cooperative people, and that s what makes it fun for me. Raphael: You re one of the most dedicated participants to RCBW (Release Critical Bugs of the Week), an initiative to fix RC bugs every week. How much time do you spend on it? What would you advise to people who are considering to join the movement? Gregor: I got into the habit of fixing RC bugs after having been invited to my first Bug Squashing Party in Munich some years ago. During this weekend I saw that fixing RC bugs can be fun, is often not that difficult, and gives a warm fuzzy feeling I can definitely recommend attending a BSP if one happens to be organized near you. After tasting blood at this first BSP I tried to continue looking at RC bugs, and I guess I spend something around half an hour per day on it. I usually blog about it once a week, in order to motivate others to join in. And joining is easy: just take a look at the tips people like Zack, Vorlon, or me have written. You don t have to be a DD to help, many of my NMUs are based on patches that others kindly prepare and send to the BTS kudos! Another nice aspect is that the RC bug list contains problems from different fields: general packaging problems, language-specific issues, policy violations, etc. So there s something for everybody, and you don t have to be an expert in all fields to fix a specific bug. What s rewarding about fixing RC bugs is not only the feeling of accomplishment and the knowledge about having helped the next release I also received quite a few Thank you mails from maintainers who were busy at that time and appreciated the help. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Well, there s not so much left of the Wheezy release cycle if we manage to freeze in June Some quick thoughts for Wheezy and Wheezy+1:

• Obviously, getting multi-arch and the hardening build flags as far as possible would be good.
• What I like is the idea of the time-based freeze, and I hope it will work out in June. And then I hope that the freeze will be shorter this time than during the last 2 releases.
• Unless I m missing something, the CUT discussions have more or less died down; IMO that s a pity because there are users who run testing and would like to avoid the several month long freeze. Maybe someone can come up with new ideas for Wheezy+1
• Too late for broad adoption in Wheezy but still: What constantly annoys me is the handling of conffiles during upgrades (when I want to keep changed values but at the same time want to add new variables). Config::Model seems to be the best idea so far for configuration upgrades but it s not yet widely adopted.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Gregor: There are many people in Debian I admire, too many to name them all. The first one that comes to my mind is Russ Allbery who not only does great work from lintian to Debian policy but who also sets a great example of communicating in a perfectly polite and respectful way even in heated discussions.

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Thank you to Gregor 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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as usual, here's my RCBW report. like in the last weeks, a mixture of NMUs and mails to the BTS, grabbing and writing patches, ...

• #616108 pidgin-facebookchat: "pidgin-facebookchat: Authentication Failure - You are not permitted to do that"
  prepare an NMU, ask for test
• #642449 python-hippocanvas: "python-hippocanvas: doesn't depend on python"
  run dh_python2 explicitly in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #642459 src:pylibssh2: "pylibssh2: missing dependency on python (after rebuild)"
  add missing build dependency, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643138 src:gnu-fdisk: "gnu-fdisk: FTBFS: dpkg-buildpackage: error: dpkg-source -b gnu-fdisk-1.2.4 gave error exit status 2"
  use autotools-dev helpers for handling config. guess,sub , upload to DELAYED/2
• #643180 src:libapache2-mod-auth-openid: "libapache2-mod-auth-openid: FTBFS: dpkg-buildpackage: error: dpkg-source -b libapache2-mod-auth-openid-0.5 gave error exit status 2"
  drop autogenerated patch, upload to DELAYED/2
• #644010 python-hippocanvas: "python-hippocanvas: Needs to be rebuilt against Python 2.7"
  fixed together with #642449
• #649463 libpam-rsa: "libpam-rsa: code to hash hostname and username is broken"
  send a patch to the BTS
• #651865 python-gnutls: "python-gnutls: gnutls.library.functions fails with libgnutls28-3.0.8-2"
  add a patch taken from upstream, upload to DELAYED/2
• #658577 libevocosm-dev: "-dev library is broken"
  send debdiff with patch from Vincent Legout to BTS; but it FTBFS (cf. #661500)
• #660032 libjs-dojo-core: "libjs-dojo: Does not build using new 1.7.1 release"
  suggest to lower severity, later done by RT, then closed in maintainer upload
• #661500 src:libevocosm: "FTBFS: dpkg-source: error: aborting due to unexpected upstream changes"
  file new FTBFS bug, add a patch
• #661621 get-flash-videos: "FTBFS"
  upload new package prepared by Juli n Moreno Pati o (pkg-perl)
• #661800 libfile-libmagic-perl: "libfile-libmagic-perl: FTBFS"
  add patch to deal with file 5.10 (pkg-perl)

Released a few hours ago, here is the monthly report of DPL activities for February 2012.

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Howdy, dear Project Members,
here's another round of updates about what has happened in DPL land, this time during February 2012. Highlights Quit a bit of highlights for this month:

• The first item is not pleasant but important. Early February I've submitted to the attention of the Technical Committee the upload of multi-arch enabled dpkg to the archive. The Technical Committee quickly reached a decision. Shortly afterwards an upload to experimental has happened and discussions on -devel ensued. Please help out with testing.
• Thanks to IBM and OSUOSL we have some new fairly capable (virtual) machines for powerpc* ports. See the announcement for more info. In particular, please note the call for powerpc64 porters. If you're interested in contributing to such a port, please get in touch with DSA.
• Google Summer of Code project is up again. As usual, it is a good chance to get some work done and, more importantly, to let students who are passionate about Free Software discover Debian. I've delegated the task of GSoC admins --- thanks Ana, Gergely, and Sukhbir! A call for project proposals has already been sent out; there isn't much time left, so please hurry up and drop your ideas to the wiki page and contact the soc-coordination mailing list.
• A couple of important discussions have been going on on -project. The first is the old "trademark vs DFSG" discussion. I've posted there results from legal advice that I've sought on the matter, based on your suggestions. Then, I've posted a proposal on how to deal with trademarks issues in the archive.
• The second discussion is about Debian affiliation with OSI. We've been approached by OSI about that, as I've summarized on -project. Helped by the feedback received, I've decided to go ahead with affiliation and I'm now discussing with OSI representative the next steps.
• The long running work on software patent issues in the archive has been concluded publishing a policy on the matter. We now have a contact point and legal advice with whom we can discuss specific issues if/when they arise; hopefully that would help us to discriminate actual issues in the archive (if any) from the vast amount of FUD in the area.

Talks, interviews, and the like

• Following up Debian related talks at FOSDEM, I've been interviewed, together with Lars Wirzenius and Wookey, for The Register.
• I've took part at a FOSDEM panel session on comparing the organization of local user groups, ambassadors, and the like. We've mostly to learn from others in this area, but I've took the change to summarize what we currently have in a slide deck.

Sprints Plenty of sprints related news!

• DSA and the Groupware team will be holding sprints later on in March, while DAM / FrontDesk are having one right now co-located with the BSP in Moenchengladbach
• the video team sent out a report for their sprint back in November
• debbugs (AKA bugs.debian.org) hackers are organizing a sprint to get people interested in contributing to the code base up to speed. If you're, drop a line in the thread

It would be amazing to have an average of one sprint per month for 2012, and we're on good track for it. If you want to help, organize one for your team as documented on the wiki. Legal stuff

• Thanks to SPI, we've established contacts with the owners of debian.eu, domain we believe we legitimately own. As a first step they've set up HTTP redirection from debian.eu to debian.org (instead of a computer hardware shop, as it was before) and we're now discussing actual transfer of domain ownership to a Debian Trusted Organization.
• We've contacted the Japanese trademark office to transfer the "debian" trademark there to SPI. Thanks to the previous owners (all Debian developers or contributors) for agreeing to the move. Now "only" a nasty pile of paperwork remains to be done.

Appointments In addition to the GSoC admins delegation (see above), I've agreed with former secretary Kurt Roeckx to reappoint him as a secretary for another year. Many thanks, Kurt! Miscellaneous

• We have been invited to attend the OpenStack summit in April and have a presence there, free of charge. Loic Dachary, active member of the OpenStack packaging team in Debian, has agreed to go and represent Debian there. Thanks a lot to Stefano Maffulli for the invitation and to Loic for his availability!
• We are in the process of joining as a project, instead of relying on individual maintainers as in the past the ISC forum to get access to embargoed vulnerability information for important pieces of software such as BIND and DHCP. They've kindly offered us membership free of charge. I've submitted a draft of the membership agreement to SPI and I'm waiting for their decision.
• Steady progress on the front of periodic budget reports, thanks to the work of Martin Michlmayr. We've discussed at length during FOSDEM and agreed on procedures to query the state of Debian finances that work for both auditors and the DPL. Martin has also set up a shared ledger repository and already checked in into it a lot of money transactions for the past few years not from all trusted organizations yet, though. Have faith, we'll get there

Happy Debian hacking.

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PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

At FOSDEM, John Sullivan delivered an interesting talk titled Is copyleft being framed? to verify alleged claims on the decline of GPL-d software. (Slides are available.) The crux of the talk is the analysis he performed on the Debian archive to discover the amount of software we distribute that is covered by GPL, LGPL, or AGPL ("GPL-d" for short in the remainder). John's talk steps in an interesting and long running debate (a recent summary of which is available in this ITWire article). The most interesting part is the discrepancy among John's results and Blackduck's, which are often used to argue how the popularity of the GPL license is declining. That might be the case. Or not. The more analyses we do to find it out, the better. The underlying assumption on John's work is that Debian is a representative sample of the Free Software out there, which I think is a reasonable assumption. I find the analysis presented in the talk completely satisfactorily from a purely scientific point of view. The same cannot be said about Blackduck's result: both their methods and data are secret, making it impossible to reproduce their experiments. Highly unscientific. Still, John's results are surprising: as much as 87 percent of Lenny's packages and 93 percent of Squeeze's are GPL-d. That seems a lot. Puzzled about that, John discussed with me the issue before his talk, in search for pitfalls in his methods or data. Finding none, I pointed him to the almighty DktrKranz for some extra review; who found nothing either. To stay on the safe side, even during his talk John called for independent reviews of his results. What could be wrong? The tool used to gather the data is license-count from the debian-policy package. Input data are the debian/copyright files of all Debian source packages. If license-count is not bugged, our debian/copyright files might be. One thing that occurred to me only a few days ago is the habit of declaring a different license for Debian packaging (the files under debian/) than the software being packaged itself. That's a bad habit because it might cause unwanted license mixtures via patches that live under debian/ but I've seen several occurrences of it in the Debian archive. For name and (self-)shame: I've also been guilty of it in the past, when I was young . Is that reason enough to skew results and overestimate GPL-d software? I don't think so, I hope not, but ultimately I don't know. It'd be nice to rule out the possibility entirely. So if anyone is willing to do some sampling of affected debian/copyright files and propose patches for license-count to exclude those "false positives", please shout. (As a bonus point: that would also help to take more sound decision for the typical use case of license-count, i.e. deciding when a license should be added to /usr/share/common-licenses.) Other independent reviews of the results are equally welcome. Note: the above, as well as John's analysis, would be a trivial exercise if DEP-5 were already widely deployed in the Debian archive.

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Update: add link to John's slides
Update 19/02/2012: Russ Allbery, author of license-count, posted a way more likely cause of data skew in John's analysis: double counting among the different types of copyleft licenses

My mutt-notmuch hack seems to be a quite popular way to integrate Mutt with notmuch. As a nice consequence, my (indexed!) inbox attracts patches from mutt-notmuch users eager to improve it. Collecting some of them, I've just tagged mutt-notmuch 0.2 with the following changes:

• readline support and query history
• support for spaces in mailboxes (use case: gmail+offlineimap)
• a new "tag" action
• normalization of =names to support mutt macros that pass folder names
• do not treat +opt as a valid cmdline option (to ease tagging)

Many thanks to Scott Barker, Christine Spang, David Newgas, and Ryan Kavanagh for the above patches. While I was at it, I've also moved mutt-notmuch repository to Gitorious. Git self-hosting is nice, but either you move to something like gitolite (which I didn't have time to setup and tune ATM) or you're stuck without merge requests which are quite nice. (Why not Github? Because.) If you're using mutt-notmuch you might also be interested in the discussion of libnotmuch support in mutt. I'd love to see that landing in mutt and be able to throw away mutt-notmuch entirely, but that seems a bit premature as of yet.

Fresh from the oven, monthly report of what I've been working on as DPL during January 2012.

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Dear Developers,
here is another monthly report of what happened in DPL-land, this time for January 2012. There's quite a bit to report about --- including an insane amount of legal-ish stuff --- so please bear with me. Or not. Legal stuff

• Webmaster heroes have decided to tackle the long standing issues of copyright and licensing of the Debian website. I've accepted to help them out in reaching consensus with license choice and I'm happy to report that we've managed to pick a DFSG-free license (BSD-ish) for future contributions. Webmasters will soon contact contributors to re-license old contributions (or get rid of them), so hopefully will have a DFSG-free website RSN. Many thanks go to David Pr vot for successfully tackling such a can of worms.
• I've sought a second legal advice on the constraints that trademarks (might) impose on the work-flow of a distro like Debian. Luckily, it is coherent with one I've sought in the past so I'm now in condition to wrap up the "trademark vs DFSG" thread on -project with the missing legal information. Hopefully, I'll find time to do that sometime next week.
• I've restarted discussions with the Debian France association so that they can become a Debian Trusted Organization (as per Constitution 9.3). Members of the board of the association seem to be interested and I'm positive it could happen fairly soon. The importance of this is that we could use a back-up association in Europe to hold Debian assets, to complement the services that FFIS are already offering us.
• Thanks to the contributions of Benjamin Mako Hill and SPI lawyers, I've now what I consider a final draft of a trademark policy for Debian trademarks. Before proposing it to you, I'm waiting for some feedback from another umbrella organization for Free Software projects, that is working on a trademark policy for all their associated projects. As many Free Software projects are seeking trademark protection these days, I see benefits in having uniform (and sane!) policies. I hope to be able to gather the feedback I still miss this week-end at FOSDEM, and let you know shortly after that. Once this is done, we'll also be able to (finally!) relicense all kinds of Debian logos under a DFSG-free license. On this front, I've also updated http://www.debian.org/trademark with the information needed to contact us about trademark usage; hopefully it'll reduce the burden of answering to such inquiries.
• With the help of Kenshi Muto, Fumitoshi Ukai, Ishikawa Mutsumi, Shuzo Hatta, and Yasuhiro Araki we've started the process to move the Debian trademark in Japan from individuals (who are present or past members of the Debian JP association) to SPI. That would help dealing with these matters, as well as ensure that important Debian assets are held by Debian Trusted Organizations.
• I remind you that we've an ongoing complaint with the current registrant of debian.eu, domain that we believe Debian should legitimately own. Lawyers at SPI has now formally contacted the current owner and hopefully we'll be able to solve the issue amicably in the next months.
• Some of the past legal advice I sought for PPA came handy in a discussion on the legal risks of running a service like mentors.debian.net, hopefully addressing part of the issues in turning that into mentors.debian.org
• Patent policy for the Debian archive is now ready as well and I also have a patch for the website ready to be merged. I'm just waiting for the final blessing from SPI (lawyers) to go ahead and publish it.

Most of the above wouldn't have been possible without the precious help of folks at SFLC working for SPI and Debian. Be sure to thank SFLC for what they're doing for us and many other Free Software projects. Coordination Nobody stepped up to coordinate the artwork collection for Wheezy I've mentioned last month, so I've tried to do a little bit of that myself. The -publicity team is now preparing the call for artwork and hopefully we'll send it out RSN. In case you want to help, there is still a lot of room for that; just show up on the debian-desktop mailing list. Sprints A Debian Med sprint has happened in January, and Andreas Tille has provided a nice and detailed report about it. Some more sprints are forthcoming this spring, how about yours? Money

• We got from SPI a prepaid and rechargeable credit card that we can use for expenses or other kind of guarantees. Many thanks to Michael Schulteiss, SPI treasurer, for his help with that. Using it, we've redeemed 10k$ of credits offered to us by Amazon, that (thanks to ongoing work by Lucas Nussbaum) we're going to use to make our QA rebuilds independent from the underlying computing infrastructure.
• Thanks to the help of Luca Capello, we advanced quite a bit on forming the Debian Event Box kit that should make it easier to set up Debian booth at FOSS events. We bought the machine for it (for about ~755 CHF) and the box to contain it will soon be on its way as well. If you're at FOSDEM, tend to the Debian booth to check it out (and possibly help out with the technical setup).
• We've got quite a bit of donations during the December holidays. I've took the chance to thank donors, discuss what we do with donations and the status of publishing periodic Debian budgets.
• Pinged by Yves-Alexis Perez, I've now properly documented the fact that DDs are welcome to apply for hardware sponsoring, in case the hardware can be used to help/improve their Debian work. As suggested by Yves-Alexis, you can also advocate other DDs for hw sponsoring.
• Given hardware invariably age and that we can afford it, I've prodded DSA to prepare a general hardware replacement plan for our machines. Planning will go on this week-end and FOSDEM (thanks to Martin Zobel-Helas and Faidon Liambotis for their presence here) and I hope to have an approved machine replacement plan well before the end of the current DPL term (although I'm usually optimist...).

Important stuff going on Other important stuff has been going on in various area of the project in January. I'd like to point your attention to a couple of things:

• People active on debian-mentors have proposed an improved work-flow to deal with sponsoring/mentoring requests, based on the usage of a new pseudo package "sponsorship-requests". Thanks to Ansgar Burchardt, Jakub Wilk, Arno T ll, and Gregor Herrmann for working on this.
• Raphael Hertzog has kickstarted work on DEP-2, as a way to rationalize the flow of package-related information that (co-)maintainers get. Discussion about the idea are ongoing on the debian-qa mailing list.

Miscellanea

• Work has further progressed in reaching out to companies with an interest in giving support for, and contributing to Debian. Thanks to Alexander Wirt the technical work is now done and some sort of governance policy has been decided. Further step for me is to announce it properly hoping to reach out to as many interested companies as possible. I hope to finalize that in the next month. (If you're working for such a company and you happen to read this, feel free to reach out to me already.)
• I've completed an old todo item setting up and documenting titanpad.debian.net, service that has been requested for collaborative work during various kinds of online events. Help is welcome to help administering the service (see doc).
• SPI has clarified the role of project representatives and, as a consequence of that, I (as DPL) no longer receive SPI board discussions addressed to board@spi. That is good not only for the sanity of my inbox, but also because it puts all projects affiliated to SPI at the same level of communication within SPI. Thanks to Robert Brockway for his work on this.

In the unlikely case you've read thus far, thanks for your attention! Happy Debian hacking.

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PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

In less then 2 hours I'll leave for the Paris Nord station to catch a train headed to Bruxelles Midi. Plan of the week-end: attend and enjoy FOSDEM 2012!. I haven't submitted any talk for this year FOSDEM edition, but I've been invited (and gladly accepted) to join the round table on working with contributor communities on Sunday. I'm positive it will be a nice occasion to share ideas on how to structure local user groups around the world. Beside that, I plan to attend several talks of the cross-distribution, legal issues devrooms, hang around the Debian booth, as well as discuss many topics with people and friends from all over the Free Software multiverse. Too bad I'm still recovering from a recent minor health issue; I won't be able to get the most out of today's beer event. But I'll attend nonetheless, see you there?

good news: from looking through RC bugs in the BTS, it seems that more & more people are starting to join the RCBW effort!

& here's my usual list for the past week:

• #633935 src:fim: "fim: Please Build-Depends on libjpeg-dev, not libjpeg62-dev"
  do as the bug report says, upload to DELAYED/2
• #634400 src:morituri: "morituri: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add upstream patch (via Ubuntu / Daniel T Chen), upload to DELAYED/2
• #643464 src:radeontool: "radeontool: FTBFS: radeontool.c:42:5: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  apply patch from Jonathan Nieder, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643473 src:python-kinterbasdb: "python-kinterbasdb: FTBFS with firebird-dev (2.5) -- removed defines"
  do a QA upload with the patch from Damyan Ivanov
• #650788 src:python-osd: "python-osd: binary-indep doesn't build python-osd"
  update build-* target in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #652245 src:tomoe: "tomoe: FTBFS: dpkg-buildpackage: error: dpkg-source --after-build tomoe-0.6.0 gave error exit status 1"
  send ideas for fix to BTS, later NMUd by a fellow DD
• #652700 haildb: "haildb ftbfs if libcloog-ppl0 is not installed"
  sponsor NMU by Tobias Frost, upload to DELAYED/2
• #654255 src:cmucl: "cmucl: FTBFS: Error: Unbound symbol."
  suggest manual close, done by maintainer
• #654257 src:newlib: "newlib: FTBFS: cannot find the library sys/linux/liblinux.la' or unhandled argument sys/linux/liblinux.la'"
  apply patch from Ubuntu / Wookey and Steve Langasek, upload to DELAYED/2

A few days ago Yves-Alexis Perez asked me how many hardware sponsorship request I usually get from Debian Developers, that is how many people ask me to use Debian money to buy material that can improve their work on Debian and indirectly Debian itself. The answer is "too few".
Making it easier for our developers to improve Debian is a worthwhile investment of money donated to Debian. Of course such a use of money should be motivated (i.e. you should be able to justify how the material you're asking for would improve Debian and why it should be Debian paying for it) and transparent (i.e. you should periodically report about what you're doing with material that Debian has bought for you to use). The above two principles are what I've tried to convey in a new section of the sponsoring guidelines wiki page I've been maintaining for a while. Comments and improvements highly welcome! Equally welcome are advocacy messages for hardware sponsoring to other fellow Developers, as suggested by Corsac.

Steve McIntyre has been contributing to Debian since 1996, 2 years before I joined! But I quickly stumbled upon Steve: in 1999, he was struggling with getting his debian-cd script to produce 2 ISO images (it was the first time that Debian did no longer fit on a single CD), I helped him by rewriting debian-cd with a robust system to split packages on as many ISO images as required. I remember those times very well because Steve was very supportive of my efforts and it was a real pleasure to get this done. His friendly nature probably also explains why he got elected Debian Project Leader twice! Anyway, enough history, check out his interview to learn more about the great work he s doing nowadays. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Steve. Raphael: Who are you? Steve: I m a professional software engineer, 37, living in Cambridge (England) with my new wife Jo. I studied for the EIST degree at the University of Cambridge, then (like many people here, it seems) I just forgot to go home again afterwards and settled here. I spent more of my study time playing with Linux than working on my degree, so I guess I m lucky that it worked and I found a career in that area! Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Steve: During my time in college, I started hacking on software in my free time, using Slackware as my first Linux distribution from the middle of 1994. After encountering more and more problems with Slackware, I was encouraged by a number of friends to make the jump over to Debian and in October 1996 I did. The installation process back then was much harder than anything people see today, but after a long weekend I finally had my Debian system up and running. I was already one of the main upstream developers for the Mikmod music player at that time, so that very same weekend I applied to be a DD so I could maintain it in Debian too. Back then, the NM process was much simpler: I just mailed a key to Bruce and he set me up with an account almost immediately! I then found that Joey Hess had beaten me to it and already packaged Mikmod. Grrr! Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian? Steve: Without a doubt, my proudest achievement within Debian is being elected Project Leader for 2 years by the other developers. It s a great feeling to have earned the trust of your friends and peers, and also a great responsibility to go and help Debian where needed: talking to the press about Debian, assisting wherever problems crop up, etc. The DPL job is certainly a lot of hard work, and I have nothing but respect for anybody who volunteers for it.

It s a great feeling to have earned the trust of your friends and peers.

Elsewhere, I ve been leading the Debian CD team for years too, both doing most of the maintenance of the debian-cd package and producing and testing the regular installation CDs and DVDs that we ship to the world. Again, this is a time-consuming job but it needs doing and it s worthwhile. Raphael: You re currently employed by ARM. What are you working on and are they supportive of your Debian involvement? Steve: The situation within ARM is very interesting; I m employed in PDSW (Processor Division, SoftWare), a new group founded just a couple of years back to help improve the state of software on ARM. Most of the people in the group are working on Free Software at this stage (e.g. toolchains, browsers, Linux kernel), which is lovely. Some of the engineers have also been seconded into a new non-profit company Linaro, which is a collaboration between ARM and a number of other companies investing in core Linux software and tools for ARM-based CPUs. I m one of the ARM engineers in Linaro, and I m a Technical Architect in the Office of the CTO. My role includes looking at future projects for Linaro to help with (e.g. ARM servers), but for the last few months I ve been concentrating on the new armhf architecture in Debian, Ubuntu and elsewhere. armhf is a new architecture in Debian and Ubuntu terms, but it s not strictly a new type of hardware. Instead, it s a new ABI. We have two reasons for doing this work:

1. It targets the latest version of 32-bit ARM CPUs (v7) and makes better use of the hardware, for better performance. Compare targetting i686 instead of i386, for example. We ll still support the older armel port for the foreseeable future for users with older hardware that can t run armhf.
2. More importantly: we are standardising on the ABI / compiler options / hardware support for future users.

In the past, there has been a huge amount of specialisation (aka fragmentation) in the ARM Linux environment, and that worked OK for specialised devices that only ever ran the software shipped with them. ARM CPUs are now becoming more and more mainstream, so people will expect to be able to install generic software on their machines. That gives a requirement for a standard base platform, and armhf (arm-linux-gnueabihf in GNU triplet terms) is that standard that we are pushing in the community. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse and others are all going to use this, making compatibility possible. I ve been working with a small team of people to make armhf happen, helping where needed: putting together build machines; patching Debian packages directly; discussing and fixing toolchain issues with Ubuntu folks; agreeing ABI specifications with people from Fedora; advising people from other distros bootstrapping their new ARM ports. ARM and Linaro are very supportive of this work, and it s been lovely being sponsored to work directly on Free Software like this. It s work that will directly benefit ARM and its partners (of course!), but it s also helping out more generally too: Debian QA work, cross-build support, bootstrapping efforts, multi-arch. More and more of the ARM market is driven by Free Software, and companies are acknowledging that. I should probably also mention that we re hiring ! Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Steve: There are three main tracks here. Obviously, I m interested in seeing armhf release with Wheezy. We ve just been added to Testing last weekend, so that s going well. We ve got over 90% of the archive built now, and we re mopping up the remaining issues. I m the primary maintainer of cdrkit at this point, but I d prefer to have it go away. Xorriso and the associated software in libisoburn is almost capable of replacing all the aging cdrtools-derived software that we have in Debian, The only missing feature that I m aware of is creating the HFS hybrid filesystems that we use for installations on Mac systems. I ve been talking with the upstream folks about this for some time already, and I m hoping we can finish this soon enough that we can get it into Wheezy. Finally, I ve got the ever-growing wishlist of things for debian-cd. We ve got the beginnings of an automated test suite that Mart n Ferrari has written, but it needs integrating and improving. I want to help get regular weekly/daily/release debian-live builds running on the main CD build machine. There s work needed if we want to make good installation media for the new multi-arch world, too. The Emdebian people are asking for help making CD images The list goes on Raphael: The ARM community seems to be very interested in multi-arch. Can you explain why? Steve: There are a number of reasons for ARM people to be interested in multi-arch; two really stand out for me:

• With the historical issues around the plethora of ARM ABIs in the wild, multi-arch will allow us to potentially support multiple ABIs cleanly on one system. That allows users to have (for example) an up-to-date system that makes the most of their current hardware, yet also run legacy programs that might use an older ABI. There s also a new 64-bit architecture coming (ARMv8) which will run older 32-bit software; again, multi-arch makes mixed installation of old and new software reasonable.
• ARM has traditionally been a common target for cross-compilation, and I d expect that to remain the case for a long time to come yet. For a lot of embedded developers, using a big fast i386/amd64 machine to compile is much faster than using a limited-power small ARM CPU. However, setting up sane cross-compilation environments has long been a bugbear for developers. Getting the toolchain and all the cross-architecture libraries to work together correctly can be like black magic. This is potentially the killer app for multi-arch: simply install the libraries for the target architecture directly on your development machine. Install a simple cross-gcc package and (maybe) qemu, and you re all set.

This is potentially the killer app for multi-arch: simply install the libraries for the target architecture [ ], install a simple cross-gcc package [ ] and you re all set.

Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Steve: For me, Debian s biggest problem has been the same for a long time: we are forever short of enough people to do the work that we re trying to do. That might sound like a weird thing to claim when Debian is one of the largest Free Software projects on the planet, but it s more a statement of just how huge our goals are. Many of the largest things in Debian are developed or controlled by very small teams working very hard, and there s always a risk of losing people due to burnout in those situations.

We are forever short of enough people to do the work that we re trying to do.

Some of the tasks that should be easy given our large membership (e.g. large-scale packaging transitions) can often instead take a very long time. We are fortunate to have more people wanting to join in Debian s work all the time, but we also need to be careful to keep on promoting what we re doing and recruiting new contributors, encouraging them to get more and more involved in core work. Debian gets ever bigger in terms of the size and the number of packages we distribute; we re not currently matching that growth rate elsewhere. Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year? Steve: This one is much easier to answer! The thing that first attracted me to Debian was the fact that I could help to develop it, help to decide how things could and should be done within it. Instead of being forced to accept what some corporation decided I could do with my computer, I could change the software to suit my needs and preferences. Alongside that, I could get involved with a strong community of similar people all over the world, all with their own strong opinions about how software should work. I joined in and found it was great fun and very rewarding. That hasn t changed for me in the intervening years, and that s why I m still around. I work on Debian because it helps me to get the OS that I want to use. It seems that lots of people around the world find it useful too, and that s awesome. Raphael: Do you believe that Stefano Zacchiroli will be the first DPL who managed to stay 3 consecutive years on the seat? Would you like him to candidate again? Steve: To be honest, I would be very surprised if Zack stood again for DPL this year. He told me himself that he wasn t planning on it, and I can understand that decision. He s been an awesome DPL in my opinion, and I m glad that he took the job. But: it is also a very difficult and time-consuming task that would be enough to wear down anybody. If Zack does decide to stand again, I would support him 100%. But I know that we also have lots of other good people in Debian who would be ready to take up the challenge next. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Steve: There are lots of people I admire in Debian, so many so that I almost don t want to list individuals here for fear of missing people out. But Bdale Garbee has been an inspiration to many of us, for many years. He s technically excellent, a great friend to many of us, an endless source of sage advice and (last but not least) he has some wonderful stories to tell about his experiences over the years. On top of that, he s just cool. Christian Perrier is another exceptional developer, in my eyes he s great at co-ordinating people in translations, working tirelessly to make this very important part of Debian work better and better with every release. He s also a really nice guy and we all love him. I also have to mention Joey Hess here, whether he likes it or not. *grin* He s been responsible for so many good things in Debian over the years, even if he did steal my first package Finally, the teams of people who make sure that Debian is always working: the security team and DSA. The rest of us can choose to take time off from Debian to go and do other things, but these people need to cover things every day. That s a major responsibility, and I salute them for taking on that challenge.

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Thank you to Steve for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that you can find older interviews on http://wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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The end of the year is a period of time during which many people sit down and decide to donate some money to initiatives that pursue the public good. I have that habit myself. At the end of 2011 I've decided to donate to Wikipedia, as I consider Wikipedia to be one of the greatest achievements of humanity and I see a lot of value in keeping it running on a purely non-profit basis. (Not to mention that it's already quite annoying to see Jimbo's banners one month per year, go figure what would happen if those banners would suddenly turn into permanent advertisement banners!) You may wonder why I haven't donated to Debian, given my involvement in the project. In fact, that involvement is precisely why I didn't donate to Debian: there is some sort of sanity in keeping a distinction between causes to which I donate my spare time (the case of Debian) and those to which I donate money (the case of Wikipedia), and I like to keep that distinction. As DPL, I've the luxury of being cc:-ed on Debian donation notifications that flow through SPI, and I can also check the flow of donations to other Debian trusted organizations. This year, I've been particularly impressed by the high flow of Debian donations during the end of the year. Thank you, donors, it is thanks to your generosity that we keep many Debian activities going. Using the money people like you regularly donate to Debian we:

• buy hardware and hardware-related services that keep the Debian infrastructure running
• sponsor sprints and other events that allow volunteer developers to get together and work on Debian in fun and productive contexts
• support travel expenses of Debian developers that attend conferences or meetings as representatives of the Debian Project

On a more political note, I'm happy to observe that Debian incomes come almost entirely from private citizens. We do have big corporate sponsors, but their contributions tend to be concentrated as specifically earmarked donations for our annual conference. This is good for them, because they get the fancy banners on the DebConf website and at the conference. But it is also good for Debian, because a donation-based economy (as Debian's, with DebConf exception) is less likely to be influenced by the whims of a few big donors. But with (great) donations comes (great) responsibility. In particular, it comes the need of budget transparency. You can't go out soliciting donations and simply say "thanks, your contribution is appreciated". You need to show donors how their money are used, so that they can judge whether they made the right choice in donating to you or not. Whether they will donate again in the future or not granting long term sustainability to your project usually depends on that. So, if you have donated to Debian or are considering doing so in the future, here are a few of places where you can check what we have been doing with donated money:

• Minutes of SPI monthly meetings, that come with monthly reports of incomes and expenses of all affiliated projects
• the list of sprints, past and forthcoming
• "Bits from the DPL" mails (indexed on the DPL "team" page), that often come with a "money" section highligthing significant expenses for the reporting period
• the DebConf reports, that come with detailed "budgeting" sections of each DebConf edition

Albeit quite detailed, the above is not enough: we should do better on the transparency of Debian budget. For one thing, the above is too scattered: budget transparency should not depend on (potential) donors mixing and matching too many sources of information. Further more, the above is not even complete: SPI is not the only Debian trusted organization, and the accessibility of information about Debian budgets hosted at other organizations varies quite a bit. We've been working on improving this for the past year or so: we're not there yet, but I'm positive we can have detailed and comprehensive budgets encompassing all Debian trusted organizations published in the coming months . Why has it taken so long and what could possibly be so difficult about it? I think the cause of the delay is twofold:

1. The disperse nature of Debian adds some difficulties to regular accounting challenges. Contrary to other FOSS projects I'm aware of, we've many different trusted organizations, each one with its own different way of reporting things. The advantage of such a setup is that we can often avoid the costs of money transfers around the world, costs in which we'd incur had we a single organization holding our assets, say, in the US. Still, having too many organizations is counterproductive. This is why for the past 1.5 years I've been working on consolidating our money assets into as few budgets as possible (avoiding, for instance, to use more than one organization per currency).
2. We tend to be good at recruiting packaging geeks, but not so good at recruiting other kinds of geeks: budget geeks, artwork geeks, journalist geeks, management geeks, etc. But it is upon those other kinds of "geekness" that many activities of "standard" Debian geeks depend. For example: if you want to have a steady flow of new project members, you need to communicate effectively Debian values and make some buzz around them, so that you could hope they get to the right ears. If you want to organize sprints for maintainers to work together you need money donations, and to solicit donations you need a transparent budget. Etc. In the specific case of accounting, we're now lucky enough to have found "standard" Debian geeks who also have a passion for accounting and auditing; but that appaears to be, essentially, a coincidence. If we don't fix the more general problem, I believe our difficulties in recruiting "non-standard" Debian geeks might hurt us quite a bit in the long run.

I've been a longtime mutt user, but have gotten somewhat annoyed of having to open a new terminal when I want to read or reply to a Debian bug with mutt (using 'bts show 123456'). How nice it would be to be able to fetch a bug report from within mutt! And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you mutt-fetchbug. It's extensively based on Zack's mutt-notmuch script (a nice interface between mutt and notmuch for searching mail, I highly recommend it). By adding a line like the following to your ~/.muttrc, you can simply press "F7" and enter a bug number from your mutt index in order to fetch and display a bug report's mbox file:

    macro index <f7> \
        "<enter-command>unset wait_key<enter><shell-escape>~/bin/mutt-fetchbug --prompt search<enter><change-folder-readonly>~/.cache/mutt_btsresults<enter><enter-command>set wait_key<enter>" \
        "fetch bug(s) (using bts show)"

The above presupposes you've downloaded mutt-fetchbug and placed it with executable permissions in ~/bin. Those interested in making improvements or extending mutt-fetchbug are more than welcome to do so, it's licensed under the GPLv3+. It can be fetched from my git branch. Update: Fixed the broken link to mutt-fetchbug, thanks Christian for the heads up.

here's my RCBW report for this week. again, nothing spectacular, mostly uploading packages where patches were already in the BTS. thanks to all the patch creators and forwarders!

• #553968 src:blktrace: "FTBFS with binutils-gold"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Ilya Barygin, upload to DELAYED/2
• #554408 src:fuse-umfuse-iso9660: "FTBFS with binutils-gold"
  add patch from Luk Claes, upload to DELAYED/2
• #554755 src:gtodo: "FTBFS with binutils-gold"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625319 chiark-tcl: "chiark-tcl: ftbfs with gcc-4.6 -Werror"
  add patch from peter green, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625327 filtergen: "filtergen: ftbfs with gcc-4.6 -Werror"
  add patch from peter green, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625343 gltron: "gltron: ftbfs with gcc-4.6 -Werror"
  add patch from peter green, upload to DELAYED/2
• #642709 src:ctsim: "ctsim: FTBFS: /bin/sh: 0: Can't open ./config.status"
  fix debian/rules (config. guess,sub handling and duplicate make clean), upload to DELAYED/2
• #643403 src:gtodo: "gtodo: FTBFS: callback.c:133:4: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2

My goal with the 3.0 (quilt) source format has always been to standardize the patch management in Debian source packages. This message seems to have been well understood. dbs and dpatch have been deprecated by their respective maintainers. I made numerous efforts to make this source format useful in as many use cases as possible (but some improvements are still possible) and I have added hints to encourage maintainers to switch. Thanks to this, the adoption rate of this new source format has been very good and it s now the most widely used source package format in Debian only two years after its introduction in Debian unstable. With 9829 source package using 3.0 (quilt) , it surpassed the number of source package still using 1.0 (7368). (Those numbers have been taken from http://upsilon.cc/~zack/stuff/dpkg-v3/ on december 13th 2011.) The number of source packages using 3.0 (quilt) doubled this year.

(Click on the picture to see it full size) Of the 7368 packages using the old format, 6816 packages trigger the missing-debian-source-format lintian tag. This means that only 552 source packages have explicitly opted to keep using the old format and that the bulk of the remaining packages are rarely updated packages that have not been switched yet.

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The French government has published a call for tender for a 2 million euro contract to support Debian and CentOS systems throughout the French public administration. The news is a month old, but the call for bids is open until 9 January 2012. There is more coverage on a EC blog post as well as on Le Monde Informatique (in French). "Customers" of the bid winner will be almost all ministries of the French administration --- from prime minister to justice, from defense to sports, from education to culture --- for a 3-year period. The call requires ability to support most of the "usual suspects" among popular FOSS applications, but explicitly focuses on Debian and CentOS as distributions. It is by far not the first time it has happened, but it is always great for me to see major public administrations choosing community based distros (and Debian in particular ).

Mako's IronBlogger is a great idea. I often find myself postponing blog posts for a very long time, simply out of laziness. IronBlogger provides a nice community incentive to counter (my) laziness and blogging more often. As a related challenge, we have to face the fact that different subsets of our communities use different media to stay informed: mailing lists, blog (aggregators), social media, IRC, etc. Disparities in how they stay informed are a pity and can be countered using multiple medias at a time. Although I haven't blogged very often as of lately, I managed to keep the Debian (Developer) community informed of what happens in "DPL land" on a monthly basis, by the means of bits from the DPL mails sent to d-d-a. While the target of bits mails perfectly fits d-d-a, there is no reason to exclude a broader public from them. After all, who knows, maybe we'll find the next DPL victim^W candidate among Planet readers! Bonus point: blogging this also helped me realize that my mails are not as markdown-clean as I thought they were. I still have no IronBlogger squad, though. (And sharing beers with folks in the Boston area is not terribly handy for me ). Anyone interested in setting up a BloggeurDeFer in the Paris area? (SCNR)

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Dear Project Members,
another month has passed, it's time to bother you again about what has happened in DPL land in November (this time, with even less delay than the last one, ah!). Call for Help: press/publicity team I'd like to highlight the call for help by the press / publicity teams. They are "hiring" and have sent out a call for new members a couple of weeks ago. The work they do is amazing and is very important for Debian, as important as maintaining packages or fixing RC bugs during a freeze. It is only by letting the world know what Debian is and what we do, that we can keep the Project thriving. And letting the world know is exactly what the publicity and press teams do. If you're into writing, blogging, or simply have a crush for social media, please read the call and "apply"! Interviews November has apparently been the "let's interview the DPL" month. I've spent quite some time giving interviews to interested journalists about various topics. For both my embarrassment and transparency on what I've said on behalf of Debian, here are the relevant links:

• audio interviewwith Karen Sandler for the Free as in Freedom oggcast by herself and Bradley M. Kuhn
• text interview with Raphael Hertzog for the People behind Debian series
• text interview for the Linux Certification Institute Italy (LICI) (note: the original of this one is in Italian; the English version is a translation by LICI)
• video interview with Amber Granger during last UDS

Assets

• the Video Team sprint approved in October has happened at beginning of November; report is still pending but the organizers are on it
• Christian Perrier reported about his trip to India mini-DebConf, even that he attended on behalf of the Project. I find amazing both the outcome of the event and Christian's report, a very good example of how to inform the Project when acting on behalf of it
• the hardware replacement for ftp,lists .d.o I've mentioned last month has been ordered, has arrived, and DSA have already put their hands on it for the setup. Many thanks to DSA and in particular to Martin Zobel-Helas for the logistics
• as an administratrivia, I've asked SPI to setup for Debian a "gift" credit card, i.e. a credit card with a limited, refillable budget. It is needed for using (with a safeguard) credits offered to the Project by public cloud providers (e.g. AWS' donation), as well as to use various kinds of services that we need from time to time

Legal advice (work in progress)

• I've sought and got from a former SPI lawyer a first legal advice on the relationships among trademark law and the procedures of a Free Software distro like Debian when distributing software subject to trademarks. I'm still waiting to seek a second advice from the current SPI lawyers (whom I've been keeping busy with other stuff). In the meantime I've pending a summary of what I've got thus far in the trademark-vs-DFSG thread. Stay tuned there!
• I've been working with SPI lawyers on a proposal of software patent policy that I think we should advertise to make explicit the position of the Debian Project on software patents. I see it as a continuation/completion of the FAQ we have already published on the subject. I'll let you know as soon as we reach a stable draft, that should be pretty soon.

Relationships with others

• I've been approached by members of the board of the OpenSource Initiative (OSI), about the soon to be open OSI affiliation program. They'd like to know if Debian is interested in being affiliated to OSI. I think we should and I'll eventually start a discussion on this topic. In the meantime, I welcome feedback from anyone who is interested in the topic.
• Thanks to the interest of Andrew Pollock, LaMont Jones, Florian Weimer and the Security Team, we are discussing with ISC to have Debian --- as a project, rather than as individuals who just happen to maintain ISC software in Debian --- become member of all forums relevant for software we distribute (BIND, NTP, DHCP). They are doing all the coordination work, but I've anticipated I'll be happy to pledge for Debian membership.
• I've taken the first step to reach out to companies that have a strategic interest in Debian. According to discussion I've had with representative of such companies, they often face similar challenges in offering Debian support and in contributing back to Debian. I think we should offer a forum for them to discuss and find synergies, as well as explain our needs to them. An official mailing list might be such a place. Once we have a suitable forum ready, I'll propose to the press team to send out a corresponding call for companies. In the meantime, if you happen to know, or even work for, companies that might be interested, please ask them to get in touch with me.

Miscellanea

• I've had a chance to discuss with the editors of the SPDX specification about its relationship with DEP-5. Thanks to the help of Dominique Dumont work is already in progress to have a mutual converter among the two formats. Also, although with some bumps, work on finalizing DEP-5 has finally restarted.
• an interesting thread of a while ago is in need of some work to produce a useful outcome, i.e. a set of security guidelines for DDs. If you're willing to help, have a look at the thread
• some more mediation-fu has been going on during November; have a look at my daily logs below if you care about the details

Thanks for reading thus far,
and happy hacking.

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PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

It s been one year since the first People behind Debian interview. For this special occasion, I wanted a special guest and I m happy that our Debian Project Leader (DPL) Stefano Zacchiroli accepted my invitation. He has a difficult role in the community, but he s doing a really great job of it. He s a great mediator in difficult situations, but he s also opinionated and can push a discussion towards a conclusion. Read on to learn how he became a Debian developer and later DPL, what he s excited about in the next Debian release, and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Stefano: I m Stefano Zacchiroli, but I prefer to be called Zack, both on the Internet and in real life. I m 32, Italian, emigrated to France about 4 years ago. I live in Paris, and I find it to be one of the most gorgeous and exciting cities in the world. As my day job I m a Computer Science researcher and teacher at University Paris Diderot and IRILL. In my copious free time I contribute to Debian, and I m firmly convinced that doing so is an effective way to help the cause of Free Software. Besides, I find it to be a lot of fun! Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Stefano: Flash back to 1999, when I was a 2nd year student in Computer Science at the University of Bologna. Back then in Italy it was uncommon for young geeks to get exposed to Free Software: Internet was way less pervasive than today and most computer magazines didn t pay much attention to GNU/Linux. Luckily for me, the professor in charge of the student lab was a Free Software enthusiast and all students machines there were running Debian. Not only that, but there was also a student program that allowed volunteers to become sysadmins after having shown their skills and convinced the director they were trustworthy. Becoming one of those volunteer Debian admins quickly became one of my top objectives for the year, and that is were I ve learned using Debian. The year after that, I got in touch with a research group that was to become the happy bunch of hackers with whom I would have done both my master and PhD theses. They were designing a new proof assistant. Most of the development was in OCaml and happened on Debian. OCaml was available in Debian, but many of the libraries we needed were not. So I approached the Debian OCaml Team offering to help. Before I realize what was going on I was (co-)maintainer of tens of OCaml-related packages. At some point I got told I think you should apply as a Debian Developer . So I did and in a couple of months I went through the New Member (NM) process, that was back then in its infancy. I still remember my happiness while reading the account created mail, the day after my 22nd birthday. I know the NM process went through some bad publicity in the past, but I m happy to see that nowadays the process can be as swift as it has been for me 10 years ago. Raphael: It s your second year as Debian Project Leader (DPL). Are you feeling more productive in the role? Do you fear to burn out? Stefano: I m feeling way more productive, no doubts. The task of the Debian Project Leader is not necessarily difficult, but it is a complex and scarcely documented one. It is also profoundly different from any other task that Debian people usually work on, so that experience doesn t help much in getting started. Before becoming effective as DPL one needs to get to know many people and mechanisms he is not familiar with. More importantly, one needs to set up a personal work-flow that allows to keep up with day-to-day DPL tasks (which are aplenty) as well as with urgencies (that tend to pop-up in the leader@debian.org INBOX at the least convenient time). Finally, one also needs to do proper traffic shaping and always retain enough motivation bandwidth to keep the Project informed about what is going on in DPL-land. Finding the right balance among all these ingredients can take some time. Once one is past it, everything goes way more smoothly. The above is why I m constantly encouraging people interested in running for DPL in the future to reach out to me and work on some tasks of the current DPL s TODO list. I swear it is not just a cheap attempt at slavery!. It is rather an attempt at DPL mentoring that could be beneficial: both to give future candidates more awareness of the task, and to reduce the potential downtime when handing over from one DPL to the next. Regarding burn out, I don t feel prone to its risk these days. If I look back, I can say that my contributions as DPL have been pretty constant in volume over time; my enthusiasm for the task, if anything, is on the rise. The effectiveness of my contributions as DPL are, on the other hand, not mine to judge. Raphael: If you had to single out two achievements where you were involved as DPL, what would they be? Stefano: I d go for the following two, in no particular order:

• Dialogue with derivatives. When I became DPL ~1.5 years ago the situation on that front was pretty dire. In the specific case of Ubuntu, by far the most successful and customized of all Debian derivatives, I remember being scared of raising the topic of collaboration with them on mailing lists. More generally, we had no specific initiatives to foster technical collaboration with and among derivatives. A huge potential of (forwarded) contributions to Debian was being wasted. Today things look much better, as I ve documented in recent talks at DebConf11 and UDS-P. The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum and many people who apply to become Debian Developers come from derivatives. Conflict situations still exist, for good reasons that we still have to either fix or figure out entirely. But I m positive we re on the right track.

  The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum

  This is by far not an achievement of mine alone. In particular, many of the activity of the Derivatives Front Desk have been organized by other enthusiastic volunteers. But I ve done my part, especially in breaking the ice and in proposing a vision of Free Software distribution where all distros play a role and are welcome to join the game, as long as they give back and give credit to their respective upstreams.
• Process membership. I m proud of having promoted the general resolution (GR) that has clarified (and advertised to the world) that Debian welcomes all kind of contributions, and that they all equally matter to become proper members of the Project. I notice only now while writing this that the GR title, traditionally chosen by the secretary, was Debian Project Members . That choice harmonically closes the circle with the recent renaming of the NM process to New Member process. Today, we have several project members (AKA Debian Developers ) that are active citizen of Debian with voting rights, even though they take care of tasks other than packaging. Anyone can become a Debian citizen, as long as they are ready to abide by Debian s values, have a track record of verifiable contributions to Debian, and are committed to keep them coming in the future.

  We have several project members that [ ] take care of tasks other than packaging.

  Once gain, this is by far not an achievement of mine alone, very little project-wide achievements are. DAM has helped a lot and support from the project as a whole has been immense.

OK, let me cheat and add a third one I m also proud of having been able to report to the Project my whereabouts as DPL, thoroughly and periodically, since the very beginning is first term. People annoyed by my reporting logorrhea now have all my sympathies. Raphael: Among the possible new features of Debian Wheezy, which one gets you excited most? Stefano: It s multi-arch, no doubt. Even though it is not a directly user visible change, it s a very far reaching one. It is also one of those changes that make me feel that moment of truth of coders, when you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

It s multi-arch [ ] you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

Raphael: If you were not DPL and could spend all your time on Debian, what project would you do? Stefano: I would sit down and do software development for Debian. It s impressive how many important and beneficial changes for Debian could be delivered by specific software improvements in various parts of our infrastructure. We tend to attract many packagers, but not so many people willing to maintain Debian infrastructure softwares like dak, britney, debbugs, the PTS, etc. Their maintenance burden then falls on the shoulders of the respective teams which are generally very busy with other important tasks. As a project, we seem to be more appealing to packagers than to software developers. That is a pity given the amount of exciting coding tasks that are everywhere in Debian. Part of the reason we are not appealing to developers is that we are not particularly good at collecting coding tasks in a place where interested developers could easily pick them up. It also takes quite a bit of inside knowledge to spot infrastructure bugs and understand how to fix them. I long for some spare hacking time to check if I m still good enough of a coder to hunt down longstanding bugs in our infrastructure, which have ended up being my pet peeves. I d also love to dive again into RCBW. It s less committing than package maintenance, more diverse and challenging, and also an immensely useful activity to get Debian releases done. Raphael: Martin Michlmayr is worried that there is so few paid opportunities around Debian. Do you agree with his sentiment, and if yes do you have ideas on how to improve this situation? Stefano: The idealistic me wishes Debian to be a community made only of volunteers that devote their free time to the Project. Oh, and that me also wishes Debian to be competitive with similar projects, no matter how many full-time employees others have! That is coherent with a view of society where everyone has a day job, but also engages in volunteering activities ensuring that public interest is pursued by people motivated by interests other than profit. But I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role. I admire projects that strike a good balance between volunteer and paid work. The Linux kernel is emblematic in that respect: many developers are paid by companies that have a commercial or strategic interest in Linux. Nevertheless volunteers contributions are aplenty and the Linux community gives a convincing impression that choices are driven by the community itself (or by its benevolent dictator) without money-driven impositions.

I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role.

Such an ecosystem does not exist around Debian. We do have a partner program that allows for it to happen, but we have very few partners with an interest in doing distribution development work. Like Martin, I m worried by this state of affairs, because it de facto means we lag behind in terms of available people power. In a community of volunteers, that might frustrate people and that is not good. To improve over the status quo the first step is to federate together small and medium companies that have a strategic interest in Debian and listen to their needs. I m already in touch with representatives of such companies that, in many cases, already employ Debian Developers to do some distribution work in Debian. We will be soon sending out a call to reach out to more such companies, but since we are discussing this, why waiting? If some of our readers here are representative of such companies, I encourage them to get in touch with me about this. Raphael: You know that the fundraising campaign for the Debian Administrator s Handbook is on good track but the liberation of the book is not yet assured. What do you think of this project? Stefano: I m happy about the project, to the point that I ve accepted writing a testimonial for it . I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian and I welcome any initiative that might help closing that gap.

I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian.

Free Culture is a great offspring of Free Software and I m convinced we need to stand up against double standards in the two camps. Letting aside software-specific licensing details, the basic freedoms to be defended are the same. They are those freedoms that ensure that a reader is in full control of his book, pretty much as they ensure that a computer user is in full control of the software that runs on it. I m therefore proud that Debian has long resolved that the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) apply not only to software but also to books and other pieces of documentation. But the status quo implies that not only we have very few up to date, high quality books about Debian. It also implies that, at present, we have no such book that we can distribute in the Debian archive, showing off the Free Software (and Free Culture!) values we stand for.
Crowdfunding is considered to be a good mate for Free Culture, where the services model that applies to Free Software is more difficult to exploit. I so wish any luck to yours and Roland s initiative. A different matter is whether Debian, as a project, should endorse the initiative and actively campaign for it. As you know, I think it should not. While we do advertise general project donations, we don t do mission-specific fundraising campaign for Debian itself. Coherently with that, I don t think we should relay crowdfunding campaigns for 3rd parties, even when the result would be beneficial to Debian. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Stefano: There are two classes of people that I particularly admire in Debian:

• Those with an uncanny ability to guide discussions towards constructive conclusions. We are lucky to have many in Debian and I admire all of them. Having to single out one I d name Russ Allbery, in honor of whom I hereby propose the periodic Russ Allbery s Distinguished Flametamer Award .
• People stepping up for responsibility roles, especially when the responsibility put them in tough spots. Release teams, ftp-masters, DSA, DAM, as well as past and present members of teams with similarly hot seats have all my admiration.

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Thank you to Zack for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.

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