I was going to post a larger blog entry, but in the end it comes down to this, my current best hopes for the Debian voting system:

That its tendancy to suck everything down into its own little procedural black hole will in the end be harmless. That the pocket universe it has pinched out of Debian is just not my universe, and that my ignoring of it doesn't come back to haunt me.

I was thinking late last night and it became clear to me that over the past 9 or 10 years, I had fallen into a nomadic outlook, even when I wasn't being particularly nomadic in my way of life all the time. Between moving around the Bay Area 1.5 times a year, shipping everything cross-country by UPS, hauling all my worldly goods back in a pickup, and then falling into a longterm already-established-but-clearly-not-permanent place at the farm, dashing off to places like Honduras and Brazil for months at a time, and going around with a camper, I experienced the kind of pressure that selects for keeping posessions limited, appreciating things that pack a lot of different uses into a small space (like a laptop with gigs and gigs of carefully organised information). The things I aquired, valued, and kept were either very portable and useful -- tools, laptop, tents, vehicles, cookware -- or portable and luxurious -- comforters, good sheets, a rug. (I had my pick of nearly anything in my Grandmother's house, and I chose a rug.) The real luxury items were put up with only grudgingly and spent a lot of time in storage. Mostly books, and this is why unlike most people, I prefer my books on the computer. For lots of other categories of stuff, I tended to assume that I wasn't going to keep it long, and bought/borrowed accordingly -- and ended up giving away couches on Craigslist. Recently I saw some stuff about Mongolian nomads in the Gobi packing their yurts onto their camels, and I can relate to that, there's a real beauty to it.

So it's been weird over the past week to put together all the large furniture that I need in my house, like a fridge, etc. A bit hard to accept it. Only with time will I find out how long this stop along the way will last..

At the moment I estimate a 50% chance that etch will ship with a debhelper that I don't loathe. The NMUed up version for the python transition is not something I'll be at all happy with etch shipping with. Thanks to several Debian pythoneers, we have a plan to fix this, but getting it into testing in time for the freeze is looking increasingly tricky. The plan is:

1. Revert dh_python to the pre-NMU version.
2. Make dh_python detect debian/pycompat or Python-Version and become a no-op in those cases. Generally deprecate dh_python.
3. Make dh_pysupport do everything dh_python used to do.
4. Make dh_pycentral do everything dh_python used to do.
5. Test everything. (Ideally, all python packages.)

Steps 1 2 and 3 are done in the 3-day delayed upload queue. Step 4 still needs to be done, and some initial tries at it have failed. Step 5 has so far been limited to building a half-dozen or so packages.

The details are in #381389.

Chris posted some pics from 2003 and I found in them what's probably a picture of my first game of Settlers.

Must play more..

Just did an awesome install of Debian etch onto Maggie's laptop, which had stopped having working wifi in windows for unknown reasons. Everything worked great in the installer and the resulting desktop felt very nice for a regular user, the only things I had to add were madwifi (non-free..) and network-manager. It was probably my most painless and happy Debian installation ever.

(Details on the page for phoenix, and in the installation report linked to from there.)

Martin "Joey" Schulze posted what seems to be his last issue of DWN at the end of September. Is this the end of its 8 year run?

I founded Debian Weekly News in 1999 with the intent of helping Debian developers keep up with what was going on in Debian as the volume of the project grew beyond what could be easily followed by everyone in the mailing lists. That goal later grew to encompass also keeping users informed of what was going on in Debian.

By the time I left VA, I was getting burnt out writing it. Besides, I was no longer able to do it on company time. (Yes, there is a delicious irony here.) So I passed it on to Joey, who's done a great job keeping it going over the years.

I've considered taking over writing DWN again. However, it's not clear to me that DWN is still relevant enough to be worth the large amount of work it takes to maintain it. A lot of communication is done on Planet Debian, wikis and in other forms that were not around when DWN was started, and that may be a better way to keep up with what's going on in Debian than DWN.

If there is a gap left by DWN, I'd feel more comfortable filling it by blogging something each week about what'd going on in Debian without necessarily trying to cover parts of the project that I'm not deeply involved in. (For example, I'm ignoring everything to do with debian-vote right now.) This approach seems more scalable, modern, and likely to take much less time. We could even have a special aggregator with feeds from other people doing the same.

discussion

You might think that an organisation of over 1000 very smart people could do better. I certianly thought so -- until I sat through one of the Debian debates on -vote. Many of the participants acted the age they must have been when they first learned the mnemonic "Garbage In, Garbage Out." They argued, often quite belligerently, from their own narrow perspectives, unable (or unwilling) to see the situation from anybody else's point of view. [...] bureaucrats, not programmers.

Paraphrased from Rick Fienberg's editorial in November's Sky & Telescope, describing the IAU Pluto definition. The parallel seems amusing, especially since both cases involve silly votes.

Simon, you have a good point, but while I am not ashamed to admit that I fall on your "rating by others" end of the scale -- happy Debian users make me happy -- much of your analysis seems a bit simplistic and not mindful of the fact that scales include points in between.

If Ubuntu only enticed all of our desktop users away, I wouldn't feel very threatened by it. I'd feel disappointed that we lost those users, but I'd see all the other users we have in other areas, and I could be satisfied with that. After all, Windows still has the lion's share of the desktop users, and I don't feel threatened by it. Or by OS X.

However, when significant development momentum shifts to Ubuntu, when there are lots of things happening there, I do begin to feel very threatened by it. I begin looking to see if development that's happening on Ubuntu is being contributed back to Debian. I conclude that it's largely a one-way street; any improvement I work on in Debian will get into Ubuntu with nearly 100% probability, but any improvement Ubuntu makes will only get into Debian if someone goes out, reads through a patch, and finds it.

See, I'm also motivated by Debian being suitable for many different purposes -- I fall on the other end of your scale too. And I know that I don't want to be today using the software and hardware I was using 5 years ago. And 5 years from now, I won't want to be using the software and hardware I'm using today. My needs will change, things will evolve, and lots of development will be needed for Debian to still be relevant, to still be suitable for all its many purposes.

And if much of the development momentum shifts to Ubuntu, and if there is not even a culture of pushing improvements back into Debian, there's a very real possibility that that won't happen. And then those of us all along this interesting Scale of Superiority you describe will have to decide between giving up and going to Ubuntu, or taking up ballroom dancing.

I've personally decided that if this happens, I won't be taking the former option; Debian is the last linux distribution I intend to work on.

This is the first in a planned series of weekly posts on what's happening in Debian, which I plan to do to help fill the gap left by Martin Schulze no longer writing DWN. I will post these on Fridays with a dwn tag, and while I don't plan to cover everything that's happening in Debian, like I tried to do when I edited DWN, my hope is that if some other people also do this, we'll cover enough to be useful. On to the news items..

mplayer in sid. The mplayer package has had the longest tenure in NEW of any package ever to be uploaded to Debian. But it's finally been accepted into the archive. Depending on the videos you need to play, you may still need non-free codecs from outside Debian, such as Christian Marillat's repository. Congratulations to mplayer's maintainers and to the ftpmasters for resolving the licencing issues that kept mplayer out of Debian for so long.

d-i string freeze and release plans. In preparation for the first release candidate of d-i for etch, a string freeze has been going on for the last two weeks, and changes to the installer are limited to bug fixing. Frans Pop posted details and a timeline for RC1. Note that preparations for RC1 have already broken most beta 3 d-i images.

alioth move. Alioth has just moved to a new server. Amoung other changes, svn.debian.org moved to the same host as alioth, eliminating some issues caused by splitting them before.

archive.progeny.com decomissioned. This significant Debian mirror was turned off on October 22nd, and anyone still using it should switch to a different mirror.

I'm finally doing some serious optimisation of ikiwiki tonight. It had been feeling a bit slow.

So far with one optimisation (making it into a two-pass compiler) I've sped it up about 8x in some cases, though it's probably more like 2x-4x in the general case of rebuilding a wiki from scratch. Incremental builds are also sped up somewhat, though generally much less.

Another optimisation changes backlinks calculation from O(N³) to O(N²) on the number of pages in the wiki. Of course N² still isn't very good, but this is still a serious improvement. Especially when you have thousands of pages.

Rebuilding my personal wiki with these optimisations, it builds 9 times faster than before, now taking just 1 minute. Ikiwiki's own wiki rebuilds in 7 seconds instead of 34.

Stunning!

The Mountain Stage show that I attended in Bristol this July is on the air now.

Well, I seem to have managed to change my web browser, to epiphany. With all the recent firefox/iceweasel ugliness, it's nice to get away from that. I am also pleased with the clean and small footprint layout that I managed to configure epiphany to use (after installing some extensions), and with its speed and UI improvements. I especially like the bookmark managing; tagging bookmarks makes sense, the Most Visited menu is great, and typing in bookmark names to access them, and search terms for google/wikipedia is quite convenient.

Nearly the only thing I'd like to change is the throbber icons. The default one is too subtle, I like firefox's spinning tab load icons.

discussion