inamerrata

It’s almost the end of financial year in Australia, so what better time to take stock?

I’m actually a bit surprised at just how much I need to do that — I knew being DPL would involve some new challenges, but it’s barely two months in and I’m already just about in shock. Guess it serves me right for putting “increasing Debian’s tempo” in my platform…

The two other roles I’ve been in that I would have expected to prepare me more have been Debian release manager, and secretary of Linux Australia. They’re both similar in a way — the release manager does a lot of cat herding within Debian, and has to make some calls that will leave people aggrieved; and Linux Australia has some contact with the press, and some reasonably serious projects going on. So a few issues were completely expected: a random initial slashdotting, a press report, an interview or two, some requests for quotes in articles and press releases, or ongoing opposition and arguments from dedicated Debianites who don’t happen to agree with me on some decision.

There were other things that were new and interesting though not really surprising. The leader@ mail address turned out to have just as much spam as I expected, though also some unexpected interesting stuff too, including my first ever personally addressed open letter — in this case by Keith Curtis who also wrote the 10,000 bugs away from World Domination article that got slashdotted a while back. A tidbit:

Everyone agrees that Ubuntu couldn’t exist without Debian, but I also believe that Debian is better setup to take Ubuntu where it needs to go. There are hints that the Ubuntu team feels like they brought a pork chop suit to a lions den. Ubuntu’s user base and development team is growing exponentially, but I believe they could get there much faster with more of Debian’s help.

Keith also forwarded an open letter he’d written to Mark Shuttleworth, and had some interesting comments on the whole Java thing. As well, I suddenly started receiving SPI board mail, as Debian’s advisory representative to the SPI board, and started getting a couple of requests for authorising expenditures (Debian UK reimbursing Matthew Garrett for travel costs to the Gnome Advisory Board meeting in 2005) or providing a Debian representative for a meeting or joining the Google Summer of Code. And then there were the cool things I knew absolutely nothing about, like the excellent news Christian Perrier passed on about the launch of Dzongkha Linux, featured in news reports from Bhutan, India, and Australia.

Of course, I completely expected that all this would overload me a bit, and I’d end up getting distracted from what I wanted to do, and not being able to keep up with stuff other people wanted me to do. To help with this a little, I delegated Steve McIntyre as, essentially, a co-DPL, and he’s been working on a few things, including the now successful switch of irc.debian.org over to OFTC, and another fun little endeavour that I won’t spoil just yet.

Things started getting a bit weird as I was preparing to travel off to debconf in Mexico — with some frustrated comments from damog and Marga and Gunnar, which was odd coming from the conference organisers themselves; and independently the reinflamation of some old tension on the debian-installer team. That got compounded at debconf itself, with the controversy over the inclusion of Sun Java in non-free extending not just to the lists, but an article in LWN (with a followup) as well as numerous other places around the net.

That issue came to something of a climax when John Goerzen (with whom I’ve had some entertaining disagreements in the past) questioned whether SPI had been sufficiently involved in the decision (“I am becoming increasingly concerned at the unilateral method in which you and/or the archive maintainers have taken this decision.”), to which I responded fairly curtly to defend the way Debian makes decisions (“If SPI wish to withdraw from their relationship with Debian, then that’s entirely possible to arrange. I don’t think it’s at all proper that you try to obtain veto power of Debian’s activities as conducted by the duly authorised members of that organisation.”). Nothing’s really news there — flamewar on Debian lists between influential project members? Next thing you know the sun will rise in the East every morning, and then where will we be?

What’s not so normal is those flamewars getting front page coverage on slashdot, or noted in an article on distrowatch. As far as Debian’s concerned, we had a couple more rounds, both in public and on the developer only -private list, then moved onto actually getting the legal advice John wanted. That’s actually still pending, and the debate has pretty much abated while that’s going on. And meanwhile, Wouter Verhelst, Manoj Srivastava, and others have started a much more productive look at Debian’s relationship with SPI and similar organisations, which has continued on to a draft of a constitutional amendment.

But there was more stress and chaos at debconf than just the Java stuff, but what’s really impressive is the way people ended up dealing with it. Take damog for example:

Just as Tore said: This is the best DebConf ever. Isn’t it great?

I started really enjoying this DebConf once I stopped worrying about bullshit, once I stopped worrying about senseless things and started to really give a shit about almost anything. Why do I need Gunnar to tell my girlfriend Ana, “you picked up the irresponsible one”? Why do I have to worry about the DPL giving a shit or not on the Latinamerican Debian community, even after being invited to meet the guys or to attend our BOF? […] I enjoy people here, thanks to all the organization cabal, thanks for your effort and your time on this.

[…]

But after leaving all of this behind, I think Ana and me are having a great time sharing time with friends around us (the friends, los cuates, we are here for).

After seeing that post, and figuring out who damog actually was when he gave a lightning talk towards the end of the conference, we had a chance to briefly chat about what was going on — somehow I hadn’t taken in the invitation to attend the BOF, and had been told it was all in Spanish anyway, so hadn’t gone; meanwhile they’ve been thinking about holding a Debian miniconf in Latin America somewhere and wanting to know what sort of support they can get from the rest of the project — particularly moral support rather than financial, at that. Hopefully we’ll see news on that score in the coming months.

But really, damog was right in the first place anyway: why care if the DPL supports you or not? Debian’s about everyone doing what they think is good and worthwhile, and that combining to produce something great — it’s not about what some guy who got six votes more than the next guy happens to think is important.

But support is important, whether it comes in the form of a DPL saying “good idea!”, or something else. Gunnar’s response to the latter, eg:

Debian is love.

After my scream for help a couple of days ago, and after a mountain of hard work, things are just running. No, we are not -by far- free of incidents, and it would be foolish to expect it to be so, but we are working nicely. And by the way, thank you, I have been receiving the largest amount of hugs ever, and believe me, each of them has been important.

[…]

Thank you all, folks. I am in Cristoph Berg’s talk about reworking NM – And this comes very good to wrap up my post. Debian is much, much more than technical work. It is a social club. I love this social club. Just sitting here makes long months of work really worth it.

A great hug back to you all!

And in the end we got quite a bit out of debconf6, for example more movement on the forthcoming release, improvements on i18n stuff, a new publicity project, movement on updating python, amongst other things. Who knows if the next debconf will manage to be anywhere near as much of an experience, but at least we’ll find out fairly soon where it’s going to be (though that process isn’t without hiccups of its own).

Post debconf, there’s also been a notable influx of trolling going on too; with the most obvious and odious example being the insane, anonymously-posted prayers for a female developer’s death. Fortunately those have mostly been ignored as the mindless spam they are, though one might argue that Marcela Tiznado’s acceptance as a DD on her birthday, and the inclusion of women.debian.org in the official debian.org namespace are a more appropriate response to that sort of harassment than any sort of direct reply anyway.

Not all our problems have conveniently been resolved right now, of course, the difficulties related to the installer team I alluded to above are ongoing, and at the moment a really good solution is still eluding us, though development continues anyway.

And then, of course, there’s more to come — half the point of posting this is so I can stop worrying about all the stuff that’s been and gone, and get on with interesting things like the next point release, and the various other projects that I’ve let languish for the past few weeks.

Today’s news: I’m now a scary biker type person, just like Martin, Michael, David, Bruce, and James along with once and future bikers like Sarah or Pia, but only dreaming of approaching the glory days of the munificent Greg. As of yesterday, my ride is a gorgeous blue 2005-model Honda VTR250, picked up from the dealer with a whole 1km already on the odometer (apparently they rode it to the service station to get some fuel).

My first trip was thus the 30km jaunt out to my parents’ place from Team Moto Honda on Moss St. Which would’ve been great, had the bike not been brand new with brand new tyres that still have the factory seal (and are thus inclined to slip a bit until it’s worn off), or had the roads not been damp or wet from showers all morning. Still it turned out fine, apart from a brief back-wheel skid while I was making sure I was familiar with how the bike brakes in a car park just after picking it up, and fortunately the rain stopped pretty much as we were doing the paperwork so the roads had had a brief chance to dry out. It rained a bit at the end of the ride, which didn’t seem to cause any problems — and turned into a confidence booster because I was expecting to have some sort of a problem. Did a little more riding afterwards, to get used to the gear and the bike and the roads and everything, and it’s seemed to go pretty well so far.

The original plan wasn’t actually to get a spiffy new bike, but rather one of the old learner bikes from Ridesmart, which ran the course that I did with Clinton to get our motorbike licenses. Our instructors were Warren and Leith, who were great — they expected a much higher level of performance than we actually needed to get the licence, and gave us plenty of reasons why that’s useful. Since my mum occassionally reads my blog, I won’t repeat any of those stories here though… In any case, they were switching from VTR250s for their low end bikes to the new (in Australia) CBF250s, which have a single cylinder engine and are designed more for commuting around the city, and generally should make more sense for teaching learners. So we said “hey, cool, any chance we could buy your old ones?” and they said “sure, when we get the new ones”, which will apparently happen next week some time. But when I was going shopping for a helment and proper riding gear last weekend, my mum mentioned “by the way, we were thinking of buying the bike for you as a birthday present”. Naturally, I replied “…”.

Somehow it went from there to getting a brand new one right off the dealership floor, signed, sealed, and ready to be picked up on my birthday. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any gaps in my memory of the sequence of events, but somehow they still doesn’t seem to make any sense. Oh well!

What else? I’ve been pretty impressed with all the motorbike people I’ve met; and it’s really weird to see how much more attention I pay to an engine revving as it goes past on the street now compared to six months ago. It’s also pretty weird to actually know things about engines and tyre pressures and whatever — I’d always avoided fussing over engines and guns as a kid as too traditionally macho and therefore insufficiently geeky. Well, at least admitting you’re wrong doesn’t fit that category…

Next, apart from spending a lot more time riding the bike in, taking it back to get oggy nobs fitted, and generally working out good routes to get around, I get to spend a day at the Mt Cotton driver training centre improving my roadcraft and having some fun racing around a track — something I’d been planning on anyway, and then got a voucher for with the bike. I’ve also started looking into getting a little GPS datalogger of some sort so I can track where I’ve been, and possibly to hook up to mapping software on my iPaq, since it turns out there’s definitely not enough room under the seat for a paper street director. Then there’s luggage, and going on some long rides over Cunningham’s Gap or down into New South Wales, and upgrading my license in a year or two so I can switch to a bigger bike, and…

Mmmm…

Who would have thought this would turn out to be one of the better DPL portraits from DC6?

My first blog post after winning the Debian Project Leader election. Scary. Links so far: debian-project, Slashdot, ZDNet Australia. I’m trying to make sure I’ve got something vaguely new to say before replying to press requests, and to also make sure I say anything new on some Debian forum first, and given there’s one I’m replying to tonight, well, you do the maths…

So my tentative theory is to put together a list of ten-twelve “interesting projects” to push forward over the course of the year, in theory one a month. The idea is that’ll stop me from letting my time be taken up reacting to things — whether that be problems, questions, the press or what have you — and thus losing control of what I’m doing, and that it’ll also force me to keep moving onto new things regularly, and also to actually “finish” them too so they don’t cause an ongoing distraction. My current list of topics is: maintainers; partners; extended suite support; constitutional stuff; non-free; distributed leadership; localisation/specialisation; livecds; the etch release. Those are just heading to roughly remind me of various s3kr1t pl0ts I’ve thought about in the past, and you shouldn’t read too much into it — you’re welcome to think about them yourself, and get inspired though.

And I’m sure I’ll change some of them around over the next few days; but one that won’t include the first one, which is something that I’ve been thinking about for most of the year now. I’ve talked about it privately with a few people over drinks and IRC, and it looks like it’s basically at the point where it seems sensible to everyone, and just needs to be coded up.

But enough teasing.

There are a few ways to explain the concept, this is the one I prefer. The idea is to do away with the whole concept of “sponsored uploads”, and replace it with a more formal and efficient way of doing the same thing. Sponsorship has a few significant problems: first, it makes it harder to work out who’s actually responsible for an upload when you can’t just rely on the name in the changes file; second, it puts a roadblock in the way of getting bugs fixed in the sponsored package — you don’t only have to have the fix ready, you have to find a sponsor with free time to check your work and upload; and third, it confuses who is responsible for broken packages: the sponsor for not doing sufficient checks, or the packagers for not getting it right in the first place.

The obvious way to fix the first problem is to make dak check that the key used to sign the .changes files uploaded actually matches the person listed in the .changes file as doing the uploading. But of course, that alone would kill off sponsorship, and thus make a fairly large number of packages (does anyone know how many?) essentially unmaintained, and also make it harder to prove you know what you’re doing when going through the new-maintainer process.

Interestingly, the obvious way to solve the second and third problems is also to do away with sponsorship, but in a different sense — namely by letting the packager upload directly. Of course, that’s unacceptable per se, since we rely on our uploaders to ensure the quality of their packages, so we need some way of differentiating people we can trust to know what they’re doing, from people we can’t trust or who don’t yet know what they’re doing.

Of course, there’s not really anything stopping us from doing that; and it’s something that’s been suggested before — it just means that as well as separating some contributors to the project out as “Debian Developers” after passing the new-maintainer process, we need some other level of people who’re trusted to do what sponsored packagers currently do — maintain a single package, after getting vetted by a developer.

And basically, that’s what I think we should do; and I’m calling the intermediate level “Debian Maintainers”.

The idea is that while a Debian Developer (DD) can do everything we currently can — upload NEW packages, NMU each others packages, hijack packages in extreme cases, and so forth — a Debian Maintainer (DM) can only maintain a specific package, after being authenticated by a DD in three ways: first to ensure they’re a real person via the usual key signing mechanisms, second to ensure they can be trusted to understand what uploading to Debian involves, and third to ensure that they understand what’s involved in maintaining a particular package before being given rights to upload new versions of that package.

Hrm. This is getting too long, so I’ll leave commenting on implementation details for later, and close with some of the possible implications on how Debian works.

One thing is that it means is that it adds an extra way in which you can contribute to Debian; from just using it, you can move to helping other people in usergroups, to contributing bug reports, to helping fix bug reports, to sending the maintainer patches to upload, to becoming a DM, to becoming a DD.

Another thing it means is that the DAM role becomes somewhat more decentralised; suddenly every DD can vet new contributors, though in a far more limited way than the DAM and FD does.

Another thing is that the utility of being a DD both rises and drops: if you just want to maintain some package, being a DD instead of a DM is pointless; but on the other hand, this is a new ability DD’s don’t currently have. It’s possible that might have a flow-on effect to new-maintainer, meaning that fewer people bother with it — giving AMs more time — or that the people who do bother with it need to be more thoroughly tested, or tested on different areas — giving AMs less time.

Another thing it means is that there’s the possibility of more central control over who can upload than sponsorship allows — rather than only looking at which DD is involved and which package is involved, we’ll have signatures by the person who did the actual packaging directly.

And of course if we have their key anyway, we can — if we choose — allow that key to sign votes in elections, with whatever limitations we might choose, such as requiring they be a registered contributor for over six months before voting, or that their votes are advisory only rather than binding, or that they can only vote in some elections, or that their vote is weighted less than a DD’s vote. And, of course, we could try different arrangements out and see what effect they have.

This is a big thing, so it needs to be done with a great deal of care. In particular, it seems like the best way to handle DMs will be to do so almost entirely automatically (rather than add extra tasks to keyring-maint or the new-maintainer team eg), which means both that the scripts need to be written with extreme care, and probably also that all the information they work with be completely public so that it’s easily auditable.

The current theory is that becoming a DM should work roughly like:

1. work with some developer, by helping resolve bugs, providing or testing patches, and otherwise demonstrate you’re interested and sensible
2. ask that DD to send an advocate mail to a bot supporting your desire to be a DM
3. reply to an automated mail from the bot, indicating you support the social contract, agree with the DMUP and constitution etc
4. receive an acknoledgement from the bot that your replies are in order, that your key is signed by a DD other than your advocate, and that you’re a registered DM
5. ask that DD (or another) to upload a new version of the package you want to (co-)maintan with your name and email address added to the Maintainer: or Uploaders: field
6. maintain the package directly

So that’s the theory. More detailed thoughts on the implementation later, hopefully after I’ve caught up on some sleep.

I debated a bit where to send this — since I expect trying to get this idea happening will be my main focus this month, maybe it would be better off on one of the Debian lists; but on the other hand, it’s a bit more half-baked than I’d feel comfortable posting to -devel-announce, and I suspect just posting to -devel would miss some people it shouldn’t. And hey, it’s not hard to forward a url, or just cut and paste the whole thing, right? Discussion (probably on debian-devel) encouraged.

Via tha ABC:

Queensland’s Police and Corrective Services Minister Judy Spence […] told Parliament […] “Palmer and Comrie got it right, the Department of Immigration is unwilling to review and reform itself and it isn’t helped by an incompetent and indolent minister who isn’t willing to push these reforms.”

So today’s award for the promotion of indolence as a term and a lifestyle is jointly awarded to Ms Spence and Ms Vanstone! Congratulations to both our winners!

Like last year I thought I might blog some random thoughts on the DPL campaign from the last few weeks. Since there’s already the platforms to read, not to mention the debate, and the various mails to the debian-vote mailing list, I’ll add a fold to make it easy to skip.

One thing which seemed a marked improvement was the way the debate ran; it seemed much less stressful in how it was run this year — in particular last year we had problems working out how to pass on our answers during the debate, and I think we had less time to give answers too. This time the main difficulty was that the second phase of the debate only allowed 1m30 to respond to questions, which wasn’t enough time unless you wrote your answer in advance and pasted it. Don seems interested in running some more debates through the year on other topics, so that might give us a chance to make some more improvements to how we run these things.

The -vote discussion this year seemed a lot more muted than last time: for instance, the March 2005 archives included some 900 messages, while this year there’ve been just under 500 so far. Top posters this year were: Anthony Towns (49), Jeroen van Wolffelaar (34), Martin (Joey) Schulze (30), Steve McIntyre (28), Andreas Schuldei (28), Ted Walther (20), Matthew Garrett(20), Bill Allombert (16), MJ Ray (15), Martin Krafft (14), Steve Langasek (14). (Ari posted 8 mails, another six developers posted more than him, but fewer than Steve) So not only much less divergence between how much the candidates had to say than last year, but also most of the posts were by candidates rather than other developers.

One thing I’m left wondering is how much of the controversies in the debate, and in Debian in general, are really what they purport to be, and how many are more along the lines of personality clashes, or unresolved and ongoing grudges. Marc Haber’s comment seemed particularly applicable:

Yes, the problem that we have with ftpmaster are not solved by better communication. They can probably be mitigated, but frankly, I don’t see that there is any way to solve the ftpmaster issues with the current cast of characters.

If you’re at the point where no matter what happens, it’ll never be enough unless you have someone’s resignation, is that about doing the job right, or about one-upmanship and proving who’s the dominant male? To take another example, consider Joss’s comment on my resignation as release manager in 2004:

As time has passed, I’m afraid I can’t come up with real examples, but the feeling of a huge improvement when Steve took the job remains.

Had I not stepped down but otherwise everything had happened in exactly the same way — with me treating everyone the same as Colin and Steve treated them, and sarge not releasing for another ten months — I wonder if there would still have been a feeling of huge improvement. Personally, I suspect not, and that leads me to think that those perceptions aren’t actually getting at the real problem, and are probably a distraction from it. If the real thing that annoys people is my strong opinions, there’s not much point telling me to be more transparent instead. I wonder how much chance for cooperation gets lost when these confrontations metastasise into more traditional complaints that aren’t actually the real cause.

Though, even if it’s not the real issue, at least “be more transparent” is a specific suggestion for improvement, and is to be appreciated for that. In contrast, take MJ Ray’s criticisms of Steve and Ari: “Did something I dislike a lot”. At least his criticism of me was a little more precise, namely “Lost my vote on Wed, 17 Aug 2005.” which at least lets me have a guess at what he’s going on about. I came up with a few from around that time — there was the discussion on the “DCC Alliance” on -project, though nothing I could see that matched that date, and there was a flamewar on -private but I don’t seem to have posted much to that at all. OTOH, I did post to my blog, and the 17th also seems to have been around the time that the debbugs CSS got updated to its slick new look. But my best guess at what lost me MJ’s vote seems to have been my mail to FSF Europe (cc’ed to debian-email, archives available to developers on master), in response to trying to work out how to consult Debian on the GPLv3 after concerns that the FSF had been “mobbed off” the debian-legal list in the past; in the interests of transparency, deliberative democracy, etc, here’s that mail:

From: Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>
Resent-Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 02:33:29 -0500 (CDT)

On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 06:21:17PM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote:
> Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
> > Do you know anyone you would suggest as mediator on this?
> I'd ask mjray, who's also on friends.

Uh, MJ Ray's not exactly known for his mediation abilities is he?
Mako (http://mako.cc; mako@debian.org) would seem like a much better bet,
though he's not European.

Interestingly, I only sent that mail on the suggestion of someone who’s on one of the DPL teams this year, both of which MJ looks likely to rank above me.

In any event, focussing on the personal is probably an inevitable consequence of “leadership” elections though — one of the obvious questions that gets asked is “what makes you so special?”, and, for me at least, that’s been a bit hard to answer this year, because I’m actually fairly happy with all the candidates this year. Beyond that the whole idea of saying “this is my idea, not theirs, and my ideas are better than theirs” seems antithetical to the whole open source philosophy anyway. Why do we spend three weeks having our prospective leaders tear down each others’ ideas rather than work on integrating them and improving them? How does that actually make any sense at all?

Bdale’s been making a similar point at the conferences I’ve seen him at over the past year, with a view to moving from a single DPL into some sort of leadership group, but so far we haven’t really had any serious idea how to do that beyond “have the elected DPL recruit a team”, which still suffers from many of the same flaws.

One thing that really surprised me is that without exception, every candidate this year proposed some sort of speech limitations — whether it be Andreas or Jeroen or Steve’s “code of conduct”, or Bill’s “rules for better communications”. Even Ari warned of kitten-killing domukuns (domuki?), and Ted appears to be concerned at reducing the amount of religious discrimination occurring on lists.

Happily, there seems to be a similar level of interest in the ideas from my platform, with the “vitality” concept being similar to David Nusinow’s ideas on momentum and Lars Wirzenius’s thoughts on

I sent in my vote for the DPL election. Fortunately, devotee was written by Manoj, not me, so the response I got back didn’t look like this:

You voted, yeah, yeah, yeah
You voted, yeah, yeah, yeah
You voted, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah....

Well, I thought you'd miss the vote,
But your ballot came today!
So I'm writing you this note,
And this is what it says:
It says you voted!
And you know that can't be bad...
It says you voted!
And you know you should be glad -- oooh!

Well, I thought you ought to know,
That I've tallied up your vote...
And now the website shows,
That you've got cause to gloat!
Because you voted!
And you know that can't be bad...
Yes you voted,
And you know you should be glad -- oooh!

You voted, yeah, yeah, yeah
You voted, yeah, yeah, yeah
And with a vote like that,
You know you should be glad...

Now it's not up to you,
Chew your nails or stamp you feet;
Results will be out soon,
Then you can party in the street...
Because you voted!
And you know that can't be bad...
Yes you voted,
And you know you should be glad -- oooh!

You voted, yeah, yeah, yeah
You voted, yeah, yeah, yeah
And with a vote like that,
You know you should be glad...
With a vote like that,
You know you should be glad...
With a vote like that,
You know you should...
Be glad!
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...

(to the tune of She Loves You by the Beatles)

So with the rebuttals up for the DPL campaign, it’s as good a time as any to post the couple of drafts I had that didn’t make it into mine:

First, Ode to Zeke:

Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
I’ve been with Ari, he bought me some cream!
Pussycat, pussycat, are you sure that is all?
Well he did take some photos, to put on his wall…
Pussycat, pussycat, have you seen this website?
Oh, you mean “Team Ari”, ain’t it a delight!
Pussycat, pussycat, but what’s in it for you?
I just do what he says, lest we see you-know-who.
Pussycat, pussycat, how does he hold you in thrall?
You fool, if I run, he swears he’ll cut off my balls!

And second, my favourite, to the tune of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:

Picture yourself in a team with the leader,
With frequent reports, and performance reviews;
Somebody emails, an answer’s forthcoming,
Compliant with mailing list rules…

Media releases, highlighting the project,
Users becoming your friends!
Look for the issues being mediated,
And they’re gone!

Jeroen puts esteem in talking…

To be continued?

Joey replies to my post from yesterday with his own example of leaving:

The technical details remain as irrelivant today as they were at the time, the relevant problem being that developers who are not involved in the installer development rarely consider how their actions can affect it.

When a policy gets int the way of solving a problem, it’s time to leave, that’s all.

His posted logs suffer from unescaped angle brackets so aren’t very easy to follow; and also from the fact that for rather obvious reasons they don’t include any of the conversation that took place after he left. Extended logs and the other side of that story below the fold:

02:40 <joeyh> aj: sigh, did you realy have to break d-i yet again right as we’re trying ot release it?
02:40 <aj> ?
02:41 <aj> joeyh: (also, please try to avoid making things overly personal on this channel, cf the charter)
02:42 <joeyh> fine, did one have to ignore the d-i release and make a package upload with lots of changes that broke d-i internalls. Yes one did
02:42 <joeyh> for at least two values of one
02:42 <aj> joeyh: please explain what you’re talking about, in technical terms
02:43 <aj> joeyh: if you do so, it might get fixed
02:48 <aj> joeyh: hello?
02:50 <h01ger> joeyh, i _guess_ you’re referring to the debootstrap-upload of aj ?! /me wonders why an upload to unstable breaks the d-i beta, isnt that build+based on etch ?
02:50 <joeyh> sorry, busy fixing the beakage
02:51 <Sledge> looks like a debootstrap change is causing problems in CD builds
02:51 <joeyh> well, there has not been a usable combination of apt, debootstrap, and d-i in testing for well over a week
02:53 <aj> so you’re saying i didn’t break it just as you’re trying to release?
02:55 <joeyh> no you broke it just as the fixed NMU was ready to go into testing
02:56 <h01ger> .oO( ah )
02:56 <aj> sigh
02:56 <neuro> …and we’re still waiting for the technical details
02:56 <aj> joeyh: second warning. this channel’s for technical discussions, eg “here’s what broke: …”, not accusations, eg “you broke it” “why’d you have to break it” “yes one did”.
02:57 <aj> joeyh: if you want, there’s still time to put 0.3.1.9 into testing
02:58 -!- joeyh [joey@kitenet.net] has quit [Quit: Terminated with extreme prejudice – dircproxy 1.0.5]
03:01 <liw> when an operator here is involved in a dispute, might it be best to have someone other than them to do the warning off of people?
03:02 <aj> i’d love that
03:03 <Sledge> sorry, I was distracted looking into CD builds or I’d have done so… :-(
03:24 <fjp> I understand joeyh’s frustration. We have been this >< close to a beta for oh, the last three weeks. Every time we think the last major issue is fixed, whoops, there’s yet another upload or migration that breaks d-i in a major way and leaves us to trace the cause of the problem and most of the time provide the fix as well.
03:25 <aj> well, that’s great, but putting debootstrap 0.3.1.9 into testing is something that could happen right now if anyone could be bothered explaining what’s going on
03:25 <fjp> Not saying it’s anybody’s fault, it’s just frustrating as it takes a lot of energy tracking all components needed for a d-i releasy; especially now.
03:25 <fjp> aj: We will. Watch you mailbox for but reports…
03:27 <aj> well, no, this is a time limited thing; dinstall’s in just over an hour
03:27 <aj> and i should’ve already gone to bed
03:28 <aj> it’s been almost 50 minutes since joeyh’s initial complaint already, even
03:28 <fjp> aj: I doubt you’ll be able to help much today then. Maybe joeyh can do it on his own. I guess he’s either working on that or taking a hike :-)
03:29 <aj> huh?
03:29 <aj> i can put 0.3.1.9 in testing with one command
03:29 <fjp> OK. Please do. That gives us a fallback at least.
03:29 <aj> *sigh*
03:30 <aj> can someone else please try getting an explanation of what’s going on
03:30 * fjp looks up bug #
03:30 <fjp> aj: #335653
03:31 <fjp> aj: Sorry, just got home and catching up on everything.
03:35 <aj> fjp: debootstrap-udeb is already 0.3.1.9 in testing, that’s a 0.3.1.9 log…?
03:35 <aj> (or earlier, perhaps)
03:37 <aj> fjp: it’s missing ++ DEF_MIRROR=http://ftp.debian.org/debian
03:37 <aj> fjp: which would show up if it were 0.3.2
03:38 <fjp> In that case I’m probably unaware yet of the new problem…
03:38 <fjp> Hmm. Wonder how that can that have gone missing all of a sudden.
03:39 <fjp> Anyway. Personally I’m not going to be rushed by todays dinstall. Dinner first and then I’ll try to look into these problems as well.
03:40 <fjp> (Including the one debian-cd is apparently having.)
03:40 <aj> *shrug* if it’s not done by today’s dinstall, it’ll probably be done with the 2day SoE and it won’t be possible to revert
03:41 <fjp> aj: I see joeyh made this commit for base-installer:
03:41 <fjp> [18:50:02] <CIA-2> debian-installer: * Remove code that munged/demunged Packages and Release filename in the
03:41 <fjp> [18:50:04] <CIA-2> debian-installer: cache for debootstrap, since debootstrap no longer does that munging.
03:41 <fjp> [18:52:33] <CIA-2> debian-installer: joeyh packages * r31703 /base-installer/etch-beta1/debian/changelog: releasing version 1.35.2
03:41 <fjp> Hopefully that fixes the new problems.
03:44 <aj> for values of “no longer does that munging” approaching “undoes the munging itself” now
03:46 <fjp> Anyway, change in behavior with nasty consequences at an inconvenient time.
03:48 <aj> well, night
03:48 <Sledge> night…

Other relevant details — the conversation above took place on the morning of the 27th of October localtime here. The upload in question was debootstrap 0.3.2, made on the 23rd of October. The previous upload was debootstrap 0.3.1.9, made by Joey on the 19th of October, and which also entered testing on the 20th. The debootstrap udebs in testing (which are synced independently), remained at 0.3.1.7 until the 25th of October, at which point they were replaced with the 0.3.1.9 versions. They were then updated to 0.3.2 in the dinstall run after the above conversation, and then to 0.3.3 on the 30th of December.

Those changes were all mentioned on the #debian-release channel, since the d-i beta was a pretty high priority. On the 25th, there was the following:

20:34 <aj> hrm, joeyh pushed debootstrap in too
20:34 <aj> i guess that means it didn't break too horibbly
20:35 <vorlon> :)
20:35 <aj> # more changes than I would like, but unbreaks etch install
20:35 <aj>  ^- debootstrap
20:35 <aj> # necessary for d-i beta
20:35 <aj>  ^- apt

The comments are from the commands joeyh passed to the testing script to get apt and debootstrap updated in testing. A few hours later, I also said:

03:11 <aj> joeyh: i bumped debootstrap-udeb/testing to 0.3.1.9 (0.3.2 for m68k) since i figured the choice of 0.3.1.9 v 0.3.2 would probably be more useful than 0.3.1.7 v 0.3.2

Downgrading the udebs to the previous version is possible while they remain in the archive — which they do for about two days after they were last used. So the 0.3.1.9 versions left the archive in the run of the 29th.

The changes in that upload included three changes that were important for good installations: defaulting to –resolve-deps, catching failures when dpkg is invoked using –status-fd to provide progress information, and improved handling of log file capturing. They weren’t crucial, but they were also only uploaded after Joey’s NMU had already gone into testing.

Joey understates his level of self-recusement somewhat too; his departure wasn’t just from that channel, but IRC entirely, and he didn’t return even to other channels for quite some time.

This doesn’t really leave me anywhere useful: I did actually take a fair bit of care to avoid causing problems for d-i in advance as per the above, and months later I’m still not sure what actually went wrong, and Joey appears to still not be interested in actually telling anyone; so the only way I can prevent anything similar happening again is just not to work on debootstrap, or anything else that might be vaguely d-i related.

What’s going on here — what’s the point of just going up to someone and yelling at them, without even explaining why? Why should anyone put up with that shit?

Add that, the fact that just trying to talk about this stuff gets you called a “snarky asshole”, and Jacobo’s remarks from today (“the existence of a charter makes the environment almost as hostile as I can bear”) and I’m left not seeing any chance for any sort of “meeting of the minds” or quid-pro-quo here, just good odds that one way or another a whole bunch of people are going to end up following Joey’s and Jacobo’s advice: leave.

Back in September last year I blogged on #debian-tech, a new IRC channel for discussing Debian, but with a charter and some ops with a mandate to enforce it. At the time I wrote:

It’ll probably be quite a bit different from #debian-devel on either OFTC or FreeNode; hopefully that’ll turn out to be in a good way. We’ve got (I think) a pretty good variety of ops, who have (I think) some pretty good ideas on encouraging good productive activities on Debian. We’ll see what happens!

Since then, we’ve had a couple of significant discussions on it, reflected on the wiki page; the multiarch discussion was interesting and spontaneous, and the release and archive qualification discussions were both potentially highly contentious discussions that seemed to end up being conducted really well, and have both had some pretty significant results. That’s pretty pleasing — this time last year, there wasn’t anywhere I’d’ve been comfortable having those sorts of discussions in public, now there’s somewhere that’s been demonstrated to work fairly well.

A more surprising outcome is that we’ve never actually banned anyone from the channel. To some extent, this is to be expected since people who don’t like the concept just won’t join in the first place, and to the extent that’s true, it’s a good thing. And at least Wouter, who’d also objected in the past, was willing to join briefly for one of the discussions important to him and get along fine.

Unfortunately that’s not the only reason for the total lack of bans. The other aspect is that people have turned out to be far more ready to ban themselves than the ops have been. To anonymise an example from November last year:

17:19 <aj> anyone in a position to do an upload?
08:17 <anibal> aj, what would you like to be uploaded?
08:31 <aj> anibal: it’s fine now, don’t worry ’bout it
09:00 <anibal> aj, np
09:13 <dato> aj: you’re feeding our curiosity! ;-)
09:14 <aj> look, they’re secret changes, i can’t just go announcing this stuff you know!!
09:15 <aj> (oh god oh god, please don’t let any of them look in dak cvs)
15:45 <neuro> aj: best not look in wanna-build svn, either.
15:56 <aj> neuro: why? are there… secrets?
15:57 <neuro> only the ones that were posted to debian-devel…
16:01 <aj> neuro: this is a job for setec astronomy!
17:15 <taggart> aj: classic
01:09 <anon> aj: I’m a bit confused – are your comments within the charter of the channel? Or is being discourteous about people who aren’t currently participants in the channel intentionally permitted?
01:21 <neuro> anon: talking about the secret changes referred to elsewhere is being “discourteous” about other people?
01:23 <anon> Oh, screw it
01:23 -!- anon [anon@anon.anon] has left #debian-tech []

(For reference, the changes being referred to were some of the security-related dak hacking I was doing at the time, probably this.)

Obviously “secret changes” was a reference to a recent (at the time) mail to -devel-announce, which was somewhat controversial in so far as the changes it was announcing weren’t “secret”, just not widely known — and following the above, there was a brief productive discussion about what those changesmeant. In any case, Henrique noted subsequently that he considered the use of the term sarcastic. So in theory joking about it ought to have been fair game.

But on the other hand, it’s not particularly surprising that it might make someone uncomfortable either. What’s less great is that trying to talk about the disagreement resulted in “anon” giving up straight away and leaving — I wasn’t around for that quarter hour, let alone the couple of minutes between neuro’s comment and anon’s departure. And similar things have happened in a few other cases, so it’s not just “anon” being particularly sensitive — which is why I figure there’s not much point naming names in this case. FWIW, you can’t guess who “anon” is from any of the names above, or afaik from any of the related threads either. I’ve no idea if “anon” would care about being named here.

This is pretty much the exact opposite of what I expected — I figured any problems we’d have would be related to people being overeager to defend themselves or their point of view, not immediately giving up and walking away at the first sign of disagreement. After all, there’s always going to be some way to get around the rules if you really want to.

In part, that’s also why #d-tech isn’t that active; without some way of addressing the above, it seems a bit silly to advertise it too much, which for a new channel that hasn’t had that much discussion means there’s not going to be much in the future.

When you get right down to it, I’m really not sure what the deal is here. On rereading both Andrew Suffield’s recent semi-resignation following his banning from posting to -devel-announce, and Lars Wirzenius’s remark that “In some ways, I am a loser” in his recent de-nomination, I’m left wondering if those aren’t examples of some related problem. I’m just not sure what that is.

The only thing I can think of is some sort of inability to cope well with people disagreeing with them, but that’s an absurdly broad generalisation, and I know for a fact it isn’t true in at least some of the cases — and I don’t really believe it for the rest anyway. Originally I was worried that I’d developed some big scary aura and people were afraid to disagree with me, but I don’t think any of the examples above could reasonably be put down to that.

I guess when you get right down to it, I wonder if this isn’t the other side of the coin to complaining about poor communication in others — that is, not having confidence in your ability to put up with it, or not thinking it’s worth standing up to, or whatever. After all, if you were confident you could stand it, and did think it was worth putting up with, would you bother complaining in the first place?

UPDATE 2006/02/28:

First responses to the above? Joerg:

No bans? No traffic!

Anthony, of course you dont need a ban. That channel has virtually no traffic, compared to many/most other debian related channels. Most of the time its a join/part log, no discussion.

Second, from Clint:

Exclusion and hypocrisy

Anthony, you and Ryan behaving like snarky assholes looks to me to be in direct conflict with the #debian-tech charter.

The fact that at least one of the channel ops considers this to be acceptable behavior is a perfectly valid reason for people to refuse to participate.

Ah, isn’t it great the way Debian’s such a supportive environment these days?

Of course, the two responses above are fundamentally contradictory: if Clint’s right a ban (or similar) would’ve been appropriate, in spite of Joerg’s claim. On the other hand, Google’s sole definition of “snarky” seems to be “A colloquialism meaning short-tempered or snappish.” which doesn’t seem terribly applicable here — however short tempered anyone was, anon left before anyone had a chance to lose theirs. Sadly, the rest of Clint’s epithet assumes you’ve got some idea what the problem is in the first place.

Even if Clint’s completely wrong, Joerg’s complaint doesn’t really work either: even in spite of the lack of traffic, the other examples have had at least some sort of component of trying to keep the channel on track (so that it doesn’t devolve to people calling each other “snarky assholes”, eg). Here’s one:

14:59 <aj> foo: “* foo smacks bar.”; cf the charter, be nice, etc
15:00 <foo> aj, you’re kidding, right?
15:00 <aj> foo: no, not really?
15:01 <aj> foo: nor threatening if that’s what you’re thinking; just reminding
15:01 -!- foo [foo@foo.foo] has left #debian-tech [probably not the channel for me]

It’s pretty easy to say “but foo’s not out of line!” — and, heck, that’s what I thought, which was why it was just a pointer/reminder. Surely there’s something fundamentally wrong when people get scared away merely by “be nice”. If there’d been some history of bans following that sort of comment, I could understand — but there’s been no history of bans whatsoever.

UPDATE 2006/02/28:

Oh, and now there’s a response from Wouter too:

As you may have noticed, I did not say much during that time, and did not ever join #debian-tech afterwards. The reason that I did join at that point was that this discussion was, indeed, important, and that it was going on at #debian-tech. I didn’t want to risk not having a say again in the future of things that are important to me; the fact that I did this should not be interpreted as an acceptance of and agreement with the channel’s charter.

Of course, for the short time he was there (around 24h) he did abide by the charter; and the above’s exactly my point: even when people disagree with the concept of the charter, they’re still able to join and be productive. Which is great!

I still feel very uncomfortable about the be nice, or else… charter of #debian-tech, because it means you can not know whether something you say as a joke will be interpreted as hostility and might get you kicked. […]

Of course, it’s true you’ll never know whether something you say as a joke will be interpreted as hostility by someone — and there’s now a couple of examples of that above. But we’ve had a few months of evidence that none of that’s enough to get you kicked on #d-tech, which ought to provide some evidence that that fear’s not well-founded.

Item one: debbugs has moved from CVS to bzr.

Item two: it’s well past time I came out in support of Mary Gardiner’s brief guide on pronouncing “bzr”.

Item three: don’t you find the Sugababes’ latest pop ditty really quite catchy?

Put them all together, and what do you get?

Hit the bzr

I'm busy with this bug; this thing needs fixing.
Don't want to talk about it, just need to send in,
Everybody loves it, yet upstream seems distant.
Applies completely clean, how can they resist it?

You know that CVS is beyond reprieving,
Just how out of date should a girl be?
I was taken by an early BitKeeper release, and
Don't even mind the way Larry treated me.

  I've been waiting patiently for them to come and get it
  I wonder if they know that they could merge it and be with it
  You know I had my patch put up from the very beginning,
  Catch this opportunity so you and me can feel it, 'cos

  If you're ready for me, boy
  You'd better hit the bzr and let me know,
  Before I get the wrong idea and go.
  You're gonna miss the patch that I control...

I'm busy showing off what your branch is missing,
It's kinda goin' off, and got your full attention.
My sexy patch has gotta be the new obsession!
You ready to do something or accept secession?

  After waiting patiently for you to come and get it
  You came on through and asked me if I wanted commit access,
  I knew I had my mind made up from the very beginning,
  Won't miss this opportunity so you and me can feel it, 'cos

  If you're ready for me boy [...] x2

(Spoken:)
I've been posting so many urls,
You're still not merging it!
Now that you've heard everything I have to say
Where are we gonna go from here?

  After waiting patiently [...]

  If you're ready for me boy [...] x3

Apparently a week’s mail is a 166MB these days for me; I may be on too many lists. In the past week, 1.9kB of that mail were a couple of missives from Charles Plessy, related to one of my blog posts from last month. Apparently he’s embarassed at being associated with what he wrote, and seems to think the best way to approach this is to assert absolute control over the text as his intellectual property and threaten to contact my ISP. Obviously, I disagree, both morally on the grounds that I don’t care for supposed supporters of free software that resort to insults and legal threats, and legally on the grounds I don’t think Charles has any reasonable case to disassociate himself from his own words.

Just for the hell of it, his followup mails and mine are below the fold.

Subject: Thanks for your public answer, but could you keep it private?
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2006 15:28:37 +0900

Dear AJ,

Thanks for your public answer to my private email. As I sent it privately to avoid one of those ego contests that apppear from time to time on -devel, I would appreciate that you would keep it private by removing my last name from your web page.

http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2006/01/13#2006-01-13-yayhatemail

PS : In this web page, the words “I hate” are from you.

Best,

What should you do if you don’t receive a response to your request of Thursday evening about a three week old issue over the weekend? How about if you’re trying to “avoid one of those ego contests”? Why naturally you should escalate the conflict first thing Monday morning:

Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 08:59:53 +0900
Subject: [update] Thanks for your public answer, but could you keep it private?

On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 03:28:37PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote :
[The above mail]

Dear Anthony Towns,

It seems that you have been busy, so I understand that you could not do the modification of your blog yet. In the meantime, I read a bit about my rights, and they fall in two categories.

– As the writer of the mail you publish, I am the copyright holder, and you have no right to redistribute it, or derivatives of it, nor to relicense it under a Creative Commons licence.

– The french law forbids the publishing of private correspondence, and I have no doubt that the australian law have some similar rules.

So here is the licence I am proposing to you :

—————————–
I am hereby granting Anthony Towns the right to publish contents of this
e-mail, and the ones I sent him in January 2006, provided that no
mention is made of my last name, Plessy (this includes my e-mail address).
—————————–

If you do not accept it, please delete the quotes of my e-mail in the article of your blog of friday the 13th of january 2006.

It seems to me that a one week deadline is reasonnable. Past this delay, I will have contact your ISP.

Best regards,

I won’t post it because I’m not inclined to inflict spammers on anyway, but you can probably work out Charles’ email address from the original -devel thread if you care.

From: Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 08:59:53AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> It seems that you have been busy, so I understand that you could not do
> the modification of your blog yet. In the meantime, I read a bit about
> my rights, and they fall in two categories.

Actually I simply hadn’t seen your mail.

> – As the writer of the mail you publish, I am the copyright holder, and
> you have no right to redistribute it, or derivatives of it, nor to
> relicense it under a Creative Commons licence.

You can assert that if you like; but I disagree. I don’t think your mail contains enough originality for copyright to apply, I believe that publication of it falls under fair use considerations given the lack of commercial value to it, and the value to the public of having it not be left secret. Furthermore, in sending the mail to me in response to topic being discussed in public, I don’t believe you have any right to insist that it be private.
> So here is the licence I am proposing to you :

I have no interest in obtaining a license from you.

> —————————–
> I am hereby granting Anthony Towns the right to publish contents of this
> e-mail, and the ones I sent him in January 2006, provided that no
> mention is made of my last name, Plessy (this includes my e-mail address).
> —————————–

I’m sorry you’re ashamed of what you’ve written and do not wish to be associated with it. In future, I hope you’ll consider whether your writing is embarassing before hitting send.

Probably the thing I most love about linux.conf.au is that every year is an experiment. In 2001 we changed its name, location and time, in 2002 we tried moving it outside Sydney and Melbourne and extended the programme to cover Monday and Tuesday, in 2003 we moved it to the furthest capital we could find and trebled the events on the Monday and Tuesday, in 2004 we doubled the events on Monday and Tuesday again, worked with AUUG to add a “government” co-conference, and in 2005 we moved it out of its standard late-January timeslot into April, and added a quiz show and lightning talks. And obviously handing the conference over to a new organising team (usually with no prior experience) and a new city each year is a risk too.

LCA 2006 had quite a few interesting experimental features, not all of which were entirely deliberate.

New Zealand

The most obvious change was moving the conference from .au to .nz. There were a few rationales: that .nz isn’t significantly more difficult to get to than Perth, so shouldn’t be considered specially, that introducing New Zealanders to the conference would broaden its appeal in future and give Linux in NZ a kickstart that it wouldn’t otherwise get, and that the NZ team was the the most enthusiastic group interested in running the conference at the time.

As far as being as easy to get to, that wasn’t quite the case: a few people had difficulties getting passports, and while many folks could get cheap Freedom Air fares direct to Dunedin, others weren’t so lucky. So that theory turns out to have been only a qualified success — it came close, but it definitely was a bit more difficult.

Having the conference in NZ definitely did introduce a bunch of kiwis to lca, though, and looks like it might have generated a few stronger ties. There was a BOF on NZ OSS, the New Zealand Open Source Society, where a bunch of folks from various NZ Linux user groups hashed out some ideas for re-establishing that group as a body more like Linux Australia in NZ that can be there to support projects that ought to be bigger than just a single LUG — I think the plans that came out of the meeting were to do things like arrange for interesting speakers to tour NZ LUGs every now and then, and to help coordinate this year’s Software Freedom Day activities in NZ. It’s hard to say for sure how well that’s going to hold up until we see if we have a bunch of attendees and speakers from NZ at next year’s conference, but at least at the moment, that hope looks like it’s turned out perfectly.

An additional aspect is that NZ is a lovely place to visit, and holding a conference there gives attendees the opportunity to take some leave either before or after the conference to tour around some very picturesque scenery. From the delegates list, it looks like quite a few people have done that, myself included.

All in all, I think the New Zealand experiment turned out pretty well; while it’s not something that should happen that often, I can certainly imagine a bid from Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch being seriously considered in a few years.

Billions of streams

The main portion of the conference has traditionally had a few lectures at once, normally three or four. This year had six. That means every single attendee, even if they attended everything they could, missed out on something like 80% of the conference. On Monday and Tuesday, there were eight miniconfs. There was a lot of technical content this time round.

There are two risks there: one is that in trying to fill that many slots you might end up accepting some low quality papers; the other is that you’ll have more people who see abstracts for some talks they really want to see, only to find they clash. It’s hard to say that those things didn’t happen — because it’s hard to prove a negative — but from what I can tell, it actually turned out pretty well.

That level of parallelism has a couple of upsides of course: notably that the more good talks there are at any one time, the more chance there is that any given attendee will be interested in one of them; and that by having the attendees split amongst more talks, you can hold them in smaller rooms making it easier to find a suitable venues.

Another aspect of the scheduling was mixing the tutorials in with the talks. I’ve no idea whether this worked well or badly or didn’t make a difference, though.

Dunedin

A side aspect is that Dunedin is actually a fairly small city; it’s population is only 122,000 it’s 10% of the size of Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, and a third of the size of Canberra. While it does have the benefit of being a university town, it’s still quite notable that even though lca’s grown quite a lot, we still have a fair degree of flexibility in where it can be held. So Cairns, with a population of 140,000 ought to be able to hold an lca pretty easily, though Broome, with a population of a mere 14,000, might still be pushing it.

Media

One of the “dropped” balls of this years conference was the media aspect; I might be mistaken, but I don’t think there were any press releases related to the 2006 conference put out in 2005 at all.

The first one was, ttbomk, a press release about Pascal Klein winning the “Community Member of the Year” award. (Pascal then went on to be part of a winning team in one of the competitions, switched from KDE to Gnome, switched from SuSE to Ubuntu, volunteered to help the folks running the next lca and got a lift home on a private jet. Not really a bad week’s work)

There were a couple more press notes afterwards, including a LinuxWorld Australia piece giving a general rundown of the conference, and a ComputerWorld New Zealand piece doing much the same. And that’s more or less it for the advance press, as far as I know. Unlike past years, we didn’t have slashdot as a media sponsor, so didn’t have a banner ad or some gratuitous stories about registrations opening or the call for papers.

There are three possible negative consequences to this: fewer speakers, fewer attendees, and missing opportunities to get messages out to people who don’t attend. Obviously the number of speakers wasn’t an issue. The number of attendees might have been an issue: this year didn’t sell out — but on the other hand, the last figures I heard were around 450 attendees out of a maximum possible of around 500. Which compares pretty well to the previous couple of years (which sold out at around 500), and may have been caused by previous issues — namely holding it outside Australia, or holding it in a small city, with a consequently smaller number of local Linux hackers.

Getting the message out doesn’t really require press in advance of the conference though — it can be done while the conference is happening or after. And there was a reasonable amount of press after the conference, including some newspaper stories, a short tv piece on the daily news, a number of articles about Samba 4, a series on lca2006, blog style, the Annodex Launch, the Linux Australia elections, and Van Jacobson’s talk. One of the nice things about these articles is that, excepting the Samba release, they were written by journalists who thought the topic was interesting to their readers, rather than being built up from a press release. I like it when news works that way.

I call this a “dropped” ball, because while it was (afaik) something the lca team had intended to work more actively on, it wasn’t forgotten so much as treated as a lower priority than making the conference work, and when making the conference work turned out to take up all the time they had available, it didn’t happen. And it looks like it’s worked out fairly well — which is good in that while future lca’s will hopefully do more press stuff, we can also be confident in saying that if the press stuff doesn’t get done well, it’s not likely to be a huge crisis.

Other stuff

A couple of things weren’t risks. Having a conference wiki editable by delegates was a great idea. HP and IBM continue to be excellent major sponsors, and definitely seem to grok how to make that work well. Offloading networking stuff to the Waikato guys appears to have worked exceptionally well, and the stuff they’ve written to manage the network will probably provide a good basis for future conference networking setups. Changing the t-shirt auction to a raffle was a neat tweak, given the amount bidding was getting up to in previous years. Which meant that at the dinner Rusty could instead auction off a copy of the John Lions book, autographed by various Unix luminaries, with money raised going to founding a John Lions chair at UNSW. Which ended up raising $10,000, matched by Linux Australia for $20,000, with additional contributions from delegates, all of which will eventually be matched by USENIX for a total of over $40,000.

Of course, underlying all the experimentation are the traditions, all the things that weren’t changed. From what I can tell, the primary formula still seems to be get interesting speakers, get a bunch of attendees who like helping each other out, and treat them all as well as you possibly can. And Mike, Drew, Kelvin, Gobby, Nick, and Alex seem to have done that to a tee.

(All of which is pretty fortunate given the bad puns that could’ve arisen from the way Kiwi’s pronounce ’06, or the airport code for Dunedin…)

Well, actually that confuses cause and effect. Anyway, a draft of the GPLv3 is out, and, at least at first glance I’m pretty impressed. Let’s add a break, since probably everyone’ll be throwing their two cents in soon enough anyway.
The GFDL’s problems don’t seem to be present, happuly: the DRM restrictions are limited to not granting permission to distribute illegal software, and not allowing you to distribute in ways that circumvent the GPL somehow (as well as a cute bit of judo against technological protection measures in general); and the source distribution requirements are just that you distribute both the binaries and source over the net concurrently, or when you’re distributing binaries by physical media, that you provide source as well, or the three year written offer. Invariant sections obviously don’t rate much of a mention.

The “extra restrictions” section (7) seems worded pretty well, and looks like it sorts out lingering doubts about compatability with BSD works, and provide some patent retaliation clauses that’re so popular now days. It also includes the ability to “require that the work contain functioning facilities that allow users to immediately obtain copies of its Complete Corresponding Source Code”, which, if used, may make the work non-free for Debian’s purposes (similar clauses in the Affero General Public License have been considered non-free in the past by Debian anyway); but since it’s an optional addition, that’s fine. Arguably it turns the GPL into a non-copyleft license from Debian’s perspective though — ie, you can take a free work under the GPLv3, and turn it into a non-free work. Personally, while I’m not remotely convinced this is a good thing to actually do, I’m also not sure it’s enough of a bother that we need to declare it non-free.

The other two areas of interest (to me) seem to be the changes to the “complete corresponding source” — which looks like it makes it a lot easier to run GPLed software on non-GPL/BSD kernels and libcs, such as OS X and OpenSolaris, though might also have some other oddities in its new found generality; and the changes to the notices required for interactive programs — with GPLv3, all programs have to have disclaimers, it’s not just a matter of keeping them if they’re already there.

One downside, though, is that it’s very clearly drafted by someone with legal experience — “the Complete Corresponding Source Code need not include a particular subunit if (a) the identical subunit is normally included as an adjunct in the distribution of … a major essential component … of the operating system on which the executable runs or a compiler used to produce the executable ….” Adjunct? Subunit? Geez.

Anyway, if the FSF follow through on addressing the community’s concerns and spend the rest of the year improving the draft, it looks like they’re back on top of the free software licensing game. This looks like it resolves a number of major problems with the GPL, and, so far at least, looks like at worst it only creates only a few minor ones in exchange.

Hrm, LWN has their first take up now too.

Things I did today:

1. Found a t-shirt I’d forgotten buying!

2. Removed the empty SuperH architecture from the archive (binary-sh).

Coincidence? You decide.