zack's home page/ blog/ posts/ 2012/ 06/ bits from the DPL for May 2012

Just posted to d-d-a, here are the monthly DPL bits.

Dear project members,
here's the periodic report of what has happened in DPL land, this time during May 2012. It's briefer than usual, as this year I've enjoyed the lovely French habit of frequent holidays during the month of May.

Highlight

First highlight for this month is an invitation to us all. We're now in June and the Wheezy freeze is literally a few days away. The RC bugs count is moving in the right direction, but it's still stellar if we want to ensure a short freeze. And a short freeze is of paramount importance: it'll reduce the time during which we can't implement great plans for the future, increase the "freshness" of software we'll ship with Wheezy, and reduce the inconveniences for those who run the testing suite due to its nice "rolling" feature. So please set out some regular time to do RC bug squashing, by providing patches and doing NMUs. Releasing Wheezy is not something that could be outsourced to the Release Team, it's a collective responsibility that kicks in as soon as our own packages are RC bug free (which they already are, right? :-))

The second highlight is more on the internal structure camp. As mentioned last month, I've discussed with the tech-ctte insisting a bit to set up periodic IRC meetings, to ensure outstanding issues get periodically reviewed. At the end of May the first IRC meeting has happened, and has been very productive. See the minutes. Another one has been scheduled, trying to setup a monthly cadence, for the end of June. Many thanks to all tech-ctte members who have took part in and helped with the meeting organization.

Communication

I've given an interview to iTWire, answering a number of questions about several past and future Debian challenges.

Discussions

The ongoing discussion to harmonize packaging of multimedia software between the official Debian archive and the unofficial debian-multimedia.org archive (dmo) has progressed. I've tried to help the two groups reaching an agreement on which packages belong where, so that both duplicate packaging efforts and user inconveniences are minimized. That seems not to have worked and dmo maintainers have simply announced that they will move away from the current domain name to a new one that does not include "debian" in its name.

Sprints

There will be a Debian Science sprint in June, co-located with the broader Debian Science event organized by European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble. I've confirmed my attendance for the opening talk of the conference day. ESRF organizers have kindly sponsored travel for all Debian attendees, many thanks to them!

Another sprint will happen next week-end in Paris, this time by the i18n/l10n team. I've approved the corresponding tentative budget for travel sponrship for ~2'000 EUR.

Other expenses

Hardware replacement plans go on. We've ordered SSDs (for ~3'000 CAD) for recently bought machines meant to replace bugs-mirror, bugs-master, and udd. On the "small emergencies" front, we also had to replace failing disks on wagner (1/2 of alioth), for as little as 100 GBP.

Miscellanea

  • I've helped a bit with the ratification of the Debian diversity statement by seconding it and shortening the discussion period

  • on the multimedia front, I've also sought legal advice for the multimedia team, to better understand how to provide a decent multimedia experience for Debian users while respecting the draconian copyright system that exists almost world-wide. There seem to be some solutions in sight for the few missing packages (which I'm still discussing with the respective maintainers), but they'll hardly be ready for Wheezy

  • three people replied to my call for help with DPL tasks (thanks!). I'll be shortly contact them to share the list of tasks that can be outsourced to anyone willing to help; then I'll try to setup a calendar of periodic IRC public meetings. There's still time to apply if you are interested (hint hint!)

  • on behalf of Debian, SPI has entered in the ISC Forum Membership Agreement, giving access to the Debian security team to security notices for softwares like BIND and DHCP. We previously had a similar agreement for individual maintainers, but it's good to move it at a project level, in order to diminish bus factors

Happy Wheezy freeze,
and RC bugs squashing!

PS the boring day-to-day activity log for May is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201205