blog/archives/2010/12zack's home pagehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/archives/2010/12/zack's home pageikiwiki2010-12-30T09:38:31Zhow to contribute to Debianhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/how_to_contribute_to_Debian/2010-12-30T09:38:31Z2010-12-30T09:38:31Z
<h1>... looking for an HOWTO?</h1>
<p>These days, possibly because it's holiday in several countries
around the world, I'm receiving a higher number of <em>"how can I
help Debian?"</em> mails than usual. This is good and makes me
happy! Those mails show we have a community who cares about giving
back to Free Software, in exchange of what they have received via
Debian.</p>
<p>Routinely, in my replies, I point people to the following list
of <strong>documentation we have on how to contribute to
Debian</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.debian.org/intro/help">"How can you help
Debian"</a>, the official contribution page on www.d.o</li>
<li><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/HelpDebian">HelpDebian</a> on
the Debian wiki</li>
<li><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/HelpDebian/FAQ">HelpDebian
FAQ</a>, companion FAQ of the above page</li>
<li><a href=
"http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-contributing.en.html">Chapter
"Contributing to the Debian Project"</a> of the Debian FAQ</li>
</ul>
<p>Am I missing something?</p>
<p>At the same time, it happens that I reply to people who clearly
went through (at least some of) the above resources, but which are
still blocked at the "what I do next?" step. I guess this is
because some of the day to day practices of Debian life are not
described in the documentation we have. For instance, I find scarce
references to <strong>"cultural" aspects</strong> of Debian
technical life such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>a lot of coordination happens over IRC</li>
<li>a typical way of starting collaborating on packaging is
interacting with the package maintainers via the BTS, by doing
triaging, submitting patches, etc.</li>
<li>lots of packages are team-maintained <small>(in fact, this is
mentioned in a couple of places, but unfortunately our <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/Teams">team list</a> is not complete.
Therefore by saying "choose from the list a team you're interested
in and contact them", as I recurrently do, I know I'm leaving
someone out)</small></li>
<li>how to find a mentor</li>
<li>...</li>
</ul>
<p>And I'm sure I'm missing quite some other cultural/folklore
traits, which look obvious to longstanding members of the Debian
community, but which are probably not so obvious to external
people.</p>
<p>So, dear lazyweb, <strong>have you started contributing to
Debian and remember your experience?</strong> If so, <strong>I'd
like to hear from you</strong>. In particular, I'd like to hear
your suggestions on how we can improve our documentation on the
matter (patches welcome, as usual!).</p>
<p><em>Bonus point</em>. Of the various pieces of documentation we
have, it seems that a sufficiently detailed <strong>HOWTO-style
document</strong>, covering both technical and cultural aspects, is
missing. If you are into writing for Debian, that might be an
experiment worth trying.</p>
squeeze your non-free firmware awayhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/squeeze_your_non-free_firmware_away/2010-12-16T08:37:06Z2010-12-15T23:05:20Z
<h1>Debian 6.0 Squeeze to be released with completely free
Kernel(s)</h1>
<p>Today <a href="http://www.debian.org">we</a> have announced
that, starting with the upcoming release of Squeeze, <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20101215">Debian will be even
Free-er</a>. Exceptions to the <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines">DFSG</a> for
non-free Linux firmware blobs, which have been granted in the past,
will no longer be granted. Starting from Squeeze, Debian will be
Free the bottom up, no matter where your own definition of
<q>software</q> ends.</p>
<p>The news has been known for a while within the Debian
development community, but we had the pleasure of sharing that with
our users only today. According to the reaction on <a href=
"http://identi.ca/notice/60464473">identi.ca</a>, where the news
quickly made into the most popular notices, people are
<em>enthusiastic</em> about the news and that in turn is very
rewarding.</p>
<p>If you are as happy and proud about this achievement as I am,
please direct your <strong>kudos</strong> to all the teams who made
this possible:</p>
<ul>
<li>the <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel">Debian kernel
team</a> who worked for the past 2 release cycles, together with
Linux upstream, to split free-vs-non-free firmware bits and monitor
new releases to avoid freedom regressions;</li>
<li>the <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianCd">Debian CD
team</a> who basically "forked" different media production lines,
for different user needs wrt firmware;</li>
<li>the <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianInstaller">d-i
team</a> who added, long ago, support for loading user-provided
firmware at installation time;</li>
<li>whoever else I might have forgotten who contributed to this
result <small>(feel free to leave a comment to refresh my
memory!)</small>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Having been trol<sup>W</sup> asked several times in the past
about the "real freeness" of Debian at events, talks, and the like,
I consider this episode to be a very nice story to tell. While we
have granted exceptions for Linux firmware at the time of <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_007">Etch</a> and <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_003">Lenny</a> releases,
during this time Debian people have worked, <strong>together with
upstream</strong>, to make this final result possible. All this
work has improved the situation not only for Debian users, but also
for users of those derivatives which rely upon Debian kernels.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, don't expect us to live under a rock. We know that
there are users out there who need nasty non-free firmware bits to
boot their machines or to access the Internet. That is why <a href=
"http://blog.einval.com/2010/12/15#CDs_with_firmware">separate
images with firmware included</a> are being provided, although they
are not part of Debian and are properly "discriminated": they
should be looked for explicitly by users and can't be supported to
the same extent of Free firmware, simply because we (as anybody
else other than the hardware manufacturer) do not have access to
the corresponding source code.</p>
<p>This separation is a perfect example of the
<strong>pragmatism</strong> embodied by the <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/social_contract">Debian Social contract</a>:
Debian consists of 100% Free software; at the same time, Debian
<em>enables</em> its users to make their own choices in terms of
Freedom, being explicit about what users risk if they cross the
boundaries of DFSG. <strong>Awareness</strong> is the key here and
I find it to be a very honest yet effective way of explaining to
the world why Free Software is better.</p>
<p>This is not the end of the story though, as we need to document
this change properly to both increase awareness and avoid leaving
users in the dark. A couple of bugs filed today might benefit from
the <strong>help of some kind doc-writers</strong>: <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/607191">Debian bug #607191</a> (documenting
the firmware change in the Squeeze release notes) and <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/607193">Debian bug #607193</a> (documenting
the firmware change on the website).</p>
Doctor jcristauhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/2010-12-15T23:05:20Z2010-12-13T16:49:58Z
<h1>we release when it's ready ...</h1>
<p>Members of the <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam">Debian release team</a>
clearly take very seriously Debian release mantras such as <q>we
release when it's ready</q> and <q><a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/good%20things%20come%20to%20those%20who%20wait">
good things come to those who wait</a></q>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.liafa.jussieu.fr/~jcristau/"><strong>Julien
Cristau</strong></a> is no exception. After a freeze period used to
improve the quality of his research work bringing down to 0 the
number of release critical bugs affecting it, Julien has just
released his <strong>PhD thesis</strong> titled <strong>Jeux et
automates sur les ordres</strong>:</p>
<p><a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/002.jpg"><img src=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/150x-002.jpg" width="150"
height="113" class="img" /></a> <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/003.jpg"><img src=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/150x-003.jpg" width="150"
height="113" class="img" /></a> <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/008.jpg"><img src=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/150x-008.jpg" width="150"
height="113" class="img" /></a> <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/009.jpg"><img src=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/150x-009.jpg" width="150"
height="113" class="img" /></a> <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/010.jpg"><img src=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/150x-010.jpg" width="150"
height="113" class="img" /></a> <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/012.jpg"><img src=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/Doctor_jcristau/150x-012.jpg" width="150"
height="113" class="img" /></a></p>
<p>Congrats, Doctor!</p>
<p><strong>PS</strong> earlier on today, Julien has promised that,
as a gift to the Debian project for his new title, he will fix 50
Squeeze RC bugs by the end of the week. \o/<br />
<small>(Not. But that would indeed be a nice gift to him from all
of us, don't you think?)</small></p>