Re: Contacting Debian Boot team
Hi Phil,
Am Mon, May 27, 2024 at 12:15:47AM +0200 schrieb Philip Hands:
> This is mostly because I found that I wasn't able to devote the time
> required to test things to my satisfaction when my first daughter came
> along,
So we will see you back in the team once your youngest child is around
10 or so. ;-P
> as I'd be distracted before I completed my tests, so I decided to
> do something about automating testing, and I've been down that rabbit
> hole ever since. When I'm working on that, I'm pretty happy.
Good! Keep on working with that. ;-)
> I'd say that that work is now bearing some fruit, finally. I had
> originally hoped that I'd then be able to put more effort into D-I
> itself, but I suspect that maintaining openQA and the Salsa pipeline
> stuff may continue to eat a fair amount of my time.
Sounds like a pretty interesting project. Thanks for keeping me
informed about this.
> > - Do you consider the workload of your team equally shared amongst its
> > members and who actually is considered a team member? (I added some
> > persons in CC who have recently answered to questions on the mailing
> > list.)
>
> My contributions are pretty-much background noise recently, so I guess
> that means that the load is very unequal if you were including me in the
> stats.
>
> Cyril has been responsible for keeping D-I viable in recent times, and
> Holger also does _loads_ of (mostly translation related) work too.
I highly appreciate all responses from Debian Boot team which are the
most extensive so far.
> > - Do you have some strategy to gather new contributors for your team?
>
> One of my intentions with the salsa/openQA work is that I'm trying to
> make it possible for people to make simple changes to bits of D-I and
> have them receive feedback about whether the result is an improvement.
>
> Hopefully that will lower the bar to new people contributing.
Very nice contribution!
> > - Can you give some individual estimation how many hours per week you
> > are working on your tasks in youre team? Does this fit the amount of
> > time you can really afford for this task?
>
> My work on D-I is pretty sporadic, because I generally pick some small
> thing in D-I to use as a test of the current salsa/openqa setup, and
> then spend significantly more time sorting out some new wrinkle that's
> revealed in the salsa and/or openqa setup by this new example.
>
> Often this means that by the time I've finished, someone else has
> already dealt with the original bug/patch in D-I. I'm not sure to what
> extent that counts as D-I work, but I'm happy with the time I spend on
> it.
OK
> > - I recently had some discussion on Chemnitzer Linuxtage what might
> > be the reason for derivatives to write their own installers. While
> > I'm personally perfectly happy with the way I can install Debian I'm
> > somehow wondering why others are spending time into a problem we
> > are considering "solved" and whether we can learn something from this,
>
> I quite like it as it is, but I'm sure many would not find the installer
> particularly pretty, and it is quite hard to work on (being in busybox
> shell, and lacking popular things like python), and I personally have no
> idea how easy/possible it is to e.g. change its branding (if a
> downstream wanted to do that).
>
> If one doesn't care about installing on our minority architectures, then
> it's possible to do something that's much easier to work on by booting a
> live image. One can then have something that'll ask all the questions
> up-front (especially if one is opinionated about what should be on the
> resulting system), and then apply that to the system without further
> interaction.
Would you agree to the statement I'm drawing from past discussion:
Debian has to care for working installer on all architectures. Debian
derivatives do not have this requirement and prefer other pretty / fancy
/ brandable ways over the Debian one?
> Some arm64 things certainly can be installed with D-I, because I have
> openQA workers running on altra.debian.net testing D-I installs, but I
> don't know that much about the details.
OK
> > - Can I do anything for you?
>
> I'm currently looking into the options that might be worth exploring for
> getting more openqa-workers running. I suppose at some point that might
> involve asking for funds to be spent, but I'm not at that stage yet.
If you have some ideas whom to ask and reasons to motivate them for X
amount to spent I'd happily support you in this.
> It probably wouldn't harm to offer some funding to osuosl, because they
> let us use their systems for various things and making sure that they
> are sustainable would be wise. (that's who host most of what I'm running
> openqa on at present, and they also host jenkins and reproducible things
> AFAIK)
If you want to go into more detail (if you consider in private might be
better that's fine) I can talk with treasurers about the options we
have. I keep on feeling as greenhorn DPL and have no good idea what
options we finally have. But thanks in any case for bringing this up.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
https://fam-tille.de
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