On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 09:40:12AM +0200, Christian PERRIER wrote: > I will take this last sentence from Russ' mail to give out my own > feeling about these issues. Thanks for this in-depth view on your feeling on this matter. I've been following with interest your blog posts on the "decline" of Debian (bug reports) since quite a while (was the first time ~3 years ago?). I've a theory on this, although not particularly original one: I think that once we're convinced of something (say, the decline), it's pretty hard to change our mind about that. It's a natural tendency to notice more prominently confirmations of our theses than counter-examples. (Unfortunately, that mixes with the tendency of noticing more prominently negative experiences than positive ones --- which is a pretty dangerous mix in a community.) Christian has shown data about the number bug reports. Those are facts. On that front I'm personally fully satisfied by the argument developed at the beginning of this thread, namely: bug reports now flow in through derivatives. I understand that others are skeptical about that, but ~1 year ago at UDS I've shown data about the amount of patches we got forwarded from Ubuntu: they were at their historical maximum, with a positive trend. But sure enough: there's always more to do, right? (and therefore reasons to be sad about the current state of affairs) Christian has also taken the d-i example. IIRC, that was an example we've used also during the Squeeze release, worrying (probably rightly so) about a not "strong" enough coordination in d-i release preparation. This time, d-i releases seem to go pretty well. I'm not personally involved in d-i development, but as mere developer I see: periodic releases, calls for testing, features coming in, etc. So now the reason to worry (again: probably rightly so) is that it is a one-person band coordination show (and I'd like to erect a KiBi-monument for that). I don't dispute that it would be *better* to have more people on the hot seats. But I can't help noticing that we seem to be way more inclined to look at the "bad" that still needs to be fixed, rather than the significant improvement over the past release cycle. About "core" teams. I remember years, not that far past, where teams like DSA, ftp-masters, keyring, DAM were one-person teams (and often the person in question was the same...). Nowadays they're lively, efficient teams with good turnover. Those are good examples to me, denoting significant improvements in core teams staffing, and I could find thousands more. I'm sure we can also find thousands *bad* examples. The problem is that the bad examples seem too stick in the collective memory of the community, while the good ones don't. We forget the good ones and move on, looking at what's the next bad thing we should be sad about. (Note: this is not specific to Christian. It's just a (meta-)feeling of mine that seemed relevant enough to this discussion for sharing it.) But if we stay at this level, the discussion might appear to be a typical optimistic-vs-pessimistic one (with the optimistic being invariably less visible, but fair enough). This is why, instead of discussing impressions abstractly, I often prefer to look for data that could confirm or counter those impressions. As I agree with Christian that the most important factor is our ability to attract contributors, I've tried to gather data about the number of people that decide to join Debian per year. The easiest data to found was those about DDs and DMs; they are not a full picture of our contributors community (no translators, no project members on Alioth, etc.), but they're probably correlated significantly with it. Here is the data I've collected and how: - with the invaluable help of Enrico Zini, number of NM applications per year, starting 2000 (see attached stats-dd.txt, data before 2000 are spurious) - in a way more hackish way (see attached dm-keyring-stats.pl and cry for my rusty Perl-fu) I've approximated the number of DM applications per year grepping through the keyring changelog I've then plotted the data in a LibreOffice spreadsheet (see attached stats-dd.ods). My own interpretation of the data is as follows: - if we look at DDs alone (excluding DMs) the number of applications per year looks stable since 2002: there are important variations with spike up and down (in particular in 2011 and 2004), but they are close to +/-1 standard deviation interval - but if we're interested in our ability to maintain _packages_ (something Christian and others have focused on), we should also take into account DMs. And if we do that, the trend is positive, and strikingly so. - Unfortunately, simply adding up DMs and DDs is not correct, as DMs become DDs, but I didn't have time/energy to do this properly. In the meantime, we know that the truth is in between the previous two points, which looks like a WIN to me. Please review the above data and methods, and show me wrong! Tentative bottom line: I've joined the project around the same time as Christian, so I'm entitled my old chap badge too. But at the same time, I like to fight with data my natural old chap tendency of thinking that things were invariably better in the past. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $curyear = 1970;
my %dm_per_year = ();
while (my $line = <>) {
chomp $line;
if ($line =~ /^debian-keyring\s+\(([0-9]{4})/) {
$curyear = $1;
$dm_per_year{$curyear} = 0 unless defined $dm_per_year{$curyear};
} elsif ($line =~ /Add new DM key/i) {
$dm_per_year{$curyear} += 1;
}
}
foreach my $year (keys %dm_per_year) {
print $year, "\t", $dm_per_year{$year}, "\n";
}
nm=> select count(*), status, extract('year' from status_changed) from person where status in ('dd_u', 'dd_nu') group by 2, 3 order by 3;
count | status | date_part
-------+--------+-----------
150 | dd_u | 1970
1 | dd_u | 1996
89 | dd_u | 2000
135 | dd_u | 2001
65 | dd_u | 2002
61 | dd_u | 2003
35 | dd_u | 2004
67 | dd_u | 2005
58 | dd_u | 2006
72 | dd_u | 2007
42 | dd_u | 2008
69 | dd_u | 2009
2 | dd_nu | 2010
49 | dd_u | 2010
27 | dd_u | 2011
2 | dd_nu | 2011
1 | dd_nu | 2012
50 | dd_u | 2012
Attachment:
stats-dd.ods
Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature