Re: Technical committee acting in gross violation of the Debian constitution
On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 7:29 AM, Noel Torres wrote:
> Exactly. Who they are? The people who chose Debian, are they laptop users?
> desktop users? sysadmins? The question is important.
All of the people you mention choose Debian.
It is impossible to know who they are though, except for people who
ask us to add their organisation to the users section of the website
and people claiming they use Debian in posts on various mailing lists
and websites, we don't track the latter though.
We can however compare various packages using the popcon graphs to get
relative quantities of popcon submitters over time but we can't do
that for all Debian users. It appears there are more web servers
running Debian than people with Debian GNOME desktops but the ratio is
changing over time.
https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=apache2+gnome&show_installed=on&want_percent=on&want_legend=on&from_date=2013-01-01&to_date=2015-01-01&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1
> But we can have estimates. popcon gives us 98681 installations of
> libgnomevfs2-common (which may indicate desktop or laptop users) and 96647
> installations of apache2.2-bin (which may indicate server users). Not a big
> difference.
Please note that GNOME depends on apache2-bin by way of
gnome-user-share so that isn't really a useful comparison.
> I'm sorry but you're wrong here. I actually want to know who uses Debian, not
> which groups are better suited to the desires of some contraposed groups of
> developers.
...
> I already know these. The question is not "how many are there" but "who they
> are". It is great to know that we have millions of users, but who are they?
I assume you aren't talking about the names of people who use Debian
but about types of machines that run Debian and what those machines
are used for. Some folks use laptops as servers for example.
> Specifically, are these machines servers or desktops/laptops?
This information is not submitted to Debian so we can't know. We can
guess based on the popcon graphs of installed packages but it doesn't
cover all Debian users.
> It is a gut feeling, one that I share with systemd proponents, that Debian's
> desktop experience will be better for our users with systemd.
Probably yes, since some of them depend on parts of it.
> It is a gut feeling also, and one that has been widely expresed by others,
> (with better and worse words) that Debian server admins will not be pleased
> with an init system which is bigger and does not use shell scripts to start
> system services. Inconveniences have been stated about binary logs (which has
> been expressed that it is not true), big binary, tightly related set of
> binaries, security relying in developers and packagers and not sysadmins,
> encompassing of not-init-related services, and more.
I work as a sysadmin myself and I am very much looking forward to
switching the systems I run to jessie with systemd. I believe that the
Debian sysadmins (who run debian.org machines) are discussing trying
systemd too. I believe the technical advantages of systemd outweigh
the concerns and think that some of the concerns are actually
advantages of systemd, not disadvantages. My opinions are based on the
initial design for systemd and on the systemd for admins blog series
as well as using systemd on my laptop.
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#thesystemdforadministratorsblogseries
I acknowledge that some server admins may feel differently though and
whether or not the claimed disadvantages are true, some server admins
will be switching away from Debian entirely due to the
systemd-by-default decision and some will continue to use Debian but
choose to install sysvinit or stay with wheezy.
> So to know which of these two approachs is better for our users, which is what
> our Social Contract, 4, impose on us, we need to know who our users are.
We can't know who they are but we can have guesses based on feedback and popcon.
> Without knowing that, we can not be true in deciding about switching or not on
> upgrades to best serve our users.
Looking at jenkins, right now systemd-sysv is installed after upgrades:
https://jenkins.debian.net/view/All/job/chroot-installation_wheezy_bootstrap_upgrade_to_jessie/523/console
That said, I did an upgrade recently with an almost-Debian system and
got sysvinit-core instead.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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