Re: paying people for Debian work (Re: Why do we take so long to realise good ideas (Was: Difficult Packaging Practices))
Hi,
Why to support additional fragmentation?
My opinion is debian was left behind regarding infrastructure. I do
packaging for
various distributions.
Honestly, I am running debian. But you could provide continues integration for
different architectures, not only i386 and amd64.
Extend access to porter machines for debian maintainers. Make the request
easier and faster. Especially for more exotic flavors like kfreebsd and hurd.
I caught me different times setting up some VM, only to check why a test
was failing on arch X and not on Y.
Best regards,
Joël
On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 11:43 AM Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 03 Jun 2019, Paul Wise wrote:
> > There are a few things that are possibly concerning:
>
> Thanks for sharing those. Let me answer them.
>
> > Freexian is essentially the only available-to-hire provider of
> > services for Debian LTS, as the Freeside link doesn't lead anywhere
> > useful. This means that Freexian essentially does not have any
> > competition in the provision of these services. Individuals or
> > companies who don't like Freexian's offering do not have any other
> > choices, short of going to the general Debian consultants list, who
> > may or may not have the needed skills and would take time to search
> > through.
>
> That's correct. But the agreement was always that the relationship
> was non-exclusive from the Debian point of view. I.e. someone else
> could setup "Debian LTS by XXXX" and Debian would not endorse one more
> than the other.
>
> > The funding breakdown for the LTS team appears to be 48% Freexian, 31%
> > volunteer/unknown, 21% other companies. I don't have any data on the
> > proportion of LTS work done by each of these groups, but I get the
> > feeling that the majority of LTS uploads are done by Freexian folks.
>
> That breakdown does not reflect reality at all. Indeed the vast majority
> of the work is done by contributors paid by Freexian.
>
> > This means that if Freexian decides to end its provision of services
> > for Debian LTS, then the level of work done for LTS would go down
> > significantly. Were this to happen, it would either significantly
> > damage the image of Debian due to having to end the LTS effort or
> > require us to do work which we have had a hard time finding volunteers
> > for in the past.
>
> That's correct. However, there's no reason for this to happen. I do care
> about Debian and the uninteresting paper work that I have to do to keep
> the Freexian service running is paid for.
>
> That said there are multiple ways to avoid this:
> - Debian organizes this by itself (it's possible, the criteria I use
> to allocate work hours to contributors are relatively transparent)
> - Debian defines clear rules for external services leveraging the Debian
> name to fund Debian-related work and encourages to have more of those
>
> > There is strong coupling between Debian and Freexian in the language
> > on the Debian LTS pages and the Freexian pages. This is free
> > advertising for Freexian's LTS services and representing Freexian's
> > LTS services as "blessed" by Debian or somehow "official", which could
> > be objected to by other companies who might decide to provide security
> > support services. It may be prudent to remove or alter the language on
> > the Debian LTS pages.
>
> I don't see the need to act pro-actively here. The current description
> is a fair representation of the reality. It might not be the ideal
> situation that we want for Debian but then again I suggest we work on
> defining criteria for all services/companies that would aim to have the
> same kind of "Debian blessing".
>
> > LTS. This means that the individuals/organisations doing consulting
> > around Debian miss out on the opportunities to work on LTS.
>
> This is not true. Many have joined the set of contributors paid by
> Freexian. Some of the contributors are working as individuals
> (freelancers) and others as members of an organization that invoices
> Freexian (Codethink for Ben Hutchings for example).
>
> You are saying that they don't have an opportunity to work on LTS
> outside of Freexian. That's also not true but the easy path is
> definitely to go through Freexian who has an established situation
> and whose join rules are open-enough to avoid the need to create
> a competitor.
>
> > Freexian doesn't fund LTS contributors who are not DDs/DMs: this
> > eliminates skilled developers from outside Debian who could contribute
> > to LTS via Freexian and eventually work on Debian more generally. This
> > seems to have prevented at least one former Debian member who was
> > interested in Freexian's offer from contributing. It might also make
> > LTS funding seem like a reward for Debian insiders.
>
> Or it creates an incentive to contribute to Debian to be able to join
> the set of paid developers.
>
> I'm sorry that you see this as a problem. This job is about contributing
> to Debian and we need persons who already know how to do this. Contrary to
> GSOC and others, our purpose is not to train outsiders to contribute to
> Debian.
>
> > The structure of using existing Debian contributors and funnelling
> > most of the funding to them through one company reduces incentives for
> > companies wanting security support to direct their employees to work
> > on Debian security support. This means that our contributor base stays
> > more static and reduces the chance that new folks will join us. An
> > alternate model where each of the companies currently sponsoring
> > Freexian LTS services instead directed their employees to spend some
> > hours on Debian security support seems more likely to lead to new
> > people getting involved.
>
> I certainly agree that the efficiency of the contributors paid by Freexian
> means that companies that used to allocate time to their employees to
> contribute to long term security support has disappeared. There are
> exceptions though, for instance credativ with their PostgreSQL support.
>
> That said, the net result is a better service to our users. The model
> where each company allocates a few hours per week to a few employees
> was not reliable and not reactive enough. They would typically only care
> about the packages that they use and would leave huge gap in the support
> both in terms of packages covered and in terms of when the updates is made
> available to users.
>
> I also don't think that this matter of fact changes anything on chances
> to have new folks in Debian. Either you are interested by Debian or not,
> the fact that your boss told you to work on something related to Debian
> doesn't change much. YMMV.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
>
> Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
> Learn to master Debian: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
>
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