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Re: [RFR] Debconf 13 video subtitles: Debian Cosmology



Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> I'd welcome a review of
> 
> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debconfsubs/debconfsubs.git;a=blob_plain;f=DebConf13/english/976_Debian_Cosmology.en.srt;h=bf36170ad36cc9ae6354d0bce42d0008295945d5;hb=9fc6766071dec0f3273416bb9b0993d5fc64884f

Should it be in en_US or en_GB?  It seems wrong to give Joey a British
accent, so I've made it "favorite", "organization", "targeted".

Also, I'm not sure whether Bdale says "fractious" or "fracturous".
The former is what's in dictionaries, but I've left it as "fracturous"
on the grounds that it's the job of the dictionaries to keep up with
the native speakers, not vice versa.
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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Okay, and now for the last talk in the morning session,

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Joey Hess will talk about Debian Cosmology

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[applause]

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Well, thanks, good morning everybody, I hope you had a good night's sleep.

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I enjoyed sleeping out in the tent, in the middle of Switzerland

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looking out over the lake

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this is kinda the first Debconf where I've kinda had a problem

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If I just look over there I'll probably just lose focus for a bit, it's so gorgeous.

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I thought this would be a good place to get up on a mountaintop, as it were

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and think about the bigger picture

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and try to think about some of the big questions, the big vague things we wonder about

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but don't really, sometimes, talk about

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maybe in public in front of a live streaming audience, I don't know.

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I have this crazy Debian Cosmology idea.

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And, let's look at Debian, let's look at the Universal operating system

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and think about thinking back 20 years back

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to when Debian was founded, up to the present

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and where it's going to go from here.

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Back in the beginning, there was kinda this void.

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and there was a gap [applause]

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and Ian Murdock saw this, and he said, well...

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let's make a new Linux distribution to replace SLS

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It'll be great; I'll get it done in a couple of weeks.

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[laughter]

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And this was back in 1993.

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And just as with the big bang

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you have the laws of nature somehow forming out of the void

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we developed these standard principles of Debian

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that have pretty much stood the test of time

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although some of them like the one package, one maintainer thing have changed over time.

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But this is all the stuff that we think of as the core principles of Debian today, probably.

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And this was in the period '94 to '98

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this early period where there weren't very many people involved in Debian

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and things got done fairly quickly.

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I have down here one of the initial threads for the Debian Constitution.

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This is where Ian Jackson said

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I think we'll use this constitution proposal to bootstrap the constitution

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so we'll vote on the constitution using the principles of the constitution.

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That could be a kind of controversial things to say, actually

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because it's a bootstrapping problem.

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But the thread actually wasn't that long

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by today's standards [laughter]

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for something that important.

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So, this was, as I said, the early period

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and then in the late 90s and early 2000s

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we went through this inflation period, just like the universe blew up

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got bigger and bigger

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we have the nice up-and-to-the-right graph

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which is the number of maintainers over time

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and I don't think that this data is very good

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but I'm kinda happy to see that it's started going up again in the most recent election

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although that's probably also just because Zack wasn't running [laughter]

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So during this inflation period we had things happen

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like adding ports to Debian.

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One port in '98, two ports in '99

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two ports in 2000; that's two ports a year.

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It's a crazy rate of change.

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And then we had... all these derivatives started popping up.

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We'd had Debian for Hams for a while

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but we got these derivatives that you don't think of much any more

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like Corel Linux, Stormix, Progeny

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These are names we haven't mentioned in a while

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but they were the early corporate entities saying, well,

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we're going to try and do something here with Debian

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and modify it

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and of course many more came from there.

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And another big event in this period was that apt started out.

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This is one of the early threads about apt

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This is about a year after it started being developed.

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Everybody started trying it

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and realized: oh, it actually doesn't work on my system

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because I have these packages that are half-configured

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I have a few broken dependencies because I just forced something at some point

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And everybody tried apt, and they're like, gosh, it says my system's inconsistent

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and it doesn't have apt-get -f yet

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so it doesn't work.

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So I thought this was an amusing thread.

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It's also not really too long a thread

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but here's an introductory representative message

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I don't know if you can read it back there

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but it's just what I said, apt-get dosn't seem to work

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it says my system lacks integrity

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and then Jason Gunthorpe, who wrote apt, said

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I don't think I've actually seen a Debian system that has a perfect dependency setup

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so that apt can actually work on it.

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If you think about introducing some big new change like apt

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and it doesn't work at all

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and this was in April of 1998

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If we then move forward one month to May of 1998.

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here's somebody saying

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"This makes makes me wonder if we should think about dropping this autoup script..."

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"...that we're using for upgrades" (some kind of a shell script or something)

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"...and switch to apt."

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"autoup seems to work and maybe we shouldn't postpone Debian 2.0 for apt..."

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"but autoup's a hack, and apt lets you do an entire bo to hamm upgrade in dselect."

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Wow. I was kinda of surprised to see this: it turns out that I wrote that.

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I had no idea I proposed converting Debian to apt for 2.0.

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It didn't actually happen in May of 1998

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we had to wait a whole year until March of '99 when 2.1 came out

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and this is a quote from debian-history

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about apt, which I thought was a great quote:

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"It established a new paradigm for package acquisition and installation"

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and it really did.

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If you look now at things that are basically command-line compatible with apt

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or more or less command line compatible

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maybe they didn't quite understand the difference between upgrade and update

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There's so many of them! It's crazy.

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And one of the interesting things about this list

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is that if you look and see which ones of these actually do it securely

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it's a really small subset.

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Maybe some of them use HTTPS in some way

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and have a little bit of security there, I don't know.

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I didn't check them all in detail.

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Of course back then apt didn't have any security either.

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It was just pulling stuff via HTTP off the web

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and hey, it'd be the right thing, because why wouldn't it be?

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So soon after apt came out... this is a screenshot from 2002

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but it was around earlier

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We got apt-get.org

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which was all these third-party apt repositories.

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And this was kinda interesting, there were hundreds of different repositories.

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You could go off, edit your sources.list, get your packages

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and we kinda started thinking, wow maybe we're gonna change how Debian works in some way.

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Maybe we'll have some kind of a central core

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and everything else will just be pulling from other repositories somewhere.

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And we kinda went off on a divergent path.

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We kinda went down a wormhole to some distributed apt, or app store model

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where there's Debian and all this stuff you pull in from here and there

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and if somebody wants to make a package they do

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and this kind of is what happened today too.

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You can pull, you know, signed packages from Google

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and from debian-multimedia, deb-multimedia, that kind of thing

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But we didn't really go down that path.

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We're still very much a centralized distribution.

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I kinda think it's interesting to think about what could have happened if we'd branched off in a different way there

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But there were good reasons to keep it centralized, such as security.

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And if you now fast-forward to the present

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here's apt-get.org from 2011

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it's been broken, we can't check if these repositories work any more

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we're not accepting new submissions

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and this is what happened to debian-multimedia.org, which is a pity.

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It's a Russian domain about motorcycles or something, I don't know.

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So that's kinda the inflation period of Debian.

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And then we can move forward again into the modern era.

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This might be where my cosmology analogy gets a little bit strained

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but we'll see.

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I've picked out two things about the modern era of Debian

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this past 10 years, or 15 years.

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So, one of them: just as in the Universe, you have large scale structures forming,

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galaxies, and larger structures.

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In Debian we've kind of developed all kinds of structures

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on top of the "one maintainer, one package" model

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and extending it, and going beyond it.

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So a few of these, such as teams...

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Lucas showed us the graph of team maintenance increasing over the past ten years or so.

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We've just developed all these structures

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Custom Debian distributions

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stuff like d-i, different projects within Debian.

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So it gets pretty complicated.

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It's not a heterogeneous thing - a homogenous thing

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It's all clumped around in different places.

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If you also look at where people are using Debian

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that's differentiated a lot too.

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It's not just... we are the Universal operating system, we say

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but a lot of people are using Debian on servers

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and a few are on laptops

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and basically nobody is on a mobile phone

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except for a few people who are lucky enough to still have an Openmoko, or something like that.

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So, we've really differentiated Debian a lot.

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So that's the large scale structure thing.

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I think it's interesting to think about it

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because it kinda makes you think about how Debian's evolving.

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Now this is where it really gets strained.

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Red shift. Okay.

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[laughter]

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How do we have red shift in Debian?

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I don't see any red when I look out

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unless I've stepped into the middle of a flame war, or something.

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Here's kind of an amusing paper

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which I don't think has been peer-reviewed yet.

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It says, what if the universe, rather than actually expanding right now

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like we think it is because of red shift

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what if the mass of everything is increasing at once?

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And it says, well, everything would work pretty much like it does now

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we wouldn't even be able to test this theory.

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And while I don't know if the mass of the universe is increasing

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exponentially over time, like this paper says it is

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it seems a little unlikely.

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Debian's mass has definitely increased.

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We have an enormous mass, and an enormous momentum.

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We're moving in a certain direction

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and it's really hard to move Debian into a different direction now.

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So, one really easy example of this

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systemd.

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Think of how many threads we've had about systemd lately

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and, yeah.

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And this isn't replacing dpkg with apt

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and breaking all of our dependencies, and having to change everything.

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This is changing how systems boot

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which you do once a week, or once a month, or once a year.

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It's a minor change as things go, right?

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And yet it's an enormous controversy inside the project.

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So I think we have to think about this momentum, this mass

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how do we manage it, how can we make Debian nimble

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on top of all this momentum.

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So I think that's probably the largest problem that Debian is facing right now

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and will face in the next however far out you want to look.

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It's kinda hard to give a talk about Debian cosmology

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because what is a long time scale in Debian?

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We have twenty years of history to look back on.

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Can people think in their head, wow, will Debian be around in twenty years?

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I don't know.

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Pick a timescale that seems to make sense to you for the rest of this talk.

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I'm not going to try and force some kind of a timescale on you.

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If you want to think a hundred years ahead, great.

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If you want to think ten years ahead, okay.

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But I'm going to try to think about moving forward

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but first I have a little digression, which I forgot about.

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So, one of the examples of a way that the momentum in Debian can be a problem.

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I mentioned apt.

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Well there's this interesting thing being developed right now

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called functional package management.

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It started out with nixos

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and now the GNU project has gotten involved with its...

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Guix? I don't know how to say it.

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The idea is that it somehow takes ideas from functional programming

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and applies them to package management

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so it's bread and butter for me.

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I'm really interested in it being a Haskell guy now.

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Being in a functional program

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you're like, wow, there's some interesting ways to use these ideas.

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It's not really functional, but it's a neat terminology to hook on it.

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And what this lets you do, it's kind of a source based system, in a way

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I don't know. Has anybody used any of these systems in the audience?

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I'm just curious. You have, Zack?

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I'd love to chat with you about it and get a broader idea.

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The idea is kind of that you never make a destructive change to the system.

238
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Every package change is atomic.

239
00:14:01,260 --> 00:14:02,870
and if you have dependencies

240
00:14:02,940 --> 00:14:05,430
you might have multiple versions of a package installed at a time.

241
00:14:05,500 --> 00:14:09,190
and it's completely different than the dpkg model in every way.

242
00:14:09,300 --> 00:14:14,710
And it's kind of inconceivable to think that Debian would switch to something like this model now.

243
00:14:14,710 --> 00:14:16,710
It would just be so incredibly hard.

244
00:14:16,710 --> 00:14:20,630
You know, switching to apt would be just nothing in comparison

245
00:14:20,690 --> 00:14:23,250
and it's much later in our evolution

246
00:14:23,380 --> 00:14:27,020
we have a lot more structure built up around our current system

247
00:14:27,120 --> 00:14:29,970
than we did back then, even.

248
00:14:29,970 --> 00:14:33,000
This is an example of something that...

249
00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:35,490
The universe is coming up with neat new things

250
00:14:35,560 --> 00:14:37,170
How do we possibly put them into Debian?

251
00:14:37,200 --> 00:14:40,260
We can obviously package up these package managers

252
00:14:40,330 --> 00:14:44,160
and make it easy enough for people to use them as a third party thing

253
00:14:44,230 --> 00:14:47,260
You can install stuff in your home directory with functional package management

254
00:14:47,490 --> 00:14:50,550
and just have a system on top of Debian, and that kind of thing.

255
00:14:50,550 --> 00:14:53,380
But how do you integrate this kind of thing

256
00:14:53,510 --> 00:14:55,930
or ideas from this kind of thing into Debian?

257
00:14:56,000 --> 00:15:02,360
I think the closest we're coming is the switch to more declarative systems for Debian packages

258
00:15:02,460 --> 00:15:05,350
so that rather than maintainer scripts, we have triggers, and stuff like that.

259
00:15:05,420 --> 00:15:07,500
But this is just taking it to a whole new level.

260
00:15:07,630 --> 00:15:11,260
And there's a lot to learn from stuff like this.

261
00:15:11,260 --> 00:15:15,840
So that's my kinda quick look at the modern era of Debian.

262
00:15:15,840 --> 00:15:18,900
Let's move into the futures that I was talking about.

263
00:15:18,900 --> 00:15:25,590
So just like in cosmology... I think you all probably know where this is going to go.

264
00:15:25,590 --> 00:15:28,010
You know, one of the models for the future is

265
00:15:28,110 --> 00:15:30,840
that Debian is in some way going to continue to expand and grow

266
00:15:30,840 --> 00:15:35,070
for however long you want to think ahead.

267
00:15:35,070 --> 00:15:38,270
And there's two ways that I think this could happen.

268
00:15:38,440 --> 00:15:44,890
It could be a targeted growth where we pick a direction we want Debian to move in

269
00:15:44,960 --> 00:15:46,980
and we just put everything behind that

270
00:15:47,110 --> 00:15:52,090
and we have enough momentum going that we can continue to maintain growth as time goes on

271
00:15:52,090 --> 00:15:55,990
and meet the needs of that one area.

272
00:15:56,050 --> 00:15:59,080
So we could pick, say, the server market

273
00:15:59,150 --> 00:16:00,900
and say okay, we're doing all this Debian cloud stuff.

274
00:16:00,960 --> 00:16:04,120
People talked about all the talks that are going to be here at Debconf about that.

275
00:16:04,430 --> 00:16:07,320
There's a lot of that going on.

276
00:16:07,320 --> 00:16:10,750
If you go off to any virtual VPS provider

277
00:16:10,750 --> 00:16:14,110
you can pick a Debian image, pretty much on every single one of them.

278
00:16:14,110 --> 00:16:16,700
It's big in that area, obviously.

279
00:16:16,700 --> 00:16:23,660
Or we could say well, we're going to try to also handle desktop, or mobile, or something.

280
00:16:23,660 --> 00:16:27,830
Something a little bit more targeted might be a good idea then just something that broad.

281
00:16:27,830 --> 00:16:33,310
But you know, maybe if we decide, well, we just want to do this, and this

282
00:16:33,310 --> 00:16:34,990
then that would help us grow.

283
00:16:35,060 --> 00:16:37,880
I don't know, it's just one model.

284
00:16:38,020 --> 00:16:41,820
If you look at mobile, though, and you look at where Debian is right now...

285
00:16:41,820 --> 00:16:46,020
This is a screenshot of Lil' Debi, which is an Android app

286
00:16:46,020 --> 00:16:50,260
that basically debootstraps Debian, that's what it's doing there in the screenshot

287
00:16:50,260 --> 00:16:55,270
and this is kinda of the current state of the art of Debian on all the mobile devices

288
00:16:55,270 --> 00:16:57,820
that every single person out there has in their pocket, I'm assuming

289
00:16:57,860 --> 00:17:00,240
that aren't running Debian, probably?

290
00:17:00,240 --> 00:17:01,720
You know, it's pretty basic,

291
00:17:01,720 --> 00:17:06,030
it really doesn't give you a system that can do a lot of wonderful things,

292
00:17:06,100 --> 00:17:08,920
unless you're wanting to do wonderful things at the command line

293
00:17:08,920 --> 00:17:12,990
with a virtual keyboard, which isn't much fun.

294
00:17:12,990 --> 00:17:17,260
You know, you can think about what we can do to expand this.

295
00:17:17,290 --> 00:17:20,050
Can we, say, add Android support into Debian in some way

296
00:17:20,120 --> 00:17:22,670
so that you can install Android apps and run them.

297
00:17:22,740 --> 00:17:28,090
Can we have some way of getting a... you know, installing something in a chroot of this type

298
00:17:28,090 --> 00:17:32,290
and then displaying it on the normal Android display

299
00:17:32,290 --> 00:17:35,650
and having a full interactive application, that kind of thing.

300
00:17:35,720 --> 00:17:40,660
So that's kind of an example of how we could go into one area and try to expand

301
00:17:40,760 --> 00:17:43,220
to get Debian growing in that area.

302
00:17:43,220 --> 00:17:48,400
The other major way that I think we could grow Debian

303
00:17:48,500 --> 00:17:50,310
or that Debian could continue growing

304
00:17:50,410 --> 00:17:53,810
is this more community-driven model.

305
00:17:53,880 --> 00:17:58,180
This is kind of where you have different projects doing their own thing

306
00:17:58,280 --> 00:18:02,520
and Debian can somehow come in and help them out.

307
00:18:02,520 --> 00:18:09,210
You know, we have some good examples, like Freedombox, and TAILS, and stuff like that

308
00:18:09,340 --> 00:18:13,580
that are using Debian in great ways, and doing wonderful stuff.

309
00:18:13,580 --> 00:18:16,410
Hopefully they're getting a lot of developers, I hope.

310
00:18:16,410 --> 00:18:19,950
I don't know if that's the case.

311
00:18:19,950 --> 00:18:22,120
But there are community-driven things.

312
00:18:22,190 --> 00:18:26,160
There are ways that Debian can expand out into an area without having to move the whole project there.

313
00:18:26,190 --> 00:18:30,290
You can just say, it's a custom Debian distribution, it's a blend, whatever

314
00:18:30,390 --> 00:18:32,480
and we're still... it's still contributing back.

315
00:18:32,550 --> 00:18:35,640
It's a wonderful ecosystem going on there.

316
00:18:35,770 --> 00:18:38,870
Now, if you look at something like the Raspberry Pi
p
317
00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:42,900
I think we kinda made a mistake with the Raspberry Pi

318
00:18:43,070 --> 00:18:49,090
because we said we're not going to support the specific arm instruction set that they want to use

319
00:18:49,120 --> 00:18:51,580
because it's five percent faster, or something

320
00:18:51,710 --> 00:18:56,640
and so they went off and built Raspbian, and that's fine, you know

321
00:18:56,640 --> 00:19:02,670
but we've kind, I think, possibly, lost a little bit of the mindshare in the Raspberry Pi community

322
00:19:02,740 --> 00:19:06,570
because everybody's like, "well, okay, we've got this Raspbian thing, it's not Debian, right?"

323
00:19:06,610 --> 00:19:10,540
Of course it is in pretty much every important way.

324
00:19:10,540 --> 00:19:14,040
And maybe if we had been a little bit more open to this project

325
00:19:14,110 --> 00:19:19,080
coming and saying, we would like to build everything for armv5, or whatever it was

326
00:19:19,150 --> 00:19:24,530
maybe we would have had a bit more opportunity for growth and expansion, there.

327
00:19:24,530 --> 00:19:29,980
And then, if you look at just Debian developer communities in general

328
00:19:29,980 --> 00:19:35,630
there's always opportunities which we sometimes don't take advantage of

329
00:19:35,690 --> 00:19:41,380
to have really good relationships with various interesting projects

330
00:19:41,580 --> 00:19:44,030
that might end up using Debian in some way

331
00:19:44,100 --> 00:19:46,920
or might end up contributing back, or becoming part of it, even.

332
00:19:47,020 --> 00:19:52,940
And so I think... I really feel pretty bullish about this community-driven thing

333
00:19:53,040 --> 00:19:55,950
I think it's kinda Debian how has always worked.

334
00:19:55,950 --> 00:20:01,650
I don't know if... you know, it's hard to look out and say

335
00:20:01,720 --> 00:20:04,580
in ten years Debian will be an attractive target for people doing

336
00:20:04,710 --> 00:20:07,500
whatever the equivalent to Raspberry Pi is in ten years

337
00:20:07,500 --> 00:20:10,530
but I hope so.

338
00:20:10,530 --> 00:20:12,530
So that's the one model.

339
00:20:12,530 --> 00:20:14,900
Whoa, what happened to the other model?

340
00:20:14,970 --> 00:20:17,350
Ah, okay, so steady state.

341
00:20:17,490 --> 00:20:22,200
It's another cosmological model, obviously.

342
00:20:22,200 --> 00:20:27,580
I think we could just continue sort of coasting along indefinitely

343
00:20:27,580 --> 00:20:30,300
without really saying, oh, we're going to make big changes

344
00:20:30,370 --> 00:20:32,720
we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we can just keep doing our thing

345
00:20:32,860 --> 00:20:37,290
and be completely happy for as long as you want to look out.

346
00:20:37,360 --> 00:20:39,110
We've got a lot of momentum, we can keep going.

347
00:20:39,180 --> 00:20:42,940
Even if we all stop doing much today, I think Debian will keep going for years and years

348
00:20:43,080 --> 00:20:45,500
quite happily

349
00:20:45,570 --> 00:20:51,250
and you know, after a while, you start having to think about generational things.

350
00:20:51,480 --> 00:20:57,570
When most of our generation, or generations, got involved with Debian

351
00:20:57,810 --> 00:21:00,900
we kind of had some infrastructure that we just kind of thought was there

352
00:21:00,900 --> 00:21:03,790
Maybe it was a kernel, or a C compiler

353
00:21:03,860 --> 00:21:04,800
or something like that.

354
00:21:04,870 --> 00:21:07,420
We didn't really think about it, maybe we occasionally ran into a bug in it

355
00:21:07,520 --> 00:21:08,530
and we reported the bug

356
00:21:08,530 --> 00:21:12,400
but it wasn't something that was at the forefront of our minds

357
00:21:12,470 --> 00:21:15,020
as something new and exciting, necessarily.

358
00:21:15,160 --> 00:21:16,970
And maybe that's where Debian's going

359
00:21:17,040 --> 00:21:21,010
Maybe Debian becomes an infrastructure that thing get built on top of over time

360
00:21:21,070 --> 00:21:24,670
and there's enough people to keep it going

361
00:21:24,810 --> 00:21:29,820
because if nothing else, companies like Google, as long they continue using Debian

362
00:21:29,880 --> 00:21:34,690
are going to want to employ tons of Debian developers, just to keep it going.

363
00:21:36,520 --> 00:21:43,600
So this is definitely I think a likely possible future at some point

364
00:21:43,670 --> 00:21:48,280
is that Debian becomes an infrastructure, and that's fine

365
00:21:48,280 --> 00:21:51,810
and if you continue looking forward does it continue being infrastructure

366
00:21:51,840 --> 00:21:52,950
or at some point does it get replaced

367
00:21:53,050 --> 00:21:57,930
and does it even matter if it gets replaced in X years? I don't know.

368
00:21:57,930 --> 00:22:04,180
But you know, I think this is another likely possibility... we'll see.

369
00:22:04,180 --> 00:22:08,220
And then of course we have this final, fun possibility that you get

370
00:22:08,220 --> 00:22:11,440
and I would probably have put some bullet points up here

371
00:22:11,510 --> 00:22:16,420
but I had an unexpected root canal and stuff, so I kind of ran out of slides at this point.

372
00:22:16,490 --> 00:22:17,900
[laughter]

373
00:22:17,900 --> 00:22:20,720
You know, you can have a big crunch.

374
00:22:20,790 --> 00:22:24,710
and this is always my favorite possibility for the universe as a whole.

375
00:22:24,710 --> 00:22:28,050
I don't know about for Debian.

376
00:22:28,390 --> 00:22:32,730
What would happen if Debian just petered and just somehow died and fell off a cliff

377
00:22:32,760 --> 00:22:34,070
and everything started going down

378
00:22:34,170 --> 00:22:37,270
and everybody switched to Android on their servers or who knows what.

379
00:22:37,340 --> 00:22:40,560
I mean, what are they going to replace us with? I can't possibly think.

380
00:22:40,630 --> 00:22:43,220
There's got to be something out there, right?

381
00:22:43,220 --> 00:22:45,220
Maybe it's all Fedora in the future, I don't know.

382
00:22:45,220 --> 00:22:49,370
Hi Fedora folks.

383
00:22:49,370 --> 00:22:53,000
This is definitely a possibility that we have to keep in mind

384
00:22:53,070 --> 00:22:55,290
and it's not like the end of the world, right?

385
00:22:55,360 --> 00:22:59,120
It would only be the end of Debian, and even if that happened

386
00:22:59,120 --> 00:23:04,940
think back to that earlier slide about apt establishing a new paradigm in package management.

387
00:23:05,080 --> 00:23:11,060
Even if Debian stopped being actively used and developed

388
00:23:11,160 --> 00:23:14,150
at some far future point that I don't want to imagine

389
00:23:14,150 --> 00:23:17,480
it would still have influenced things in a great many ways

390
00:23:17,550 --> 00:23:21,220
and I think we could all be quite pleased with the work that we had done on it.

391
00:23:21,380 --> 00:23:24,410
Of course we all hope that it will continue to be used

392
00:23:24,510 --> 00:23:26,430
for as long as long as we're involved in the project

393
00:23:26,500 --> 00:23:30,460
or maybe ten years longer so we can keep using Debian systems after we retire.

394
00:23:30,700 --> 00:23:35,940
So, I kind of thought that I would take a little poll of the audience.

395
00:23:35,980 --> 00:23:39,070
Who thinks that we're going to somehow continue to expand

396
00:23:39,340 --> 00:23:43,110
for however long you want to imagine is a long time?

397
00:23:43,240 --> 00:23:48,590
Hands? Continued expansion? I would say maybe ten percent of the room.

398
00:23:48,650 --> 00:23:51,950
Okay, so who's for steady state?

399
00:23:51,950 --> 00:23:57,600
Slightly fewer than for expansion. Okay, big crunchers?

400
00:23:57,600 --> 00:24:04,830
[laughter, applause]

401
00:24:04,890 --> 00:24:10,430
Okay, well, I think we're for expansion.

402
00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:21,370
So that's really all that I came here to say

403
00:24:21,440 --> 00:24:24,830
It's a fairly fluff talk, I know. I hope that you've enjoyed it.

404
00:24:24,940 --> 00:24:31,880
Maybe some people have some other cosmological models that they'd like to suggest?

405
00:24:37,950 --> 00:24:44,540
[Audience]: Sort of relevant to the big crunch scenario

406
00:24:44,670 --> 00:24:48,470
Andrew on IRC asks

407
00:24:48,610 --> 00:24:52,310
I'm watching other community distributions fragment and lose focus.

408
00:24:52,310 --> 00:24:57,590
Fedora, openSUSE are killing themselves right now.

409
00:24:57,590 --> 00:24:59,590
Are we doing the same?

410
00:24:59,590 --> 00:25:04,440
[Joey]: I don't think that we're fragmenting as such.

411
00:25:04,480 --> 00:25:08,650
We've already kind of fragmented already. There was the whole Ubuntu thing

412
00:25:08,680 --> 00:25:12,990
which I think is the first time I've said that word in this talk.

413
00:25:13,150 --> 00:25:18,750
I don't know if we lose focus as such.

414
00:25:18,750 --> 00:25:20,550
We've never really had focus, have we?

415
00:25:20,620 --> 00:25:22,700
We've all just done our own thing and...

416
00:25:22,770 --> 00:25:28,620
[laughter, applause]

417
00:25:28,620 --> 00:25:30,170
[Audience]: I was just saying to somebody over here

418
00:25:30,170 --> 00:25:32,860
that one of the differences is that

419
00:25:32,930 --> 00:25:38,840
those distros are actually more tightly tied to something else that matters

420
00:25:38,840 --> 00:25:45,470
whether it's the commercial distribution organization that they were sort of spawned out of, or whatever.

421
00:25:45,470 --> 00:25:51,790
They've had a less completely community-driven reason to exist

422
00:25:51,890 --> 00:25:53,370
and to continue to exist than Debian has

423
00:25:53,440 --> 00:25:58,280
so I would not be surprised if we don't end up having an entirely different life-cycle

424
00:25:58,350 --> 00:26:01,070
than something like Fedora or openSUSE.

425
00:26:01,070 --> 00:26:03,320
The question I was going to to pose:

426
00:26:03,320 --> 00:26:08,500
I've noticed as you have, and you made a couple of references to this

427
00:26:08,600 --> 00:26:14,150
the average length of thread about almost anything has gotten a lot larger.

428
00:26:14,150 --> 00:26:17,240
One of the things that I observed a while back, though

429
00:26:17,310 --> 00:26:21,950
is that the average number of participants per thread had not actually increased all that much.

430
00:26:22,020 --> 00:26:28,040
It was certainly for any given thread a much smaller percentage of the people currently active in the project

431
00:26:28,040 --> 00:26:33,250
than used to be the case when there were thirty of us and five of us were screaming at each other.

432
00:26:33,250 --> 00:26:38,560
I'm wondering if there's... I don't know exactly what to take from that

433
00:26:38,630 --> 00:26:42,950
But the notion that a similar number of people can just scream at each other for a whole lot longer

434
00:26:42,950 --> 00:26:44,950
and still not come to a conclusion.

435
00:26:44,950 --> 00:26:49,390
I don't know if there's anything to take from that, or learn from it, or not.

436
00:26:49,420 --> 00:26:55,100
[Joey]: Yeah, I don't know, I'd actually meant to say I was going to put the systemd thread on here

437
00:26:55,170 --> 00:27:02,970
but despite this being a pretty zoomy thing, there are limits to floating point resolution

438
00:27:03,070 --> 00:27:06,170
and eventually you can't actually represent the whole thread in Iceweasel

439
00:27:06,200 --> 00:27:10,020
or whatever I'm running here.

440
00:27:10,020 --> 00:27:15,820
Maybe what's happened is that we have either...

441
00:27:15,880 --> 00:27:21,260
we just have more people and so the number of people who feel strongly about something

442
00:27:21,330 --> 00:27:23,080
they feel much more strongly about it.

443
00:27:23,150 --> 00:27:27,080
You have a small subset, who all feel that they have to win.

444
00:27:27,180 --> 00:27:31,350
And so they just keep talking about this and they don't come to a consensus.

445
00:27:31,490 --> 00:27:33,240
Do you have a thought?

446
00:27:33,240 --> 00:27:36,460
[Audience]: It's really interesting because as a project

447
00:27:36,560 --> 00:27:42,580
I think we have this sense about ourselves that we're all about freedom and so forth

448
00:27:42,680 --> 00:27:46,690
and somewhere along the way freedom got translated into

449
00:27:46,790 --> 00:27:49,210
"we should all be able to have our own way"

450
00:27:49,210 --> 00:27:55,830
and that was really not part of the freedom that we cared about when this project was young.

451
00:27:56,000 --> 00:28:03,700
Even when there were strong debates, they were debates about technical details

452
00:28:03,800 --> 00:28:06,690
or when the constitution was being drafted

453
00:28:06,790 --> 00:28:10,290
there were a few big questions about how should this should be structured

454
00:28:10,360 --> 00:28:14,060
and then a draft got generated, a lot of folks looked at it

455
00:28:14,120 --> 00:28:18,160
and went, yeah, that's close enough, and off we ran.

456
00:28:18,230 --> 00:28:23,290
And the amount of bikeshedding that goes on these days just scares me a little bit

457
00:28:23,290 --> 00:28:27,610
because it seems like taking that word freedom, and translating it way too much

458
00:28:27,740 --> 00:28:34,430
into not needing to collaborate, or not needing to come to agreement and consensus.

459
00:28:34,430 --> 00:28:36,430
Now, I don't know how we change that, or fix it.

460
00:28:36,430 --> 00:28:42,640
But it bothers me sometimes when I see people take the things that I thought of

461
00:28:42,670 --> 00:28:45,390
when I first joined the project in 1994

462
00:28:45,460 --> 00:28:47,550
as being fundamental tenets of the project

463
00:28:47,550 --> 00:28:51,330
and they use the same words, but they mean something very different.

464
00:28:51,330 --> 00:28:56,760
and it causes their behaviors to be very different from what I would like to see.

465
00:28:56,760 --> 00:29:02,140
[Joey]: When the constitution was originally proposed, I was kinda against it.

466
00:29:02,210 --> 00:29:06,380
And I thought, well, this seems like a lot of faff around for something that shouldn't matter.

467
00:29:06,410 --> 00:29:10,880
I didn't even bother to vote on it.

468
00:29:10,980 --> 00:29:14,560
I was like, if Ian wants to do this, great! Ian can do this, you know? He'll take care of it.

469
00:29:14,560 --> 00:29:16,560
If it breaks, he'll fix it.

470
00:29:16,560 --> 00:29:19,490
And I think we've kinda...

471
00:29:19,690 --> 00:29:23,320
Maybe it's just that we have a lot of people now who...

472
00:29:23,460 --> 00:29:28,640
Debian is an important part of their life, maybe professionally, or personally, much more important.

473
00:29:28,700 --> 00:29:34,120
How many people here in the room have their livelihood in some way connected to Debian?

474
00:29:34,120 --> 00:29:39,330
So probably about as many as want Debian to continue growing.

475
00:29:42,690 --> 00:29:47,900
[Audience]: One thing I just wanted to add to what Bdale was saying about the bikeshedding and stuff

476
00:29:47,900 --> 00:29:54,390
I'm in preparation for my BoF later this week about the code of conduct.

477
00:29:54,460 --> 00:29:56,810
I've actually been reading a lot of other codes of conduct

478
00:29:56,920 --> 00:29:59,300
on a page prepared by Zack, thanks for that

479
00:29:59,570 --> 00:30:03,510
and one item that I saw coming back a few times

480
00:30:03,610 --> 00:30:08,110
and which I've also taken into my proposed code of conduct that we'll be discussing

481
00:30:08,180 --> 00:30:12,420
is about: be collaborative.

482
00:30:12,420 --> 00:30:14,420
Try to work with other people.

483
00:30:14,420 --> 00:30:19,170
And I think that it could help to put something like that there.

484
00:30:19,170 --> 00:30:22,400
It's just a proposal, and we still have to discuss it.

485
00:30:23,980 --> 00:30:29,360
[Audience]: So let me as a dark and destructive person

486
00:30:29,430 --> 00:30:32,730
focus on the big crunch model for a moment.

487
00:30:32,730 --> 00:30:37,160
The question is: what would happen?

488
00:30:37,230 --> 00:30:43,690
What would we be able to do in Debian if we would be in this big crunch situation?

489
00:30:43,820 --> 00:30:47,660
Because, okay, now we are big.

490
00:30:47,720 --> 00:30:54,720
We are very important, and we are quite central to the Free software world

491
00:30:54,750 --> 00:30:57,410
in a number of ways.

492
00:30:57,410 --> 00:31:03,020
What happens if this world in some ways disintegrates?

493
00:31:03,020 --> 00:31:09,010
Obviously there must be a replacement.

494
00:31:09,010 --> 00:31:18,990
We should be open to change and re-evolve in a way that makes the world go on

495
00:31:19,090 --> 00:31:25,850
even if we in the way we are now fundamentally change.

496
00:31:25,850 --> 00:31:32,070
[Joey]: You know, I didn't really think about the big crunch as affecting the Free software community as a whole.

497
00:31:32,070 --> 00:31:36,080
I just assumed that was some background noise which kept everything going

498
00:31:36,080 --> 00:31:38,160
even if Debian went away.

499
00:31:38,290 --> 00:31:41,250
I mean, yeah, it seems to me that Debian can definitely go away

500
00:31:41,250 --> 00:31:44,550
without the Free software community fragmenting or imploding

501
00:31:44,680 --> 00:31:48,250
or whatever, or turning to BSD licenses

502
00:31:48,350 --> 00:31:50,800
vanishing down the Apple rabbit-hole, or whatever.

503
00:31:50,970 --> 00:31:54,670
[Audience]: That's not what I was about here.

504
00:31:54,670 --> 00:32:03,550
It's more, we have one model of working in our Free software ecosystem

505
00:32:03,550 --> 00:32:09,460
that maybe this model at some point in time is not relevant any more.

506
00:32:09,460 --> 00:32:18,240
It's like, maybe some of you know this model of evolving systems.

507
00:32:18,310 --> 00:32:21,470
There is a first system which is a big hack

508
00:32:21,540 --> 00:32:26,110
the second system is built by a community and great and does everything

509
00:32:26,210 --> 00:32:30,550
but at some point in time this second system becomes irrelevant

510
00:32:30,550 --> 00:32:33,780
fundamental ideas will be changed

511
00:32:33,910 --> 00:32:40,570
and a third system or third systems will evolve

512
00:32:40,700 --> 00:32:43,660
on the remains of the second system.

513
00:32:43,760 --> 00:32:47,560
That's just what's happening now, slowly, with X for example.

514
00:32:47,700 --> 00:32:52,980
X will not be completely disintegrating

515
00:32:53,080 --> 00:32:55,090
but people will evolve on it

516
00:32:55,230 --> 00:33:02,420
and I think we should have some thoughts about the same ideas in Debian

517
00:33:02,560 --> 00:33:06,390
and we should prepare

518
00:33:06,390 --> 00:33:12,340
what might happen if this case starts growing on us.

519
00:33:12,340 --> 00:33:18,700
[Joey]: Thank you for that; you're thinking further ahead than I am and that's great.

520
00:33:18,700 --> 00:33:23,680
Anybody else with a question, I'm not sure how we are on time.

521
00:33:23,680 --> 00:33:28,650
[Audience]: I think the disintegrating is not really an interesting point

522
00:33:28,650 --> 00:33:33,830
Debian is, I think, there to... itch our scratch

523
00:33:33,830 --> 00:33:38,770
if we don't have the scratch left, there's no reason to itch

524
00:33:38,770 --> 00:33:42,300
as long as we are community-driven

525
00:33:42,510 --> 00:33:48,570
as long there will be a scratch, we will continue to itch.

526
00:33:48,570 --> 00:33:50,410
[Joey]: Or the other way round, but I take your point.

527
00:33:50,510 --> 00:33:54,240
[Audience]: And to the mailing list problem

528
00:33:54,340 --> 00:34:03,290
I think I see a tendency on mailing lists that we have something like

529
00:34:03,450 --> 00:34:11,120
this anti-politician and anti-intellectual point.

530
00:34:11,120 --> 00:34:19,260
It's too often everything that's on a mailing list that's bikeshedding

531
00:34:19,360 --> 00:34:23,780
if you give a point against something

532
00:34:23,780 --> 00:34:28,840
if it's not the opinion that you are, it's bikeshedding, it's not a technical argument

533
00:34:28,840 --> 00:34:30,840
you are against progress

534
00:34:30,840 --> 00:34:38,290
and I think we need to be a bit more collaborative at this point.

535
00:34:38,420 --> 00:34:43,770
To more listen to each other, and not to dismiss everything

536
00:34:43,770 --> 00:34:48,710
as everything you don't understand doesn't make sense.

537
00:34:48,780 --> 00:34:53,760
It's only people that want their old stuff keeping there.

538
00:34:53,920 --> 00:35:03,470
It's, I think, the reason some flames go up very much is that it's important to people

539
00:35:03,610 --> 00:35:06,370
and then it's important to listen to them

540
00:35:06,370 --> 00:35:12,250
and not just tell them, oh, old fart, we don't care.

541
00:35:12,250 --> 00:35:19,950
[Joey]: I think if you go back and look at older threads in Debian like I did for this talk

542
00:35:20,020 --> 00:35:25,060
or if you go whereever stuff's getting done, and look at what a thread looks like

543
00:35:25,060 --> 00:35:28,890
when stuff is getting done and people are busy making things happen

544
00:35:28,890 --> 00:35:32,390
versus when people are busy complaining about other people making things happen, or whatever

545
00:35:32,460 --> 00:35:36,430
there's a really different tone there. I think you could learn to recognise that tone

546
00:35:36,490 --> 00:35:40,760
I don't know if you could teach people who are part of the problem

547
00:35:40,870 --> 00:35:42,610
which we all probably are from time to time

548
00:35:42,750 --> 00:35:46,110
to squelch that down, or, not.

549
00:35:46,180 --> 00:35:50,210
I think it's something we need... yeah. Enrico?

550
00:35:55,660 --> 00:36:00,000
It's right there, go up to the stand.

551
00:36:10,290 --> 00:36:16,040
[Audience]: On that point, it's interesting that you made that point

552
00:36:16,100 --> 00:36:21,350
I found myself, after some frustrating discussion I was having

553
00:36:21,380 --> 00:36:26,760
asking people to please... real life discussion, about something completely different

554
00:36:26,760 --> 00:36:33,490
asking people... telling people, can you please stick to...

555
00:36:33,620 --> 00:36:37,090
I'm more interesting in hearing your personal story.

556
00:36:37,190 --> 00:36:40,650
I'm more interested in hearing your experience in what you have done.

557
00:36:40,780 --> 00:36:48,380
Please don't... I'm less interested in hearing what you wish would happen.

558
00:36:48,490 --> 00:36:52,590
I'm less interested in what you wish I would do.

559
00:36:52,590 --> 00:36:57,090
Please let me choose what I would do, and I'm happy to hear your experience.

560
00:36:57,090 --> 00:37:04,930
And I think that is a pattern that also matches very well what you mentioned.

561
00:37:05,030 --> 00:37:08,930
When people are getting things done, they are not discussing about

562
00:37:08,930 --> 00:37:11,520
the way they wish everybody else would believe

563
00:37:11,620 --> 00:37:16,160
or the way they wish everybody else would have done something

564
00:37:16,330 --> 00:37:18,780
but they bring in their experience:

565
00:37:18,850 --> 00:37:24,300
When I did this last time I did it this way, and it didn't work. Let's try another way.

566
00:37:24,360 --> 00:37:27,740
But when it comes from personal experience

567
00:37:27,740 --> 00:37:32,430
it is more about getting things done

568
00:37:32,430 --> 00:37:38,150
than about seeing who has the better ideas, or something

569
00:37:38,250 --> 00:37:40,840
which is rather pointless.

570
00:37:41,040 --> 00:37:46,020
So yeah, I wish on mailing lists to see people bringing in their experience

571
00:37:46,080 --> 00:37:52,740
their stories at work, the way they fixed a problem like that before and how

572
00:37:52,780 --> 00:37:55,570
rather than: "people should do this".

573
00:37:55,700 --> 00:38:00,110
"People should do this" is possibly something I don't want to see on a mailing list any more.

574
00:38:01,270 --> 00:38:06,090
[applause]

575
00:38:06,190 --> 00:38:11,400
[Joey]: I think we have to somehow learn to be more accepting

576
00:38:11,570 --> 00:38:15,610
of just doing something, and if it's a mistake, reverting it.

577
00:38:15,670 --> 00:38:18,300
It would be great if we had more technology around this

578
00:38:18,360 --> 00:38:21,990
but just socially, deciding, if somebody wants to go off and do something

579
00:38:21,990 --> 00:38:23,990
then let them

580
00:38:23,990 --> 00:38:27,440
and if it turns out to be a bad idea, we can undo it later.

581
00:38:27,440 --> 00:38:33,900
I think if you look at where we're really good in Debian at making things happen

582
00:38:33,930 --> 00:38:36,890
it is stuff like the one maintainer per package model

583
00:38:36,890 --> 00:38:39,880
where people are given the power to go off and do something

584
00:38:40,020 --> 00:38:44,170
and it's their responsibility, and if you have a flamewar about it

585
00:38:44,170 --> 00:38:46,710
well we have processes but we don't use them very often

586
00:38:46,710 --> 00:38:52,390
and it would be great if we could find more ways to expand that kind of way of doing things

587
00:38:52,390 --> 00:38:54,810
off to the things which don't just touch one package.

588
00:38:54,950 --> 00:38:58,680
I think that's what's broken down as it were.

589
00:38:58,680 --> 00:39:02,550
We're building this bigger stuff on top of individual packages

590
00:39:02,650 --> 00:39:04,970
and we don't have a way to go off and say

591
00:39:05,100 --> 00:39:07,520
this guy is going to handle the systemd transition

592
00:39:07,520 --> 00:39:09,610
with this group of people he's got together, or something.

593
00:39:09,680 --> 00:39:14,740
Maybe that doesn't work, Bdale looks unhappy with it, so it's a bad idea

594
00:39:14,740 --> 00:39:16,740
but there must be a way to make it happen.

595
00:39:16,740 --> 00:39:18,740
Anybody else?

596
00:39:18,740 --> 00:39:26,090
[Audience]: I used to expect that at some point sooner or later Debian would effectively just split

597
00:39:26,120 --> 00:39:28,100
into multiple groups which competed with each other.

598
00:39:28,100 --> 00:39:32,310
I mean I know some people talk about Ubuntu as a fork of Debian, but it's kind of a different thing

599
00:39:32,410 --> 00:39:35,600
I really thought that some time there would just be a discussion

600
00:39:35,770 --> 00:39:38,730
where the two sides just disagreed so badly about some issue

601
00:39:38,860 --> 00:39:43,270
that you would end up with two things, basically both of which claim to be the true Debian

602
00:39:43,270 --> 00:39:46,530
obviously one would probably own the trademark, but yeah, I mean

603
00:39:46,530 --> 00:39:50,930
both of them would just think that they were the true continuation and hate each other forever.

604
00:39:50,930 --> 00:39:53,590
That seems to have become less likely now

605
00:39:53,590 --> 00:39:57,360
and it seems to me that most of the times we have big discussions

606
00:39:57,560 --> 00:40:01,110
it just ends up with not much happening

607
00:40:01,110 --> 00:40:03,610
rather than something happening that really annoys people.

608
00:40:03,610 --> 00:40:06,300
I mean in some ways that's better and some ways that's worse.

609
00:40:06,440 --> 00:40:08,720
[Joey]: That's a fascinating comment.

610
00:40:08,760 --> 00:40:12,690
That doesn't fit into any of my three models, the forking off thing.

611
00:40:12,690 --> 00:40:18,100
It's multiple universes, it fits into the cosmological model

612
00:40:18,100 --> 00:40:23,790
Yeah, that's fascinating, why is that less likely now than it used to be?

613
00:40:23,850 --> 00:40:27,350
Is there less excitement and energy around Debian or is it something else?

614
00:40:27,420 --> 00:40:33,070
[Audience]: Now I would worry more that, again, if it gets harder to push new ideas

615
00:40:33,200 --> 00:40:36,290
and you end up... well, we are still getting new people

616
00:40:36,500 --> 00:40:43,420
but if you look at the official members of Debian, we're basically only at a replacement rate

617
00:40:43,560 --> 00:40:52,330
I have to say, looking around the room, that we're definitely an aging population too.

618
00:40:52,570 --> 00:40:58,150
So although that's still fine for a few decades, yeah

619
00:40:58,220 --> 00:41:04,140
if we want to continue in the long term of Debian having a good future and still being relevant

620
00:41:04,140 --> 00:41:10,660
then, again on your graph, how do we get back into really growing,

621
00:41:10,760 --> 00:41:16,240
not just the community round the edges, helpers and contributors and so on

622
00:41:16,240 --> 00:41:20,610
but people who are members of Debian should also be growing

623
00:41:20,610 --> 00:41:23,640
and taking new ideas.

624
00:41:24,040 --> 00:41:32,750
[Audience]: Sort of replying to that: if we go a bit smaller than cosmological, and go to galactic, say

625
00:41:32,750 --> 00:41:42,000
I think Debian could be looked at as if it started out being a star nursery

626
00:41:42,130 --> 00:41:45,700
and then we turned into a galaxy

627
00:41:45,760 --> 00:41:49,700
and we're now at a stage where we need to find a way of maintaining the black hole

628
00:41:49,700 --> 00:41:55,380
because otherwise, if people aren't allowed to work on an alternative black hole

629
00:41:55,450 --> 00:42:01,840
then the arms will fly off, as... yeah, we need to suck more.

630
00:42:02,000 --> 00:42:05,540
[laughter, applause]

631
00:42:05,600 --> 00:42:10,860
So the black hole is the sort of boring, central packages

632
00:42:10,860 --> 00:42:14,210
which you're not allowed to touch, because if you do that everything will break

633
00:42:14,210 --> 00:42:18,110
and we need a way of instantiating a new galaxy next door

634
00:42:18,250 --> 00:42:20,940
and just replacing the black hole, and as you say if it doesn't work

635
00:42:21,070 --> 00:42:22,680
You can git revert.

636
00:42:22,750 --> 00:42:26,250
So, and the other thing is, if you look at the mailing lists

637
00:42:26,250 --> 00:42:28,330
you get the impression that there's a war going on

638
00:42:28,400 --> 00:42:31,900
where there is going to be a schism.

639
00:42:31,900 --> 00:42:34,920
Half the people will go off and maintain their servers

640
00:42:34,960 --> 00:42:39,500
and the other half will go off with their tablets, or whatever, and sort them out.

641
00:42:39,700 --> 00:42:43,800
But actually, the people in those discussions aren't going to build either of those things

642
00:42:43,870 --> 00:42:46,020
and the rest of Debian is just getting on with it.

643
00:42:46,090 --> 00:42:49,050
So, that's why I think Debian doesn't fragment

644
00:42:49,110 --> 00:42:51,950
because the vocal people aren't necessarily the people doing the job.

645
00:42:52,580 --> 00:42:55,430
[Audience]: I think there's another possibility

646
00:42:55,430 --> 00:42:59,100
and that is that when I think about Moray's question

647
00:42:59,130 --> 00:43:03,870
There are more derivatives of Debian than any other core distribution

648
00:43:03,870 --> 00:43:07,270
so there are certainly lots of people out there who have decided

649
00:43:07,410 --> 00:43:10,160
that the thing they wanted to to differently, or cared about

650
00:43:10,230 --> 00:43:14,110
was worth going, creating a CDD, or a fork, or whatever.

651
00:43:14,110 --> 00:43:21,090
So that's happened, it just hasn't dragged the trademark into... or the name into some kind of a pit

652
00:43:21,190 --> 00:43:23,010
which I would hate to see happen.

653
00:43:23,070 --> 00:43:28,320
But I have this sense that maybe the other thing about it is that Debian has become large enough

654
00:43:28,390 --> 00:43:30,740
and means enough things to enough people

655
00:43:30,810 --> 00:43:35,080
that the vast majority of us in the project who don't give a flying you-know-what

656
00:43:35,110 --> 00:43:37,730
about whether it's upstart or systemd

657
00:43:37,800 --> 00:43:43,920
That's an impassioned important discussion for the people for whom how the system boots

658
00:43:44,020 --> 00:43:46,810
is the thing they care about in Debian.

659
00:43:46,880 --> 00:43:49,440
But for the vast majority of us it's it, like, as you say

660
00:43:49,500 --> 00:43:53,270
I do that once per kernel update cycle, a reboot

661
00:43:53,340 --> 00:43:57,100
and the rest of the time I just don't care

662
00:43:57,170 --> 00:44:01,880
and so the idea that the distribution would fracture

663
00:44:02,010 --> 00:44:06,690
or somehow Debian wouldn't be Debian any more because there's a fracturous discussion

664
00:44:06,750 --> 00:44:10,820
going on in a particular sub-project or sub-part of the distribution

665
00:44:10,890 --> 00:44:12,910
is just hard for me to wrap my brain around.

666
00:44:12,970 --> 00:44:16,920
[Joey]: It seems like it would have to be something that isn't technological based.

667
00:44:16,920 --> 00:44:19,160
Some kind of, you know, we want to change the social contract

668
00:44:19,230 --> 00:44:21,850
or maybe want to change what free software is

669
00:44:22,090 --> 00:44:25,780
and that would fracture Debian.

670
00:44:29,650 --> 00:44:33,350
[Audience]: So, on the lines of what Bdale just said

671
00:44:33,420 --> 00:44:39,270
this way that we are becoming almost a preferred choice to be upstream

672
00:44:39,470 --> 00:44:42,230
is a very good thing

673
00:44:42,290 --> 00:44:45,390
and that enables our work to scale much better

674
00:44:45,520 --> 00:44:47,410
than if we try to grow the project

675
00:44:47,470 --> 00:44:50,970
and I think the reason why we aren't growing in terms of number of people

676
00:44:51,040 --> 00:44:54,740
is that we're already at some kind of limits of scaling

677
00:44:54,800 --> 00:44:57,430
We're having... a lot of things we're talking about

678
00:44:57,490 --> 00:45:01,190
are difficulties to do with coordinating and communicating between this number of people

679
00:45:01,330 --> 00:45:07,880
and allowing, and becoming upstream for people is a way for us to scale that a lot better

680
00:45:08,020 --> 00:45:12,360
and one of the things that we should be trying to do is to look outward

681
00:45:12,360 --> 00:45:14,360
rather than inward

682
00:45:14,360 --> 00:45:17,600
and to try to think of ways in which we can be a better upstream for people

683
00:45:17,740 --> 00:45:22,110
to make it easier for people to derive, so that fewer people have to do their work within Debian

684
00:45:22,110 --> 00:45:25,940
and that they're easier to do it outside Debian.

685
00:45:26,010 --> 00:45:32,330
Because after all, software freedom is about freedom to make the change yourself to the software you're using

686
00:45:32,430 --> 00:45:35,760
and that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have a huge, kind of

687
00:45:35,890 --> 00:45:39,490
get involved with a huge complicated upstream who have processes

688
00:45:39,520 --> 00:45:40,870
and decide to do things a particular way.

689
00:45:40,940 --> 00:45:42,280
No, you should just be able to it.

690
00:45:42,350 --> 00:45:48,270
At the moment if you want to do that it's quite hard, and we should make it easier.

691
00:45:48,670 --> 00:45:53,450
[Joey]: Yeah, you know, when you think about that

692
00:45:53,580 --> 00:46:00,940
maybe it's kind of what's happening now, but you have to wonder

693
00:46:01,110 --> 00:46:04,470
your scenario, you can go either one of two ways.

694
00:46:04,470 --> 00:46:08,640
You can have a lot of custom Debian distributions, and things based on Debian

695
00:46:08,640 --> 00:46:11,740
and Debian can just become a background infrastructure

696
00:46:11,800 --> 00:46:15,350
and then who wants to work on it when it's some thing that's down there in the depths

697
00:46:15,350 --> 00:46:18,700
that other exciting things are being built on top of

698
00:46:18,700 --> 00:46:22,230
You know, maybe you contribute patches back when it makes your life easier

699
00:46:22,430 --> 00:46:28,550
but do we get a sustaining model that way, or maybe we don't.

700
00:46:28,550 --> 00:46:31,850
I kind of used to have this argument with Manoj.

701
00:46:31,910 --> 00:46:34,430
I thought that Debian had to expand or we were just going to die

702
00:46:34,600 --> 00:46:38,400
and Manoj was like no, Debian is just about what I need for my system

703
00:46:38,400 --> 00:46:40,400
and what my friends need for their systems.

704
00:46:40,400 --> 00:46:44,760
I'm only interested in it in that way.

705
00:46:44,760 --> 00:46:46,760
And I don't know, maybe Manoj was right.

706
00:46:46,760 --> 00:46:52,290
I think that I was definitely wrong.

707
00:46:52,290 --> 00:46:58,850
The best arguments are always that way, right?

708
00:46:58,850 --> 00:47:04,530
[Introducer]: Okay, the time is over, so we have to take this as the closing comment

709
00:47:04,530 --> 00:47:08,900
and, yeah, you have to move it to lunch to discuss over that.

710
00:47:08,900 --> 00:47:10,900
[Joey]: Okay, thanks everybody.

711
00:47:10,900 --> 00:47:15,830
[applause]


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