Re: DPL teams review 2008
Hi Steve,
This survey is really a good idea.
Le Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 01:02:40AM +0100, Steve McIntyre a écrit :
>
> 1. You
> ------
>
> a. What's your name, and where are you from? How long have you been
> involved in Debian?
I am Charles Plessy, Frenchman living in Japan since four years, Debian
user since around year 2000, involved in Debian-Med since 2006, and
Debian developper since 2-3 weeks :)
> b. What do you do outside of Debian - are you a student with lots of
> free time, or are you employed full-time with a family and lots of
> other commitments?
I am a molecular biologist. I spend some time making experiments in a
lab, some time doing some computer analysis of the results, and some
time writing scientific articles and applications for funding for new
projects. With the exception of a few packages that I needed at work, I
do my Debian activities off-work, at home or sometimes in my workplace
but at times where the only task remaining in the day is to wait for a
machine to end its sample processing. Sometimes I can't help doing a few
things at coffee break :)
> c. How much time *can* you comfortably spend on Debian work in a
> typical week? And how much time *do* you spend on Debian work?
> (Yes, I know these can be very different!)
Typically, I have one or two hours of free time per day, and usually do
not work on week-ends (this is very lazy for a molecular biologist ;) I
often give to Debian one weekend afternoon and a few hours during the
week.
> d. What packages do you maintain? How well do you cope? Are you part
> of a team for those packages, or do you work on them on your own?
> How much time do you need to spend, on average? Are they in good
> shape?
In the Debian-Med team we co-maintain all our packages, and I have
decided to not maintain any by myself, to keep strong synergies in my
packaging work. Everything is in our SVN.
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian-med-packaging@lists.alioth.debian.orghttp://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/packages/?rev=0&sc=0
Most of my Debian time is dedicated to packaging. We are lucky that most
of the bioinformatical packages we maintain are not fast-evolving, so
our tast is quite simple, and we still can dedicate a lot of time on
preparing new packages.
> e. How would you rank all of your tasks in order of importance?
- Keeping our package collection in good shape.
- New upstream releases.
- New packages.
- Debian-Med general tasks such as writing news, documenting our
packaging practices, keeping an eye on Debtags and translations,
exploratory work (MIME support, for instance), ...
- I try to dedicate ~10 % of my Debian time (very rough estimate) to
general-interest tasks. I am quite limited by my skills, but I
sometimes test the installer, an recenlty I prepared a trivial update
for a RC bug in Etch.
> f. Finally, are you having fun working on Debian? Why/why not?
I am having a lot of fun with Debian. Debian-Med is a very nice team
that is still expanding, and it is really great to see the picture
emerging as we add more and more pieces to the puzzle. Also, I strenghen
my computer skills by doing Debian work, and I enjoy using these skills
for my research. I have had the opportunity to attend the Tōkyō area
Debian study group, and it has always been a pleasant time.
What typically makes me lose some fun in Debian is when I get directly
insulted. I can sometimes express some criticisms that people find
insluting, and get true insults in return ("moron", "stupid",
"whiner",...). I was not far from resigning from the NM queue a few
weeks before getting accepted as a DD.
Absence of answer is also killing the fun. Sometimes people ignore bugs
but keep on blogging on planet.d.o. Once a DD though he orphaned his
package but did not. But even if he did so, would it have been so
difficult to write something like "Hello, I am not the maintainer
anymore"? I have the feeling that Debian is often paralysed by such
behaviour.
> 2. Teams you're in
> ------------------
>
> a. What teams do you work on? Are you an "official" member of those
> teams?
I am member of the Debian-Med project and one of the admins of its
Alioth avatar.
> b. How well do you think those teams are performing, in terms of
> getting things done? How are daily/regular tasks dealt with? And
> how about less common, one-off things?
Debian-Med is growing and I hope that the release of Lenny will give us
opportunity to increase our user base. Our list is very reactive,
sponsoring works well, bugs are usually answered quickly (although we
sometimes let the pending fix wait a bit too long).
> c. How do members of your teams communicate with each other about what
> they're working on? And how do they (as individuals or as a team)
> communicate with people outside of the team? Do you feel they
> coordinate well?
We use email, and almost never IRC, IM nor forums. Given that we always
never have to work in emergency, I think that the time lag of email
communication is not a problem for team communication.
> d. Are there enough resources for your teams to do their jobs well? If
> not, what's missing?
I think that we miss user feedback. There is no communication channel
where we could contact users of package X easily, apart from posting
some text on the package's PTS page, that we dont expect to be visited
by users. Probably we could get more if we spent more time on forums (I
do not think that our users use IRC). In the future, maybe we should
consider attending some bioinformatical meetings as Debian-Med members.
But this could be a conflict of interest with our pay jobs.
Some commercial support would also greatly help the adoption of
Debian-Med by professionnals. But I have the feeling that we still need
to grow before we can attract some people interested by that kind of
project.
> e. Anything else you'd like to mention?
I think that the DM system is very useful to Debian-Med.
> 3. Other teams
> --------------
>
> a. What contact, if any, do you (as an individual) have with other
> teams? How well does that contact work?
I am member of the Debian-CDD team, but only for modifying the
Debian-Med metapackages. I sometimes contact the Debian Perl group
because some bioinformatical packages of interest are CPAN modules and
often get useful feedback. I got a CVS access to the Debian webwml
repository, where the Debian-Med website lives, when I was still in NM
queue. I have sometimes interesting discussions with Debichem and
Debian-Science members. I would say that the contact with all these
teams is good.
Contacts with the Release team are usually good, but sometimes there was
some tension in the handling of some bugs, where basically I got the
feeling that it was not trusted that we could fix them in time for Lenny.
I have a very bad relationship with the port and buildd teams. I can not
understand why their gold standard for problem solving is to not
communicate until the work is done, nor why they are so inflexible about
building all packages despite some are obvioulsy not useful on arches
that are weak in scientific computing. Just asking the question leads to
aggressive behaviour. Most insults I got from Debian developpers come
from them. Of course, I have not been very kind in all of my emails, an
I am sorry for this. But I think that it the end this is not a
communication problem but a conflict of interest for packages: I want my
work to be easy to access to our users, and they want my work to be
built on their favourite arch: sometimes these goals are conflicting and
we did not manage to find an agreement.
> b. How well do your team(s) interact with other teams?
Debian-Med has good relationship with all the other teams, and interacts
more often with the CDD, Perl, Debichem and Debian-Science teams.
> c. If you have any issues in (a) or (b), how would you suggest to fix
> them?
I think that we should be more user driven. I am willing to make a lot
of efforts if tomorrow a researcher sends an email to the Debian-Med
mailing list explaining that he needs sequence alignment software on
an unexpected architecture. In the absence of evidence for users on some
arches, I think that it would be easy to relax rules for packages that
do not have downstream dependancies, as most of the Debian-Med packages
are.
Also, I think that we should give ourselves more soft deadlines, so that
teams can better synchronise their works. I have felt some pressure for
solving bugs, but never was informed of an agenda other than about the
general freeze. In the Debian-Med team we maintain many packages and
prepare many others, and as I said, we do not have so much user feedback
for the moment. It means that there is a lot of space for adapting our
priorities to the needs of other teams. But for this I think that we
need a scale of importance and an agenda with soft deadlines.
> d. Any other observations about the various teams in Debian?
To all the teams: be more verbose !
Thank you Steve for the time you spend on this survey,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian-Med packaging team
Wakō, Saitama, Japan
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