Re: DPL teams review 2008
On Tue, 29 Apr 2008, Steve McIntyre wrote:
...
I'm simply looking for positive ways where we can make Debian
work better.
Thanks Steve for this effort.
1. You
------
a. What's your name, and where are you from? How long have you been
involved in Debian?
Andreas Tille, Germany.
Debian developer since nearly exactly 10 years.
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'*m a physicist by profession but working ifull-time as computer scientist
in a medical institute which is run by the German government. My Debian
work is _tolerated_ in my spare time, but not actively supported by
my institute - so very less Debian work possible in working hours.
I have a family with a 17 year old son (so he is in an age he is happy
spending his time on his own ;-)). I have no further important commitments.
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!)
I think I spend about nearly 2 hours per day for Debian work which
makes about 15 hours per week. This is more or less identically to
the time I can comfortably spend.
d. What packages do you maintain?
I maintain some rather unimportant packages (some of them I'm upstream
others have long update periods upstream). The only important one I
maintain on my own is WordNet. All packages I feel responsible in the
Debian-Med scope are team maintained.
How well do you cope?
I think I cope very well. Currently no bugs with higher severity than
minor, most of them upstream problems. I'd regard this as the normal
situation.
Are you part
of a team for those packages, or do you work on them on your own?
All medical applications team maintained. I'd be willing to team
maintain all my other packages but nobody volunteered to join such
a team and I hate "virtual" teams which consist of just one active
person.
How much time do you need to spend, on average?
Don't understand this question.
Are they in good shape?
As I said I regard packages I'm responsible for in good shape. Regarding
team maintenance we developed some means to be able to catch up. Please
have a look at:
http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/ [0]
We try to extend these tools to make them usable for all CDDs.
e. How would you rank all of your tasks in order of importance?
I'd regard the coordination and leading of the Debian-Med team and
strategically develope the CDD concept as higher priority than just
adding packages to the Debian pool. I try to care for the health of
the team by gathering new members, working together with upstream
authors of software that is relevant for our scope, etc.
f. Finally, are you having fun working on Debian?
Yep, a lot of fun!
Why/why not?
Isn't this a stupid question??? ;-)
It's Debian, isn't it?
To be honest: The most fun is to see like a one man show project from
2002 turned into a really good team with several members who also seem
to have fun in the Debian Med team.
2. Teams you're in
------------------
First Team Debian Med.
a. What teams do you work on? Are you an "official" member of those
teams?
I'm an official member and it was me who started the project.
b. How well do you think those teams are performing, in terms of
getting things done?
I'm very happy how things getting donw.
How are daily/regular tasks dealt with? And
how about less common, one-off things?
Thanks to a quite sensible sharing of the tasks inside the team I regard
the cooperation as good. In some aspect the communication could be enhanced
but this is probably a matter of time constraints of some team members and
thus a perfectly normal situation.
c. How do members of your teams communicate with each other about what
they're working on?
Basically the Debian Med mailing list. The IRC channel just exists but
is quite orphaned.
And how do they (as individuals or as a team)
communicate with people outside of the team?
E-Mail.
Do you feel they coordinate well?
Well, some members could be more verbose what they did or why they
do not manage what they would like to do. I guess the main reason
are time constraints as I said above. But this is no problem that
would really block the efficiency of the work.
d. Are there enough resources for your teams to do their jobs well? If
not, what's missing?
Ahhh, we could always use some man power!!!
I hope this page more or less answers the question:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMedTodo
e. Anything else you'd like to mention?
Yep, thanks to my fellow Debian Med members.
2. Teams you're in
------------------
Second team: Custom Debian Distributions
a. What teams do you work on? Are you an "official" member of those
teams?
I'm an official member and I think the work was also initiated by myself.
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?
The team tries to spread the concept of Custom Debian Distributions
which is to support specialized users *inside* Debian. [1]
c. How do members of your teams communicate with each other about what
they're working on?
Basically the mailing list, but unfortunally there is not so much interest
in inter-CDD communication. There is some successfull cooperation between
Debian Med and Debian Edu which was basically because I kind of forced the
Debian Edu people in by turning their debian-edu source package to build
with cdd-dev tools. There is some light at horizont about an upcoming
Debian Science - at least there is some stuff in alioth svn.
And how do they (as individuals or as a team)
communicate with people outside of the team?
The mailing list is kind of missused by people who missinterpreted the
intention of the list and the CDD idea by perfectly ignoring the docs.
We kind of tolerate this to keep an eye on things that are happening and
perhaps get some new ideas. It might be possible to educate people who
missunderstood the concept - so everybody is welcome.
Do you feel they coordinate well?
Not really. There is not much traffic on the list and at least 50%
is the "tolerated" missuse as mentioned above. We are working on enhancing
coordination. My specific plan is to make the CDD concept attractive
enouth by enabling every CDD to use nice tools as there were developed
by a Debian Med member (David Paleino). The first step for better factorisation
are done and I plan to present some interesting stuff at DebConf to
gain more interest and by thus increase the willingness of people
to communicate better.
d. Are there enough resources for your teams to do their jobs well?
There could be more active members and in principle there are enough
people doing CDD stuff for their own CDD. The problem is to lead them
to work together.
If not, what's missing?
Acceptance of the concept to work closer together and try to prevent
reinventing the wheel.
e. Anything else you'd like to mention?
I'm continuosely working on this because I think that the CDD concept
has a great potential to establish powerful substructures under the
hood of Debian and by doing so perhaps solving some internal structural
problems.
2. Teams you're in
------------------
Third team Debian Edu
a. What teams do you work on? Are you an "official" member of those
teams?
I'm not as active as in the other two teams above - I'm rather in to
find synergy effects. But I have upload rights for the debian-edu package
and so technically (if this is your interpretation of "official") I'm
a member of this team.
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?
The most viatal and successful CDD according to my opinion. It is
a team that could serve as an example regarding communication, organisation
and results.
c. How do members of your teams communicate with each other about what
they're working on?
Four main ways for communication:
- regular real live developer gatherings (very interesting!!!)
- IRC meeting (about every 6 weeks)
- Mailing list
- active IRC channel
And how do they (as individuals or as a team)
communicate with people outside of the team? Do you feel they
coordinate well?
Communication with teachers, upstream developers, similar projects.
They succeded to convince Linex people to merge back to Debian as
much as possible.
d. Are there enough resources for your teams to do their jobs well? If
not, what's missing?
Well, you can never have enough people working on a living project,
but this one is not really short in man power.
e. Anything else you'd like to mention?
Thanks for the support I've got for my ideas.
2. Teams you're in
------------------
Fourth team Debian Science
a. What teams do you work on? Are you an "official" member of those
teams?
Well, there is not really such a team - but we are working on this.
In so far I'm a member of the process to form a team.
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?
Performance is slow. I had two talks ([2],[3]) about this topic and
there were two Extremadura workshops about CDD which was dominated by
Debian-Edu but there was also some work done on Debian Science stuff.
So some meta packages stuff is in SVN that might be released at some
point in time - but probably not for Lenny.
c. How do members of your teams communicate with each other about what
they're working on?
There is a mailing list about scientific software in Debian but this
is not really a communication about forming a CDD.
And how do they (as individuals or as a team)
communicate with people outside of the team? Do you feel they
coordinate well?
No, they do not. The mailing list works rather than some random
discussion about random packages that are useful for scientific work
sometimes targeting at developers about packaging issues and sometimes
to answer scientific user questions. There is no real interest in
a stricter organisation.
d. Are there enough resources for your teams to do their jobs well? If
not, what's missing?
I think that there is no broad consensus that we really need a team
for this purpose and I agree that the fiels "Science" is very wide.
The rationale behind the idea of a Debian Science team is that if
we have no smaller teams like Debian Med for medicine and biology,
DebiChem for Chemestry, Debian GIS for geographical information systems
it is better to have a certain structure for all to consolidate a
stable basis to draw some kind of Debian Physics, Debian Math, etc.
later from. There are a few people who agree with my idea.
e. Anything else you'd like to mention?
We are working on it. ;-)
3. Other teams
--------------
a. What contact, if any, do you (as an individual) have with other
teams? How well does that contact work?
In addition to the contacts inbetween the teams above which was
specifically strengthened in two Extremadura workshops (BTW, a really
great thing to meet in real life - many thanks to the Extremadura
people!!!)
b. How well do your team(s) interact with other teams?
There is some contact to Debian Junior, DebiChem and Debian GIS.
It is planed to strengthen the contact and try to convince them
to use the same techniques.
c. If you have any issues in (a) or (b), how would you suggest to fix
them?
Enhancing the techniques to make it more attractive to cooperate
technically. This will IMHO lead to better communication inbetween
people running the projects.
d. Any other observations about the various teams in Debian?
No.
Other stuff
===========
That's the list of things I'm hoping to learn more about from this
review of teams.
STeve, thanks for your effort.
But please keep those separate from this survey - it'll help
me to avoid my head exploding in all directions... :-)
Nobody wants this! ;-)))
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/
[2] http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200707_lsm_science
[3] http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200803_chem_science
--
http://fam-tille.de
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