Becoming a Debian Maintainer - and behavior of DDs
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
Hello,
About 1.5-2 years ago I started working on Debian-HA. The project had been abandoned by Martin (as
he works on other packages, and mainly Ubuntu last I recall), and I pursued getting involved and
getting things started.
I quickly got admitted to Alioth as an admin, and began getting things in order. I reached out to
old devs, joined upstream, got IRC going, built us a wiki, and updated alioth (lists, etc).
There was another contributor looking to get involved, Ferenc Wagner, though he only got involved
after I started emailing, fixing up alioth, working on the software stack the team maintains, and
found a sponsor for the team (prior to Christoph Berg joining us).
After a week or so, Christoph Berg and 4 others joined the fray under the premise that his company
was sponsoring them to work with the team on the software stack.
Fast Forward a couple weeks -
Ferenc suddenly disappears for 3 months after Christoph originally shut down a seemingly endless
restructuring of Git repositories, claiming that he did not care for bike-shedding. In that time I
not only finished the package I was working on, but I prepared LibQB, Pacemaker, Corosync, crmsh,
pcs, the ruby packages, and more - asked for review and for other members to help contribute and
potentially sponsor the uploads. I contribute upstream, am active in clusterlabs, and I even have a
private ppa for hosting the stack unofficially, and I've been hounded by countless end-users to put
it back up when it goes down. My mother even gets phone calls from Germany in that regard.
During that time I worked with Christoph Berg, he advised not to play with repository structure too
much - and asked that I didn't do more than I had to to get the stack working again.
Next Ferenc comes into the fray again, upset that I had backed up the old corosync repository (thus
removing the glorious contributions of previous contributors according to Ferenc - though I did
reuse their changelog so only git history resided elsewhere, not that it was deleted) and created a
new one (seeing as how upstream uses git now instead of mercurial, beyond other factors such as
that we were standardizing our team).
Ferenc disregards all my work and makes his own repository on github (instead of contributing to
the team repository) so that he can structure branches how he wants and move to DEP-14 (I was never
opposed to that, but its exactly what Christoph asked me not to do when I suggested it based off of
conversations I had with Ferenc) - and after Christoph states that he doesn't care for
bike-shedding and had been working with me already on some of the packages along with Adrian; he
reneged with regard to Ferenc's new repository (which was now missing all of my changelog entries
which cataloged my contributions to the package, the very thing I didn't do - but which Ferenc
complained about himself).
I spoke with Christoph about it, asking why he disregarded my work, why he allowed Ferenc to remove
my changelog entries - he apologized and stated that he'd pay better attention next time. He had a
sudden changing of mind though after Debconf.
Yes, after Debconf Christoph's whole demeanor towards me changed; He blatantly started uploading
each and every one of Ferenc's packages, 'mindfully' attempting to accept the ruby packages I
worked on - I'm guessing to try to make me feel better and shut me up. And all he had to offer was
a 'Sorry if your changelog entries got removed'. Sure I was still in the uploaders field or
whatever, but the changes I made to code were no longer noted.
I had also asked Christoph to advocate me as a maintainer 6-8 months prior to now, which was
already almost a year after I had started working with the Debian-HA packages. He told me he'd
consider it after the stack was done. He advocated for Ferenc very shortly after Debconf, far
before the stack is complete (it still isnt complete even) - only a month or two later. Now, months
after that, Christoph is advocating Ferenc as a DD.
All the packages I've helped with, get uploaded almost as soon as Ferenc does a 'final' check-in.
My work non-existent and/or removed, or left there but it is obvious that Ferenc is the final
factor in Christoph's mind.
If you cannot tell, this is a play of favoritism, and isn't right. Christoph was setting him up
with history (by only uploading his work and ignoring mine and others) so he could exaggerate his
contributions and quickly help him to promote to DD. In his advocacy for Ferenc, Christoph makes it
appear as if Ferenc did all that work himself - though he most certainly did not. Countless months
did Adrian and I work on those softwares in the stack, and I feel that I at least am being slapped
in the face. Adrian - however - was advocated by Christoph very near the same time as Ferenc.
Christoph is now lying to me, trying to say that I misread what he told me and that he said he did
not feel I was ready because my package(s) required more review than Ferenc's. This is not true, I
have the logs to prove this is not what was said in any way shape or form. Firstly, Christoph
blantantly said in IRC that he let the changelog issue slip by because he basically was just making
sure the packages worked and would then upload them - indicating he wasnt doing a proper job
reviewing. Secondly there should never have been 'his' or 'my' packages. We have a team repository
why wasnt work being done there? Especially after the facade Ferenc put up because I backed up a
repository and remade it.
Aside from that a review is a review, Christoph never reviewed my packages because he still doesnt
even understand the bits in Ferenc's repository that were copied from my work. I didn't do as much
to packages specifically as I got them up to date because Christoph _specifically_ told me not to!
Yet Christoph claims that there are more loose ends in what I submit....erm - how about because I
did what he asked of me, and additional loose ends are part of previous iterations of the package.
Christoph could have given me feedback to do more, yet he did not. Christoph was reviewing Ferenc's
personal repository, and was not reviewing my work properly to begin with. Since then he continues
to focus primarily on Ferenc's work, they have become quite close.
Christoph continuously takes Ferenc's work and uploads them with almost no review - In fact Ferenc
was almost mentoring Christoph - which he admits in his advocacy by stating Ferenc had to teach
him. (mind you I said almost)
I continued to discuss this with Myon and he goes as far as to type 'stop yelling', 'I'm more than
happy to have you on the team but...' Almost as if he's threatening to remove me from Alioth and
kick me off the team if I pursue this. Meanwhile, the only all-caps words in IRC were from
Christoph (Myon). I'll post our conversation from today [1], but please note that I do get he doesnt
_have_ to advocate me - not as a DM or DD. But playing favorites and lying is not really - in my
mind - the thing a DD (or any Debian Contributor) should be doing.
Debian is supposed to be a respectable organization. That kind of behavior is not respectable. I
believe that Debian needs to work harder to ensure that DD's are fair and unbiased - which is
obviously not the case here.
Whether anyone agrees with me or not is not very important. I did not write this email to get
something 'fixed' with regards to my specific situation, but to ensure that this type of behavior
is noted to the proper individuals and remembered.
And for the record, this horrible vibe that I get from Christoph and Ferenc - is a major part of why I did
not act upon my diversity sponsorship for Debconf last year in Germany (aside from the fact that it
was last minute and a complete mess).
[1] http://paste.debian.net/hidden/047b079a/
Best regards,
Richard B Winters (Rik)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: OpenPGP.js v1.2.0
Comment: http://openpgpjs.org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=d0tb
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Reply to: