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About the recent DD retirements



Hello world,

There is a thread that started today in debian-private. Don't worry,
it's not an earth-shattering thread, nor is it complaining about huge
masses of retiring DDs. However... Yes, in the last few months we have
got used to seeing many more retirement messages than what we used to
in that mailing list.

The rules of engagement dictate that I shall not disclose here
anything but my own message. However, the original poster made a very
interesting, long mail, with some questions to which the answers might
be interesting for the general public to read. I will take the freedom
to quote the questions along with my answers. Mr. Original Poster, if
you care to identify yourself and forward your full message, I'll be
happy.

------------------------------------------------------------

First of all: Yes, this is the right forum. At least, this is *the*
forum we currently keep an eye on and start acting on account
retirement notices. Usually, account retirements posted here get
processed first by keyring-maint (Jonathan McDowell, Daniel Kahn
Gillmor and myself). We then either transfer or open a relevant
ticket to DSA.

Second, yes, the retirement trend is public: We talked about its
inavoidability back in DC14, and I posted several times on my blog
about it. The last one is at:

   http://gwolf.org/node/4022

So, we are not posting "Mr. Foobar, maintainer of packages foo and
quux, has retired", but we do have:

   The graph above shows the sharp change between tags 2014.12.31 and
   2015.01.01. But my definition of success is that we managed to get
   the number down to just 252+35=287 from what we had back in August,
   when we did our DebConf presentation and started the aggressive
   push: 490 DD keys and 49 DM keys. Since then, 34 DDs requested
   their retirement, becoming emeritus, and practically all of the
   rest managed to get their key transition done!

And, of course, you do have a public Git repository detailing the
changes:

   https://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=keyring/keyring.git

So, yes, it is public with quite full detail. And yes, we knew quite
well us retiring 1024D keys would bring a load of retirements. And to
some degree, it is a *good* thing. Yes, being a socially-active DD for
long, and having been a DebConf organizer for most of my Debian
involvement, I do know many of the retirees personally. It is, as I
have posted here, animically(?) hard to prompt so much people for
action and get all those retirement messages. We "lost" 34 people in
the last six months!

But then again, by far most of the retirees state the fact they are
leaving just acknowledges they had already left long ago. Which is
also sad — But it is, after all, just a fact of life in a
volunteer-run project.

And yes, we have at least a lesser size distortion on the project. We
have many more orphaned packages — Some months ago they were as orphan
as they are today, but we weren't paying enough attention.¹

And... Sure, Debian's attractiveness has also morphed. Those of us who
joined a long time ago (I'm "younger" than you on the project, only
since 2003, but it's still a very long time) have changed our life
circumstances, possibly our interests, maybe even our ideological
viewpoints. And yes, maybe (but that'd fuel a different discussion)
Debian is less attractive in general to the young developer population
to what it was in the past — I don't remember where I read that the
median birth year of DDs has remained almost constant, which means
that (yes) we might be attracting more senior developers (after all,
Linux is no longer just a toy), but also... That we are failing to
attract young talent.

¹ *Please* do not read this as an attack on MIA-team work. They do
  very hard, heuristic-based work. It will never precisely match
  reality, though, IMO.

> The questions I want to open up with this email are:

OK, you make specific questions. I skipped most of your mail's
content with my rant, but lets go to this point!

>   * do you have the impression that Debian wants only contributors that
>     consistently spend many hours for Debian each month?

I really hope not. My time allocation from Debian varies wildly, and
it often reaches zero.

>   * is there something that can be changed to make it less time
>     consuming to be a good citizen (like better ways to keep up with
>     relevant discussions)?

I try to do that, at least. It's a very passive way of participating,
but at least I "lurk" (and post very seldom) on ~10 mailing lists
(including -devel, -project and -private) and idle on a couple of IRC
channels. That allows me to feel the pulse of the project and catch
many of the erupting topics.

>   * does the concept of "the package maintainer" assign too much
>     responsibility, putting too many eggs in a single basket? (Freezing
>     a package if $maintainer goes MIA, stopping other contributors from
>     moving Debian forward)?

I think we have collectively done a great job of slowly moving over to
shared maintenance. Again, I don't have the numbers handy, but
remember having read it. And yes, I do hope every DD should at some
point have all of their packages group-maintained and sit on the
low-NMU-threshold list.

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