Re: Contacting Debian Rust packaging team
Hi Fabian,
thank you for your personal insight. I'm happy about the different
answers of membery of the Rust packaging team.
Kind regards
Andreas.
Am Fri, Nov 01, 2024 at 09:35:47PM +0100 schrieb Fabian Grünbichler:
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2024, at 9:51 PM, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > Hi
>
> Hi!
>
> Thanks for reaching out, since other team members already replied individually I'll do so as well.
>
> > I have some specific questions to the rust team.
> >
> > - Do you feel good when doing your work in rust team?
>
> Yes :) It can feel a bit like the work is neverending at times, but we are a lively and motivated bunch ;)
>
> > - Do you consider the workload of your team equally shared amongst its
> > members?
>
> We do have a steady influx of new contributors, some of which become DMs, some of which in turn became DDs or are on their way to becoming ones. So the workload is definitely not shared equally, by virtue of that alone - a pretty big part of the more mechanical part of packaging or updating packages is done by people that are not allowed yet to upload, or can only upload a specific set of packages but touch a lot more.
>
> Broadly speaking, I think people usually fall into one, sometimes more of these categories:
> - working on packaging a certain piece of software (or pieces) and their deps and keeping it somewhat current
> - working on keeping the huge set of packaged crates in testing (plugwash is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, with occasional assistance of other team DDs)
> - working on the toolchain (that's mostly me) and internal tooling (that's shared a bit more, but I am also one of the main drivers there)
> - sponsoring and helping with issues
> - ..
>
> > - Do you have some strategy to gather new contributors for your team?
>
> I think we are one of the few teams that actually have a significant number of people show up on their own - both upstreams (which happens in other parts of Debian as well) that want to see their thing packaged, but also regular users/students/devs that like a certain application and want to see it packaged in Debian. Some of them end up contributing to the team effort over a longer period of time (packaging from scratch a Rust application usually entails introducing at least tens of NEW packages, sometimes even more, and touching quite a lot more), and in the past year we've had (I think?) 3 new DDs (me included), with one more already approved - in addition to DDs that help out in the team without having it as their main topic of interest in Debian.
>
> We obviously profit a lot from Rust being a popular, rising language in general, I don't think the team is doing anything "special".
>
> > - Can you give some individual estimation how many hours per week you
> > are working on your tasks in youre team? Does this fit the amount of
> > time you can really afford for this task?
>
> Some of the work I do in the team is upstreaming of work I do during (paid) working hours for a Debian derivative. I'd say each toolchain update (those happen every 6 weeks upstream) is between 5 and 20 hours of work to get into testing. I probably spend between 5 and 10 hours on average on other team related work per week, but I don't really keep track of it :)
>
> > - What is your most used / favourite medium (email, IRC, Matrix, video
> > conferences, ?) to organise your work?
>
> I'd say it's IRC followed by salsa, and then with quite a gap, mail/BTS.
>
> > - I personally do not speak Rust but as far as I heard it belongs to
> > those programming languages that are featuring their own dedicated
> > packaging system. How are you dealing with problems that might
> > occure from this fact?
>
> It's a bit of a double-edged sword - cargo is a nice tool if you are doing upstream dev work. It does encourage some practices that are not a good fit for the work we do as a distro (like updating to new versions of dependencies without a need to do so). We do have our own helper tool that tries to convert packaging metadata from cargo's manifest to various parts of the `debian/` directory. I'd say it works quite well for the bulk of packaged crates (but I am also it's main maintainer nowadays, so I am probably biased ;)), but the more exotic/complicated your package is, the more you might benefit from packaging it in a more classic fashion.
>
> I think the fact that Rust doesn't have stable dynamic linking yet (or even within reach) is probably more of an issue than the fact that cargo exists and is widely used.
>
> > - Can I do anything for you?
>
> I don't think there is anything pressing atm, mid-term the whole security support topic might be something where you (or a future DPL) could facilitate. IMHO it would probably be easiest to tackle that at a (Mini?)Debconf/camp where people from all the involved teams are present and can hash out blockers and a path towards a solution.
>
--
https://fam-tille.de
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