1 00:00:07,700 --> 00:00:11,900 Okay, and now for the last talk in the morning session, 2 00:00:11,930 --> 00:00:14,660 Joey Hess will talk about Debian Cosmology 3 00:00:14,960 --> 00:00:21,950 [applause] 4 00:00:22,020 --> 00:00:26,930 Well, thanks, good morning everybody, I hope you had a good night's sleep. 5 00:00:27,030 --> 00:00:30,960 I enjoyed sleeping out in the tent, in the middle of Switzerland 6 00:00:31,000 --> 00:00:32,780 looking out over the lake 7 00:00:33,100 --> 00:00:35,740 this is kinda the first Debconf where I've kinda had a problem 8 00:00:35,740 --> 00:00:41,420 If I just look over there I'll probably just lose focus for a bit, it's so gorgeous. 9 00:00:41,490 --> 00:00:47,310 I thought this would be a good place to get up on a mountaintop, as it were 10 00:00:47,370 --> 00:00:50,670 and think about the bigger picture 11 00:00:50,740 --> 00:00:56,320 and try to think about some of the big questions, the big vague things we wonder about 12 00:00:56,450 --> 00:00:58,540 but don't really, sometimes, talk about 13 00:00:58,540 --> 00:01:01,800 maybe in public in front of a live streaming audience, I don't know. 14 00:01:01,800 --> 00:01:06,070 I have this crazy Debian Cosmology idea. 15 00:01:06,070 --> 00:01:10,810 And, let's look at Debian, let's look at the Universal operating system 16 00:01:10,810 --> 00:01:15,680 and think about thinking back 20 years back 17 00:01:15,750 --> 00:01:18,070 to when Debian was founded, up to the present 18 00:01:18,110 --> 00:01:20,860 and where it's going to go from here. 19 00:01:20,930 --> 00:01:25,970 Back in the beginning, there was kinda this void. 20 00:01:25,970 --> 00:01:31,590 and there was a gap [applause] 21 00:01:31,690 --> 00:01:35,150 and Ian Murdock saw this, and he said, well... 22 00:01:35,150 --> 00:01:39,960 let's make a new Linux distribution to replace SLS 23 00:01:39,960 --> 00:01:42,690 It'll be great; I'll get it done in a couple of weeks. 24 00:01:42,690 --> 00:01:45,070 [laughter] 25 00:01:45,070 --> 00:01:49,410 And this was back in 1993. 26 00:01:49,510 --> 00:01:52,740 And just as with the big bang 27 00:01:52,810 --> 00:01:55,830 you have the laws of nature somehow forming out of the void 28 00:01:55,970 --> 00:01:59,830 we developed these standard principles of Debian 29 00:01:59,830 --> 00:02:01,950 that have pretty much stood the test of time 30 00:02:02,020 --> 00:02:05,790 although some of them like the one package, one maintainer thing have changed over time. 31 00:02:05,950 --> 00:02:13,520 But this is all the stuff that we think of as the core principles of Debian today, probably. 32 00:02:13,520 --> 00:02:18,030 And this was in the period '94 to '98 33 00:02:18,160 --> 00:02:22,800 this early period where there weren't very many people involved in Debian 34 00:02:22,900 --> 00:02:25,090 and things got done fairly quickly. 35 00:02:25,120 --> 00:02:29,860 I have down here one of the initial threads for the Debian Constitution. 36 00:02:29,930 --> 00:02:33,430 This is where Ian Jackson said 37 00:02:33,560 --> 00:02:38,970 I think we'll use this constitution proposal to bootstrap the constitution 38 00:02:38,970 --> 00:02:41,760 so we'll vote on the constitution using the principles of the constitution. 39 00:02:41,900 --> 00:02:44,450 That could be a kind of controversial things to say, actually 40 00:02:44,560 --> 00:02:47,600 because it's a bootstrapping problem. 41 00:02:47,600 --> 00:02:51,850 But the thread actually wasn't that long 42 00:02:51,850 --> 00:02:53,670 by today's standards [laughter] 43 00:02:53,670 --> 00:02:56,360 for something that important. 44 00:02:56,630 --> 00:03:00,760 So, this was, as I said, the early period 45 00:03:00,860 --> 00:03:05,840 and then in the late 90s and early 2000s 46 00:03:05,910 --> 00:03:08,600 we went through this inflation period, just like the universe blew up 47 00:03:08,600 --> 00:03:10,080 got bigger and bigger 48 00:03:10,080 --> 00:03:12,080 we have the nice up-and-to-the-right graph 49 00:03:12,080 --> 00:03:15,730 which is the number of maintainers over time 50 00:03:15,730 --> 00:03:20,160 and I don't think that this data is very good 51 00:03:20,230 --> 00:03:24,200 but I'm kinda happy to see that it's started going up again in the most recent election 52 00:03:24,270 --> 00:03:27,930 although that's probably also just because Zack wasn't running [laughter] 53 00:03:27,930 --> 00:03:32,270 So during this inflation period we had things happen 54 00:03:32,340 --> 00:03:35,230 like adding ports to Debian. 55 00:03:35,300 --> 00:03:37,720 One port in '98, two ports in '99 56 00:03:37,850 --> 00:03:40,370 two ports in 2000; that's two ports a year. 57 00:03:40,370 --> 00:03:43,060 It's a crazy rate of change. 58 00:03:43,060 --> 00:03:47,870 And then we had... all these derivatives started popping up. 59 00:03:47,940 --> 00:03:49,790 We'd had Debian for Hams for a while 60 00:03:49,820 --> 00:03:52,380 but we got these derivatives that you don't think of much any more 61 00:03:52,380 --> 00:03:55,790 like Corel Linux, Stormix, Progeny 62 00:03:55,790 --> 00:03:58,700 These are names we haven't mentioned in a while 63 00:03:58,800 --> 00:04:02,450 but they were the early corporate entities saying, well, 64 00:04:02,450 --> 00:04:04,450 we're going to try and do something here with Debian 65 00:04:04,450 --> 00:04:05,490 and modify it 66 00:04:05,490 --> 00:04:08,050 and of course many more came from there. 67 00:04:08,110 --> 00:04:13,630 And another big event in this period was that apt started out. 68 00:04:13,760 --> 00:04:18,100 This is one of the early threads about apt 69 00:04:18,100 --> 00:04:20,959 This is about a year after it started being developed. 70 00:04:20,959 --> 00:04:22,200 Everybody started trying it 71 00:04:22,300 --> 00:04:25,460 and realized: oh, it actually doesn't work on my system 72 00:04:25,530 --> 00:04:29,310 because I have these packages that are half-configured 73 00:04:29,310 --> 00:04:32,290 I have a few broken dependencies because I just forced something at some point 74 00:04:32,290 --> 00:04:36,060 And everybody tried apt, and they're like, gosh, it says my system's inconsistent 75 00:04:36,160 --> 00:04:38,900 and it doesn't have apt-get -f yet 76 00:04:38,900 --> 00:04:40,900 so it doesn't work. 77 00:04:40,900 --> 00:04:43,120 So I thought this was an amusing thread. 78 00:04:43,180 --> 00:04:46,160 It's also not really too long a thread 79 00:04:46,160 --> 00:04:50,750 but here's an introductory representative message 80 00:04:50,820 --> 00:04:52,630 I don't know if you can read it back there 81 00:04:52,700 --> 00:04:55,320 but it's just what I said, apt-get dosn't seem to work 82 00:04:55,460 --> 00:04:57,210 it says my system lacks integrity 83 00:04:57,270 --> 00:04:59,290 and then Jason Gunthorpe, who wrote apt, said 84 00:04:59,360 --> 00:05:04,470 I don't think I've actually seen a Debian system that has a perfect dependency setup 85 00:05:04,500 --> 00:05:09,780 so that apt can actually work on it. 86 00:05:09,780 --> 00:05:12,470 If you think about introducing some big new change like apt 87 00:05:12,540 --> 00:05:14,020 and it doesn't work at all 88 00:05:14,150 --> 00:05:16,680 and this was in April of 1998 89 00:05:16,780 --> 00:05:19,950 If we then move forward one month to May of 1998. 90 00:05:19,950 --> 00:05:21,350 here's somebody saying 91 00:05:21,480 --> 00:05:25,330 "This makes makes me wonder if we should think about dropping this autoup script..." 92 00:05:25,330 --> 00:05:28,380 "...that we're using for upgrades" (some kind of a shell script or something) 93 00:05:28,380 --> 00:05:29,760 "...and switch to apt." 94 00:05:29,760 --> 00:05:35,240 "autoup seems to work and maybe we shouldn't postpone Debian 2.0 for apt..." 95 00:05:35,240 --> 00:05:41,930 "but autoup's a hack, and apt lets you do an entire bo to hamm upgrade in dselect." 96 00:05:42,130 --> 00:05:45,830 Wow. I was kinda of surprised to see this: it turns out that I wrote that. 97 00:05:45,900 --> 00:05:49,800 I had no idea that I proposed converting Debian to apt for 2.0. 98 00:05:49,860 --> 00:05:53,430 It didn't actually happen in May of 1998 99 00:05:53,490 --> 00:05:57,130 we had to wait a whole year until March of '99 when 2.1 came out 100 00:05:57,260 --> 00:05:59,460 and this is a quote from debian-history 101 00:05:59,460 --> 00:06:01,460 about apt, which I thought was a great quote: 102 00:06:01,460 --> 00:06:05,530 "It established a new paradigm for package acquisition and installation" 103 00:06:05,530 --> 00:06:07,750 and it really did. 104 00:06:08,220 --> 00:06:14,070 If you look now at things that are basically command-line compatible with apt 105 00:06:14,140 --> 00:06:16,060 or more or less command line compatible 106 00:06:16,120 --> 00:06:19,050 maybe they didn't quite understand the difference between upgrade and update 107 00:06:19,150 --> 00:06:22,140 There's so many of them! It's crazy. 108 00:06:22,140 --> 00:06:25,370 And one of the interesting things about this list 109 00:06:25,440 --> 00:06:29,410 is that if you look and see which ones of these actually do it securely 110 00:06:29,410 --> 00:06:31,410 it's a really small subset. 111 00:06:31,410 --> 00:06:36,740 Maybe some of them use HTTPS in some way 112 00:06:36,740 --> 00:06:40,030 and have a little bit of security there, I don't know. 113 00:06:40,030 --> 00:06:44,470 I didn't check them all in detail. 114 00:06:44,470 --> 00:06:47,360 Of course back then apt didn't have any security either. 115 00:06:47,430 --> 00:06:49,850 It was just pulling stuff via HTTP off the web 116 00:06:49,920 --> 00:06:53,410 and hey, it'd be the right thing, because why wouldn't it be? 117 00:06:53,620 --> 00:06:59,670 So soon after apt came out... this is a screenshot from 2002 118 00:06:59,670 --> 00:07:01,150 but it was around earlier 119 00:07:01,150 --> 00:07:03,150 We got apt-get.org 120 00:07:03,150 --> 00:07:06,230 which was all these third-party apt repositories. 121 00:07:06,230 --> 00:07:10,630 And this was kinda interesting, there were hundreds of different repositories. 122 00:07:10,730 --> 00:07:13,590 You could go off, edit your sources.list, get your packages 123 00:07:13,720 --> 00:07:19,370 and we kinda started thinking, wow maybe we're gonna change how Debian works in some way. 124 00:07:19,440 --> 00:07:22,600 Maybe we'll have some kind of a central core 125 00:07:22,670 --> 00:07:25,980 and everything else will just be pulling from other repositories somewhere. 126 00:07:26,100 --> 00:07:28,590 And we kinda went off on a divergent path. 127 00:07:28,720 --> 00:07:33,710 We kinda went down a wormhole to some distributed apt, or app store model 128 00:07:33,710 --> 00:07:38,400 where there's Debian and all this stuff you pull in from here and there 129 00:07:38,470 --> 00:07:40,220 and if somebody wants to make a package they do 130 00:07:40,290 --> 00:07:43,040 and this kind of is what happened today too. 131 00:07:43,110 --> 00:07:46,150 You can pull, you know, signed packages from Google 132 00:07:46,150 --> 00:07:50,270 and from debian-multimedia, deb-multimedia, that kind of thing 133 00:07:50,270 --> 00:07:52,460 But we didn't really go down that path. 134 00:07:52,460 --> 00:07:54,680 We're still very much a centralized distribution. 135 00:07:54,750 --> 00:07:58,650 I kinda think it's interesting to think about what could have happened if we'd branched off in a different way there 136 00:07:58,650 --> 00:08:03,190 But there were good reasons to keep it centralized, such as security. 137 00:08:03,190 --> 00:08:05,190 And if you now fast-forward to the present 138 00:08:05,190 --> 00:08:09,070 here's apt-get.org from 2011 139 00:08:09,070 --> 00:08:13,370 it's been broken, we can't check if these repositories work any more 140 00:08:13,510 --> 00:08:14,790 we're not accepting new submissions 141 00:08:14,920 --> 00:08:18,690 and this is what happened to debian-multimedia.org, which is a pity. 142 00:08:18,690 --> 00:08:23,460 It's a Russian domain about motorcycles or something, I don't know. 143 00:08:25,140 --> 00:08:30,320 So that's kinda the inflation period of Debian. 144 00:08:30,390 --> 00:08:34,559 And then we can move forward again into the modern era. 145 00:08:34,559 --> 00:08:40,380 This might be where my cosmology analogy gets a little bit strained 146 00:08:40,539 --> 00:08:42,220 but we'll see. 147 00:08:42,360 --> 00:08:49,420 I've picked out two things about the modern era of Debian 148 00:08:49,620 --> 00:08:52,580 this past 10 years, or 15 years. 149 00:08:52,780 --> 00:08:58,570 So, one of them: just as in the Universe, you have large scale structures forming, 150 00:08:58,700 --> 00:09:03,270 galaxies, and larger structures. 151 00:09:03,410 --> 00:09:06,940 In Debian we've kind of developed all kinds of structures 152 00:09:07,070 --> 00:09:09,190 on top of the "one maintainer, one package" model 153 00:09:09,330 --> 00:09:12,320 and extending it, and going beyond it. 154 00:09:12,450 --> 00:09:15,580 So a few of these, such as teams... 155 00:09:15,650 --> 00:09:21,400 Lucas showed us the graph of team maintenance increasing over the past ten years or so. 156 00:09:21,400 --> 00:09:24,730 We've just developed all these structures 157 00:09:24,730 --> 00:09:27,850 Custom Debian distributions 158 00:09:28,020 --> 00:09:31,720 stuff like d-i, different projects within Debian. 159 00:09:31,860 --> 00:09:34,070 So it gets pretty complicated. 160 00:09:34,140 --> 00:09:38,040 It's not a heterogeneous thing - a homogenous thing 161 00:09:38,140 --> 00:09:40,260 It's all clumped around in different places. 162 00:09:40,400 --> 00:09:43,890 If you also look at where people are using Debian 163 00:09:43,960 --> 00:09:45,570 that's differentiated a lot too. 164 00:09:45,610 --> 00:09:48,370 It's not just... we are the Universal operating system, we say 165 00:09:48,400 --> 00:09:50,720 but a lot of people are using Debian on servers 166 00:09:50,720 --> 00:09:52,720 and a few are on laptops 167 00:09:52,720 --> 00:09:54,720 and basically nobody is on a mobile phone 168 00:09:54,720 --> 00:09:59,800 except for a few people who are lucky enough to still have an Openmoko, or something like that. 169 00:09:59,800 --> 00:10:06,690 So, we've really differentiated Debian a lot. 170 00:10:06,830 --> 00:10:09,750 So that's the large scale structure thing. 171 00:10:09,820 --> 00:10:12,680 I think it's interesting to think about it 172 00:10:12,810 --> 00:10:18,090 because it kinda makes you think about how Debian's evolving. 173 00:10:18,490 --> 00:10:23,300 Now this is where it really gets strained. 174 00:10:23,640 --> 00:10:26,160 Red shift. Okay. 175 00:10:26,330 --> 00:10:29,960 [laughter] 176 00:10:29,960 --> 00:10:31,960 How do we have red shift in Debian? 177 00:10:31,960 --> 00:10:33,730 I don't see any red when I look out 178 00:10:33,860 --> 00:10:36,250 unless I've stepped into the middle of a flame war, or something. 179 00:10:36,480 --> 00:10:39,310 Here's kind of an amusing paper 180 00:10:39,370 --> 00:10:42,330 which I don't think has been peer-reviewed yet. 181 00:10:42,400 --> 00:10:46,200 It says, what if the universe, rather than actually expanding right now 182 00:10:46,200 --> 00:10:47,920 like we think it is because of red shift 183 00:10:47,980 --> 00:10:50,200 what if the mass of everything is increasing at once? 184 00:10:50,200 --> 00:10:53,970 And it says, well, everything would work pretty much like it does now 185 00:10:54,070 --> 00:10:57,670 we wouldn't even be able to test this theory. 186 00:10:57,670 --> 00:11:03,280 And while I don't know if the mass of the universe is increasing 187 00:11:03,280 --> 00:11:05,740 exponentially over time, like this paper says it is 188 00:11:05,800 --> 00:11:07,280 it seems a little unlikely. 189 00:11:07,350 --> 00:11:11,010 Debian's mass has definitely increased. 190 00:11:11,010 --> 00:11:14,340 We have an enormous mass, and an enormous momentum. 191 00:11:14,340 --> 00:11:15,890 We're moving in a certain direction 192 00:11:15,960 --> 00:11:19,320 and it's really hard to move Debian into a different direction now. 193 00:11:19,320 --> 00:11:24,730 So, one really easy example of this 194 00:11:24,800 --> 00:11:26,620 systemd. 195 00:11:26,720 --> 00:11:30,200 Think of how many threads we've had about systemd lately 196 00:11:30,200 --> 00:11:31,690 and, yeah. 197 00:11:31,830 --> 00:11:35,460 And this isn't replacing dpkg with apt 198 00:11:35,530 --> 00:11:38,420 and breaking all of our dependencies, and having to change everything. 199 00:11:38,550 --> 00:11:40,300 This is changing how systems boot 200 00:11:40,440 --> 00:11:44,240 which you do once a week, or once a month, or once a year. 201 00:11:44,240 --> 00:11:46,390 It's a minor change as things go, right? 202 00:11:46,390 --> 00:11:50,420 And yet it's an enormous controversy inside the project. 203 00:11:50,420 --> 00:11:54,960 So I think we have to think about this momentum, this mass 204 00:11:55,100 --> 00:11:59,810 how do we manage it, how can we make Debian nimble 205 00:12:00,010 --> 00:12:03,710 on top of all this momentum. 206 00:12:03,810 --> 00:12:08,600 So I think that's probably the largest problem that Debian is facing right now 207 00:12:08,600 --> 00:12:13,090 and will face in the next however far out you want to look. 208 00:12:13,090 --> 00:12:17,090 It's kinda hard to give a talk about Debian cosmology 209 00:12:17,220 --> 00:12:22,130 because what is a long time scale in Debian? 210 00:12:22,230 --> 00:12:26,970 We have twenty years of history to look back on. 211 00:12:27,140 --> 00:12:31,480 Can people think in their head, wow, will Debian be around in twenty years? 212 00:12:31,550 --> 00:12:32,760 I don't know. 213 00:12:32,860 --> 00:12:38,340 Pick a timescale that seems to make sense to you for the rest of this talk. 214 00:12:38,370 --> 00:12:40,900 I'm not going to try and force some kind of a timescale on you. 215 00:12:40,960 --> 00:12:43,110 If you want to think a hundred years ahead, great. 216 00:12:43,180 --> 00:12:46,510 If you want to think ten years ahead, okay. 217 00:12:46,510 --> 00:12:50,550 But I'm going to try to think about moving forward 218 00:12:50,550 --> 00:12:54,610 but first I have a little digression, which I forgot about. 219 00:12:55,660 --> 00:13:04,030 So, one of the examples of a way that the momentum in Debian can be a problem. 220 00:13:04,160 --> 00:13:05,840 I mentioned apt. 221 00:13:06,080 --> 00:13:09,240 Well there's this interesting thing being developed right now 222 00:13:09,270 --> 00:13:10,920 called functional package management. 223 00:13:11,090 --> 00:13:13,580 It started out with nixos 224 00:13:13,610 --> 00:13:16,540 and now the GNU project has gotten involved with its... 225 00:13:16,640 --> 00:13:19,090 Guix? I don't know how to say it. 226 00:13:19,190 --> 00:13:24,940 The idea is that it somehow takes ideas from functional programming 227 00:13:25,040 --> 00:13:27,060 and applies them to package management 228 00:13:27,100 --> 00:13:28,040 so it's bread and butter for me. 229 00:13:28,100 --> 00:13:30,530 I'm really interested in it being a Haskell guy now. 230 00:13:30,630 --> 00:13:32,070 Being in a functional program 231 00:13:32,140 --> 00:13:35,570 you're like, wow, there's some interesting ways to use these ideas. 232 00:13:35,640 --> 00:13:39,540 It's not really functional, but it's a neat terminology to hook on it. 233 00:13:39,570 --> 00:13:44,780 And what this lets you do, it's kind of a source based system, in a way 234 00:13:44,850 --> 00:13:48,520 I don't know. Has anybody used any of these systems in the audience? 235 00:13:48,620 --> 00:13:50,530 I'm just curious. You have, Zack? 236 00:13:50,630 --> 00:13:53,290 I'd love to chat with you about it and get a broader idea. 237 00:13:53,290 --> 00:13:58,800 The idea is kind of that you never make a destructive change to the system. 238 00:13:58,840 --> 00:14:01,260 Every package change is atomic. 239 00:14:01,260 --> 00:14:02,870 and if you have dependencies 240 00:14:02,940 --> 00:14:05,430 you might have multiple versions of a package installed at a time. 241 00:14:05,500 --> 00:14:09,190 and it's completely different than the dpkg model in every way. 242 00:14:09,300 --> 00:14:14,710 And it's kind of inconceivable to think that Debian would switch to something like this model now. 243 00:14:14,710 --> 00:14:16,710 It would just be so incredibly hard. 244 00:14:16,710 --> 00:14:20,630 You know, switching to apt would be just nothing in comparison 245 00:14:20,690 --> 00:14:23,250 and it's much later in our evolution 246 00:14:23,380 --> 00:14:27,020 we have a lot more structure built up around our current system 247 00:14:27,120 --> 00:14:29,970 than we did back then, even. 248 00:14:29,970 --> 00:14:33,000 This is an example of something that... 249 00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:35,490 The universe is coming up with neat new things 250 00:14:35,560 --> 00:14:37,170 How do we possibly put them into Debian? 251 00:14:37,200 --> 00:14:40,260 We can obviously package up these package managers 252 00:14:40,330 --> 00:14:44,160 and make it easy enough for people to use them as a third party thing 253 00:14:44,230 --> 00:14:47,260 You can install stuff in your home directory with functional package management 254 00:14:47,490 --> 00:14:50,550 and just have a system on top of Debian, and that kind of thing. 255 00:14:50,550 --> 00:14:53,380 But how do you integrate this kind of thing 256 00:14:53,510 --> 00:14:55,930 or ideas from this kind of thing into Debian? 257 00:14:56,000 --> 00:15:02,360 I think the closest we're coming is the switch to more declarative systems for Debian packages 258 00:15:02,460 --> 00:15:05,350 so that rather than maintainer scripts, we have triggers, and stuff like that. 259 00:15:05,420 --> 00:15:07,500 But this is just taking it to a whole new level. 260 00:15:07,630 --> 00:15:11,260 And there's a lot to learn from stuff like this. 261 00:15:11,260 --> 00:15:15,840 So that's my kinda quick look at the modern era of Debian. 262 00:15:15,840 --> 00:15:18,900 Let's move into the futures that I was talking about. 263 00:15:18,900 --> 00:15:25,590 So just like in cosmology... I think you all probably know where this is going to go. 264 00:15:25,590 --> 00:15:28,010 You know, one of the models for the future is 265 00:15:28,110 --> 00:15:30,840 that Debian is in some way going to continue to expand and grow 266 00:15:30,840 --> 00:15:35,070 for however long you want to think ahead. 267 00:15:35,070 --> 00:15:38,270 And there's two ways that I think this could happen. 268 00:15:38,440 --> 00:15:44,890 It could be a targeted growth where we pick a direction we want Debian to move in 269 00:15:44,960 --> 00:15:46,980 and we just put everything behind that 270 00:15:47,110 --> 00:15:52,090 and we have enough momentum going that we can continue to maintain growth as time goes on 271 00:15:52,090 --> 00:15:55,990 and meet the needs of that one area. 272 00:15:56,050 --> 00:15:59,080 So we could pick, say, the server market 273 00:15:59,150 --> 00:16:00,900 and say okay, we're doing all this Debian cloud stuff. 274 00:16:00,960 --> 00:16:04,120 People talked about all the talks that are going to be here at Debconf about that. 275 00:16:04,430 --> 00:16:07,320 There's a lot of that going on. 276 00:16:07,320 --> 00:16:10,750 If you go off to any virtual VPS provider 277 00:16:10,750 --> 00:16:14,110 you can pick a Debian image, pretty much on every single one of them. 278 00:16:14,110 --> 00:16:16,700 It's big in that area, obviously. 279 00:16:16,700 --> 00:16:23,660 Or we could say well, we're going to try to also handle desktop, or mobile, or something. 280 00:16:23,660 --> 00:16:27,830 Something a little bit more targeted might be a good idea then just something that broad. 281 00:16:27,830 --> 00:16:33,310 But you know, maybe if we decide, well, we just want to do this, and this 282 00:16:33,310 --> 00:16:34,990 then that would help us grow. 283 00:16:35,060 --> 00:16:37,880 I don't know, it's just one model. 284 00:16:38,020 --> 00:16:41,820 If you look at mobile, though, and you look at where Debian is right now... 285 00:16:41,820 --> 00:16:46,020 This is a screenshot of Lil' Debi, which is an Android app 286 00:16:46,020 --> 00:16:50,260 that basically debootstraps Debian, that's what it's doing there in the screenshot 287 00:16:50,260 --> 00:16:55,270 and this is kinda of the current state of the art of Debian on all the mobile devices 288 00:16:55,270 --> 00:16:57,820 that every single person out there has in their pocket, I'm assuming 289 00:16:57,860 --> 00:17:00,240 that aren't running Debian, probably? 290 00:17:00,240 --> 00:17:01,720 You know, it's pretty basic, 291 00:17:01,720 --> 00:17:06,030 it really doesn't give you a system that can do a lot of wonderful things, 292 00:17:06,099 --> 00:17:08,920 unless you're wanting to do wonderful things at the command line 293 00:17:08,920 --> 00:17:12,990 with a virtual keyboard, which isn't much fun. 294 00:17:12,990 --> 00:17:17,260 You know, you can think about what we can do to expand this. 295 00:17:17,290 --> 00:17:20,050 Can we, say, add Android support into Debian in some way 296 00:17:20,119 --> 00:17:22,670 so that you can install Android apps and run them. 297 00:17:22,740 --> 00:17:28,089 Can we have some way of getting a... you know, installing something in a chroot of this type 298 00:17:28,089 --> 00:17:32,290 and then displaying it on the normal Android display 299 00:17:32,290 --> 00:17:35,650 and having a full interactive application, that kind of thing. 300 00:17:35,720 --> 00:17:40,660 So that's kind of an example of how we could go into one area and try to expand 301 00:17:40,760 --> 00:17:43,220 to get Debian growing in that area. 302 00:17:43,220 --> 00:17:48,400 The other major way that I think we could grow Debian 303 00:17:48,500 --> 00:17:50,310 or that Debian could continue growing 304 00:17:50,410 --> 00:17:53,810 is this more community-driven model. 305 00:17:53,880 --> 00:17:58,180 This is kind of where you have different projects doing their own thing 306 00:17:58,280 --> 00:18:02,520 and Debian can somehow come in and help them out. 307 00:18:02,520 --> 00:18:09,210 You know, we have some good examples, like Freedombox, and TAILS, and stuff like that 308 00:18:09,340 --> 00:18:13,580 that are using Debian in great ways, and doing wonderful stuff. 309 00:18:13,580 --> 00:18:16,410 Hopefully they're getting a lot of developers, I hope. 310 00:18:16,410 --> 00:18:19,950 I don't know if that's the case. 311 00:18:19,950 --> 00:18:22,120 But there are community-driven things. 312 00:18:22,190 --> 00:18:26,160 There are ways that Debian can expand out into an area without having to move the whole project there. 313 00:18:26,190 --> 00:18:30,290 You can just say, it's a custom Debian distribution, it's a blend, whatever 314 00:18:30,390 --> 00:18:32,480 and we're still... it's still contributing back. 315 00:18:32,550 --> 00:18:35,640 It's a wonderful ecosystem going on there. 316 00:18:35,770 --> 00:18:38,870 Now, if you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 317 00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:42,900 I think we kinda made a mistake with the Raspberry Pi 318 00:18:43,070 --> 00:18:49,090 because we said we're not going to support the specific arm instruction set that they want to use 319 00:18:49,120 --> 00:18:51,580 because it's five percent faster, or something 320 00:18:51,710 --> 00:18:56,640 and so they went off and built Raspbian, and that's fine, you know 321 00:18:56,640 --> 00:19:02,670 but we've kind, I think, possibly, lost a little bit of the mindshare in the Raspberry Pi community 322 00:19:02,740 --> 00:19:06,570 because everybody's like, "well, okay, we've got this Raspbian thing, it's not Debian, right?" 323 00:19:06,610 --> 00:19:10,540 Of course it is in pretty much every important way. 324 00:19:10,540 --> 00:19:14,040 And maybe if we had been a little bit more open to this project 325 00:19:14,110 --> 00:19:19,080 coming and saying, we would like to build everything for armv5, or whatever it was 326 00:19:19,150 --> 00:19:24,530 maybe we would have had a bit more opportunity for growth and expansion, there. 327 00:19:24,530 --> 00:19:29,980 And then, if you look at just Debian developer communities in general 328 00:19:29,980 --> 00:19:35,630 there's always opportunities which we sometimes don't take advantage of 329 00:19:35,690 --> 00:19:41,380 to have really good relationships with various interesting projects 330 00:19:41,580 --> 00:19:44,030 that might end up using Debian in some way 331 00:19:44,100 --> 00:19:46,920 or might end up contributing back, or becoming part of it, even. 332 00:19:47,020 --> 00:19:52,940 And so I think... I really feel pretty bullish about this community-driven thing 333 00:19:53,040 --> 00:19:55,950 I think it's kinda how Debian has always worked. 334 00:19:55,950 --> 00:20:01,650 I don't know if... you know, it's hard to look out and say 335 00:20:01,720 --> 00:20:04,580 in ten years Debian will be an attractive target for people doing 336 00:20:04,710 --> 00:20:07,500 whatever the equivalent to Raspberry Pi is in ten years 337 00:20:07,500 --> 00:20:10,530 but I hope so. 338 00:20:10,530 --> 00:20:12,530 So that's the one model. 339 00:20:12,530 --> 00:20:14,900 Whoa, what happened to the other model? 340 00:20:14,970 --> 00:20:17,350 Ah, okay, so steady state. 341 00:20:17,490 --> 00:20:22,200 It's another cosmological model, obviously. 342 00:20:22,200 --> 00:20:27,580 I think we could just continue sort of coasting along indefinitely 343 00:20:27,580 --> 00:20:30,300 without really saying, oh, we're going to make big changes 344 00:20:30,370 --> 00:20:32,720 we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we can just keep doing our thing 345 00:20:32,860 --> 00:20:37,290 and be completely happy for as long as you want to look out. 346 00:20:37,360 --> 00:20:39,110 We've got a lot of momentum, we can keep going. 347 00:20:39,180 --> 00:20:42,940 Even if we all stop doing much today, I think Debian will keep going for years and years 348 00:20:43,080 --> 00:20:45,500 quite happily 349 00:20:45,570 --> 00:20:51,250 and you know, after a while, you start having to think about generational things. 350 00:20:51,480 --> 00:20:57,570 When most of our generation, or generations, got involved with Debian 351 00:20:57,810 --> 00:21:00,900 we kind of had some infrastructure that we just kind of thought was there 352 00:21:00,900 --> 00:21:03,790 Maybe it was a kernel, or a C compiler 353 00:21:03,860 --> 00:21:04,800 or something like that. 354 00:21:04,870 --> 00:21:07,420 We didn't really think about it, maybe we occasionally ran into a bug in it 355 00:21:07,520 --> 00:21:08,530 and we reported the bug 356 00:21:08,530 --> 00:21:12,400 but it wasn't something that was at the forefront of our minds 357 00:21:12,470 --> 00:21:15,020 as something new and exciting, necessarily. 358 00:21:15,160 --> 00:21:16,970 And maybe that's where Debian's going 359 00:21:17,040 --> 00:21:21,010 Maybe Debian becomes an infrastructure that thing get built on top of over time 360 00:21:21,070 --> 00:21:24,670 and there's enough people to keep it going 361 00:21:24,810 --> 00:21:29,820 because if nothing else, companies like Google, as long they continue using Debian 362 00:21:29,880 --> 00:21:34,690 are going to want to employ tons of Debian developers, just to keep it going. 363 00:21:36,520 --> 00:21:43,600 So this is definitely I think a likely possible future at some point 364 00:21:43,670 --> 00:21:48,280 is that Debian becomes an infrastructure, and that's fine 365 00:21:48,280 --> 00:21:51,810 and if you continue looking forward does it continue being infrastructure 366 00:21:51,840 --> 00:21:52,950 or at some point does it get replaced 367 00:21:53,050 --> 00:21:57,930 and does it even matter if it gets replaced in X years? I don't know. 368 00:21:57,930 --> 00:22:04,180 But you know, I think this is another likely possibility... we'll see. 369 00:22:04,180 --> 00:22:08,220 And then of course we have this final, fun possibility that you get 370 00:22:08,220 --> 00:22:11,440 and I would probably have put some bullet points up here 371 00:22:11,510 --> 00:22:16,420 but I had an unexpected root canal and stuff, so I kind of ran out of slides at this point. 372 00:22:16,490 --> 00:22:17,900 [laughter] 373 00:22:17,900 --> 00:22:20,720 You know, you can have a big crunch. 374 00:22:20,790 --> 00:22:24,710 and this is always my favorite possibility for the universe as a whole. 375 00:22:24,710 --> 00:22:28,050 I don't know about for Debian. 376 00:22:28,390 --> 00:22:32,730 What would happen if Debian just petered and just somehow died and fell off a cliff 377 00:22:32,760 --> 00:22:34,070 and everything started going down 378 00:22:34,170 --> 00:22:37,270 and everybody switched to Android on their servers or who knows what. 379 00:22:37,340 --> 00:22:40,560 I mean, what are they going to replace us with? I can't possibly think. 380 00:22:40,630 --> 00:22:43,220 There's got to be something out there, right? 381 00:22:43,220 --> 00:22:45,220 Maybe it's all Fedora in the future, I don't know. 382 00:22:45,220 --> 00:22:49,370 Hi Fedora folks. 383 00:22:49,370 --> 00:22:53,000 This is definitely a possibility that we have to keep in mind 384 00:22:53,070 --> 00:22:55,290 and it's not like the end of the world, right? 385 00:22:55,360 --> 00:22:59,120 It would only be the end of Debian, and even if that happened 386 00:22:59,120 --> 00:23:04,940 think back to that earlier slide about apt establishing a new paradigm in package management. 387 00:23:05,080 --> 00:23:11,060 Even if Debian stopped being actively used and developed 388 00:23:11,160 --> 00:23:14,150 at some far future point that I don't want to imagine 389 00:23:14,150 --> 00:23:17,480 it would still have influenced things in a great many ways 390 00:23:17,550 --> 00:23:21,220 and I think we could all be quite pleased with the work that we had done on it. 391 00:23:21,380 --> 00:23:24,410 Of course we all hope that it will continue to be used 392 00:23:24,510 --> 00:23:26,430 for as long as long as we're involved in the project 393 00:23:26,500 --> 00:23:30,460 or maybe ten years longer so we can keep using Debian systems after we retire. 394 00:23:30,700 --> 00:23:35,940 So, I kind of thought that I would take a little poll of the audience. 395 00:23:35,980 --> 00:23:39,070 Who thinks that we're going to somehow continue to expand 396 00:23:39,340 --> 00:23:43,110 for however long you want to imagine is a long time? 397 00:23:43,240 --> 00:23:48,590 Hands? Continued expansion? I would say maybe ten percent of the room. 398 00:23:48,650 --> 00:23:51,950 Okay, so who's for steady state? 399 00:23:51,950 --> 00:23:57,600 Slightly fewer than for expansion. Okay, big crunchers? 400 00:23:57,600 --> 00:24:04,830 [laughter, applause] 401 00:24:04,890 --> 00:24:10,430 Okay, well, I think we're for expansion. 402 00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:21,370 So that's really all that I came here to say 403 00:24:21,440 --> 00:24:24,830 It's a fairly fluff talk, I know. I hope that you've enjoyed it. 404 00:24:24,940 --> 00:24:31,880 Maybe some people have some other cosmological models that they'd like to suggest? 405 00:24:37,950 --> 00:24:44,540 [Audience]: Sort of relevant to the big crunch scenario 406 00:24:44,670 --> 00:24:48,470 Andrew on IRC asks 407 00:24:48,610 --> 00:24:52,310 I'm watching other community distributions fragment and lose focus. 408 00:24:52,310 --> 00:24:57,590 Fedora, openSUSE are killing themselves right now. 409 00:24:57,590 --> 00:24:59,590 Are we doing the same? 410 00:24:59,590 --> 00:25:04,440 [Joey]: I don't think that we're fragmenting as such. 411 00:25:04,480 --> 00:25:08,650 We've already kind of fragmented already. There was the whole Ubuntu thing 412 00:25:08,680 --> 00:25:12,990 which I think is the first time I've said that word in this talk. 413 00:25:13,150 --> 00:25:18,750 I don't know if we lose focus as such. 414 00:25:18,750 --> 00:25:20,550 We've never really had focus, have we? 415 00:25:20,620 --> 00:25:22,700 We've all just done our own thing and... 416 00:25:22,770 --> 00:25:28,620 [laughter, applause] 417 00:25:28,620 --> 00:25:30,170 [Audience]: I was just saying to somebody over here 418 00:25:30,170 --> 00:25:32,860 that one of the differences is that 419 00:25:32,930 --> 00:25:38,840 those distros are actually more tightly tied to something else that matters 420 00:25:38,840 --> 00:25:45,470 whether it's the commercial distribution organization that they were sort of spawned out of, or whatever. 421 00:25:45,470 --> 00:25:51,790 They've had a less completely community-driven reason to exist 422 00:25:51,890 --> 00:25:53,370 and to continue to exist than Debian has 423 00:25:53,440 --> 00:25:58,280 so I would not be surprised if we don't end up having an entirely different life-cycle 424 00:25:58,350 --> 00:26:01,070 than something like Fedora or openSUSE. 425 00:26:01,070 --> 00:26:03,320 The question I was going to to pose: 426 00:26:03,320 --> 00:26:08,500 I've noticed as you have, and you made a couple of references to this 427 00:26:08,600 --> 00:26:14,150 the average length of thread about almost anything has gotten a lot larger. 428 00:26:14,150 --> 00:26:17,240 One of the things that I observed a while back, though 429 00:26:17,310 --> 00:26:21,950 is that the average number of participants per thread had not actually increased all that much. 430 00:26:22,020 --> 00:26:28,040 It was certainly for any given thread a much smaller percentage of the people currently active in the project 431 00:26:28,040 --> 00:26:33,250 than used to be the case when there were thirty of us and five of us were screaming at each other. 432 00:26:33,250 --> 00:26:38,560 I'm wondering if there's... I don't know exactly what to take from that 433 00:26:38,630 --> 00:26:42,950 But the notion that a similar number of people can just scream at each other for a whole lot longer 434 00:26:42,950 --> 00:26:44,950 and still not come to a conclusion. 435 00:26:44,950 --> 00:26:49,390 I don't know if there's anything to take from that, or learn from it, or not. 436 00:26:49,420 --> 00:26:55,100 [Joey]: Yeah, I don't know, I'd actually meant to say I was going to put the systemd thread on here 437 00:26:55,170 --> 00:27:02,970 but despite this being a pretty zoomy thing, there are limits to floating point resolution 438 00:27:03,070 --> 00:27:06,170 and eventually you can't actually represent the whole thread in Iceweasel 439 00:27:06,200 --> 00:27:10,020 or whatever I'm running here. 440 00:27:10,020 --> 00:27:15,820 Maybe what's happened is that we have either... 441 00:27:15,880 --> 00:27:21,260 we just have more people and so the number of people who feel strongly about something 442 00:27:21,330 --> 00:27:23,080 they feel much more strongly about it. 443 00:27:23,150 --> 00:27:27,080 You have a small subset, who all feel that they have to win. 444 00:27:27,180 --> 00:27:31,350 And so they just keep talking about this and they don't come to a consensus. 445 00:27:31,490 --> 00:27:33,240 Do you have a thought? 446 00:27:33,240 --> 00:27:36,460 [Audience]: It's really interesting because as a project 447 00:27:36,560 --> 00:27:42,580 I think we have this sense about ourselves that we're all about freedom and so forth 448 00:27:42,680 --> 00:27:46,690 and somewhere along the way freedom got translated into 449 00:27:46,790 --> 00:27:49,210 "we should all be able to have our own way" 450 00:27:49,210 --> 00:27:55,830 and that was really not part of the freedom that we cared about when this project was young. 451 00:27:56,000 --> 00:28:03,700 Even when there were strong debates, they were debates about technical details 452 00:28:03,800 --> 00:28:06,690 or when the constitution was being drafted 453 00:28:06,790 --> 00:28:10,290 there were a few big questions about how should this should be structured 454 00:28:10,360 --> 00:28:14,060 and then a draft got generated, a lot of folks looked at it 455 00:28:14,120 --> 00:28:18,160 and went, yeah, that's close enough, and off we ran. 456 00:28:18,230 --> 00:28:23,290 And the amount of bikeshedding that goes on these days just scares me a little bit 457 00:28:23,290 --> 00:28:27,610 because it seems like taking that word freedom, and translating it way too much 458 00:28:27,740 --> 00:28:34,430 into not needing to collaborate, or not needing to come to agreement and consensus. 459 00:28:34,430 --> 00:28:36,430 Now, I don't know how we change that, or fix it. 460 00:28:36,430 --> 00:28:42,640 But it bothers me sometimes when I see people take the things that I thought of 461 00:28:42,670 --> 00:28:45,390 when I first joined the project in 1994 462 00:28:45,460 --> 00:28:47,550 as being fundamental tenets of the project 463 00:28:47,550 --> 00:28:51,330 and they use the same words, but they mean something very different. 464 00:28:51,330 --> 00:28:56,760 and it causes their behaviors to be very different from what I would like to see. 465 00:28:56,760 --> 00:29:02,140 [Joey]: When the constitution was originally proposed, I was kinda against it. 466 00:29:02,210 --> 00:29:06,380 And I thought, well, this seems like a lot of faff around for something that shouldn't matter. 467 00:29:06,410 --> 00:29:10,880 I didn't even bother to vote on it. 468 00:29:10,980 --> 00:29:14,560 I was like, if Ian wants to do this, great! Ian can do this, you know? He'll take care of it. 469 00:29:14,560 --> 00:29:16,560 If it breaks, he'll fix it. 470 00:29:16,560 --> 00:29:19,490 And I think we've kinda... 471 00:29:19,690 --> 00:29:23,320 Maybe it's just that we have a lot of people now who... 472 00:29:23,460 --> 00:29:28,640 Debian is an important part of their life, maybe professionally, or personally, much more important. 473 00:29:28,700 --> 00:29:34,120 How many people here in the room have their livelihood in some way connected to Debian? 474 00:29:34,120 --> 00:29:39,330 So probably about as many as want Debian to continue growing. 475 00:29:42,690 --> 00:29:47,900 [Audience]: One thing I just wanted to add to what Bdale was saying about the bikeshedding and stuff 476 00:29:47,900 --> 00:29:54,390 I'm in preparation for my BoF later this week about the code of conduct. 477 00:29:54,460 --> 00:29:56,810 I've actually been reading a lot of other codes of conduct 478 00:29:56,920 --> 00:29:59,300 on a page prepared by Zack, thanks for that 479 00:29:59,570 --> 00:30:03,510 and one item that I saw coming back a few times 480 00:30:03,610 --> 00:30:08,110 and which I've also taken into my proposed code of conduct that we'll be discussing 481 00:30:08,180 --> 00:30:12,420 is about: be collaborative. 482 00:30:12,420 --> 00:30:14,420 Try to work with other people. 483 00:30:14,420 --> 00:30:19,170 And I think that it could help to put something like that there. 484 00:30:19,170 --> 00:30:22,400 It's just a proposal, and we still have to discuss it. 485 00:30:23,980 --> 00:30:29,360 [Audience]: So let me as a dark and destructive person 486 00:30:29,430 --> 00:30:32,730 focus on the big crunch model for a moment. 487 00:30:32,730 --> 00:30:37,160 The question is: what would happen? 488 00:30:37,230 --> 00:30:43,690 What would we be able to do in Debian if we would be in this big crunch situation? 489 00:30:43,820 --> 00:30:47,660 Because, okay, now we are big. 490 00:30:47,720 --> 00:30:54,720 We are very important, and we are quite central to the Free software world 491 00:30:54,750 --> 00:30:57,410 in a number of ways. 492 00:30:57,410 --> 00:31:03,020 What happens if this world in some ways disintegrates? 493 00:31:03,020 --> 00:31:09,010 Obviously there must be a replacement. 494 00:31:09,010 --> 00:31:18,990 We should be open to change and re-evolve in a way that makes the world go on 495 00:31:19,090 --> 00:31:25,850 even if we in the way we are now fundamentally change. 496 00:31:25,850 --> 00:31:32,070 [Joey]: You know, I didn't really think about the big crunch as affecting the Free software community as a whole. 497 00:31:32,070 --> 00:31:36,080 I just assumed that was some background noise which kept everything going 498 00:31:36,080 --> 00:31:38,160 even if Debian went away. 499 00:31:38,290 --> 00:31:41,250 I mean, yeah, it seems to me that Debian can definitely go away 500 00:31:41,250 --> 00:31:44,550 without the Free software community fragmenting or imploding 501 00:31:44,680 --> 00:31:48,250 or whatever, or turning to BSD licenses 502 00:31:48,350 --> 00:31:50,800 vanishing down the Apple rabbit-hole, or whatever. 503 00:31:50,970 --> 00:31:54,670 [Audience]: That's not what I was about here. 504 00:31:54,670 --> 00:32:03,550 It's more, we have one model of working in our Free software ecosystem 505 00:32:03,550 --> 00:32:09,460 that maybe this model at some point in time is not relevant any more. 506 00:32:09,460 --> 00:32:18,240 It's like, maybe some of you know this model of evolving systems. 507 00:32:18,310 --> 00:32:21,470 There is a first system which is a big hack 508 00:32:21,540 --> 00:32:26,110 the second system is built by a community and great and does everything 509 00:32:26,210 --> 00:32:30,550 but at some point in time this second system becomes irrelevant 510 00:32:30,550 --> 00:32:33,780 fundamental ideas will be changed 511 00:32:33,910 --> 00:32:40,570 and a third system or third systems will evolve 512 00:32:40,700 --> 00:32:43,660 on the remains of the second system. 513 00:32:43,760 --> 00:32:47,560 That's just what's happening now, slowly, with X for example. 514 00:32:47,700 --> 00:32:52,980 X will not be completely disintegrating 515 00:32:53,080 --> 00:32:55,090 but people will evolve on it 516 00:32:55,230 --> 00:33:02,420 and I think we should have some thoughts about the same ideas in Debian 517 00:33:02,560 --> 00:33:06,390 and we should prepare 518 00:33:06,390 --> 00:33:12,340 what might happen if this case starts growing on us. 519 00:33:12,340 --> 00:33:18,700 [Joey]: Thank you for that; you're thinking further ahead than I am and that's great. 520 00:33:18,700 --> 00:33:23,680 Anybody else with a question, I'm not sure how we are on time. 521 00:33:23,680 --> 00:33:28,650 [Audience]: I think the disintegrating is not really an interesting point 522 00:33:28,650 --> 00:33:33,830 Debian is, I think, there to... itch our scratch 523 00:33:33,830 --> 00:33:38,770 if we don't have the scratch left, there's no reason to itch 524 00:33:38,770 --> 00:33:42,300 as long as we are community-driven 525 00:33:42,510 --> 00:33:48,570 as long there will be a scratch, we will continue to itch. 526 00:33:48,570 --> 00:33:50,410 [Joey]: Or the other way round, but I take your point. 527 00:33:50,510 --> 00:33:54,240 [Audience]: And to the mailing list problem 528 00:33:54,340 --> 00:34:03,290 I think I see a tendency on mailing lists that we have something like 529 00:34:03,450 --> 00:34:11,120 this anti-politician and anti-intellectual point. 530 00:34:11,120 --> 00:34:19,260 It's too often everything that's on a mailing list that's bikeshedding 531 00:34:19,360 --> 00:34:23,780 if you give a point against something 532 00:34:23,780 --> 00:34:28,840 if it's not the opinion that you are, it's bikeshedding, it's not a technical argument 533 00:34:28,840 --> 00:34:30,840 you are against progress 534 00:34:30,840 --> 00:34:38,290 and I think we need to be a bit more collaborative at this point. 535 00:34:38,420 --> 00:34:43,770 To more listen to each other, and not to dismiss everything 536 00:34:43,770 --> 00:34:48,710 as everything you don't understand doesn't make sense. 537 00:34:48,780 --> 00:34:53,760 It's only people that want their old stuff keeping there. 538 00:34:53,920 --> 00:35:03,470 It's, I think, the reason some flames go up very much is that it's important to people 539 00:35:03,610 --> 00:35:06,370 and then it's important to listen to them 540 00:35:06,370 --> 00:35:12,250 and not just tell them, oh, old fart, we don't care. 541 00:35:12,250 --> 00:35:19,950 [Joey]: I think if you go back and look at older threads in Debian like I did for this talk 542 00:35:20,020 --> 00:35:25,060 or if you go whereever stuff's getting done, and look at what a thread looks like 543 00:35:25,060 --> 00:35:28,890 when stuff is getting done and people are busy making things happen 544 00:35:28,890 --> 00:35:32,390 versus when people are busy complaining about other people making things happen, or whatever 545 00:35:32,460 --> 00:35:36,430 there's a really different tone there. I think you could learn to recognise that tone 546 00:35:36,490 --> 00:35:40,760 I don't know if you could teach people who are part of the problem 547 00:35:40,870 --> 00:35:42,610 which we all probably are from time to time 548 00:35:42,750 --> 00:35:46,110 to squelch that down, or, not. 549 00:35:46,180 --> 00:35:50,210 I think it's something we need... yeah. Enrico? 550 00:35:55,660 --> 00:36:00,000 It's right there, go up to the stand. 551 00:36:10,290 --> 00:36:16,040 [Audience]: On that point, it's interesting that you made that point 552 00:36:16,100 --> 00:36:21,350 I found myself, after some frustrating discussion I was having 553 00:36:21,380 --> 00:36:26,760 asking people to please... real life discussion, about something completely different 554 00:36:26,760 --> 00:36:33,490 asking people... telling people, can you please stick to... 555 00:36:33,620 --> 00:36:37,090 I'm more interesting in hearing your personal story. 556 00:36:37,190 --> 00:36:40,650 I'm more interested in hearing your experience in what you have done. 557 00:36:40,780 --> 00:36:48,380 Please don't... I'm less interested in hearing what you wish would happen. 558 00:36:48,490 --> 00:36:52,590 I'm less interested in what you wish I would do. 559 00:36:52,590 --> 00:36:57,090 Please let me choose what I would do, and I'm happy to hear your experience. 560 00:36:57,090 --> 00:37:04,930 And I think that is a pattern that also matches very well what you mentioned. 561 00:37:05,030 --> 00:37:08,930 When people are getting things done, they are not discussing about 562 00:37:08,930 --> 00:37:11,520 the way they wish everybody else would believe 563 00:37:11,620 --> 00:37:16,160 or the way they wish everybody else would have done something 564 00:37:16,330 --> 00:37:18,780 but they bring in their experience: 565 00:37:18,850 --> 00:37:24,300 When I did this last time I did it this way, and it didn't work. Let's try another way. 566 00:37:24,360 --> 00:37:27,740 But when it comes from personal experience 567 00:37:27,740 --> 00:37:32,430 it is more about getting things done 568 00:37:32,430 --> 00:37:38,150 than about seeing who has the better ideas, or something 569 00:37:38,250 --> 00:37:40,840 which is rather pointless. 570 00:37:41,040 --> 00:37:46,020 So yeah, I wish on mailing lists to see people bringing in their experience 571 00:37:46,080 --> 00:37:52,740 their stories at work, the way they fixed a problem like that before and how 572 00:37:52,780 --> 00:37:55,570 rather than: "people should do this". 573 00:37:55,700 --> 00:38:00,110 "People should do this" is possibly something I don't want to see on a mailing list any more. 574 00:38:01,270 --> 00:38:06,090 [applause] 575 00:38:06,190 --> 00:38:11,400 [Joey]: I think we have to somehow learn to be more accepting 576 00:38:11,570 --> 00:38:15,610 of just doing something, and if it's a mistake, reverting it. 577 00:38:15,670 --> 00:38:18,300 It would be great if we had more technology around this 578 00:38:18,360 --> 00:38:21,990 but just socially, deciding, if somebody wants to go off and do something 579 00:38:21,990 --> 00:38:23,990 then let them 580 00:38:23,990 --> 00:38:27,440 and if it turns out to be a bad idea, we can undo it later. 581 00:38:27,440 --> 00:38:33,900 I think if you look at where we're really good in Debian at making things happen 582 00:38:33,930 --> 00:38:36,890 it is stuff like the one maintainer per package model 583 00:38:36,890 --> 00:38:39,880 where people are given the power to go off and do something 584 00:38:40,020 --> 00:38:44,170 and it's their responsibility, and if you have a flamewar about it 585 00:38:44,170 --> 00:38:46,710 well we have processes but we don't use them very often 586 00:38:46,710 --> 00:38:52,390 and it would be great if we could find more ways to expand that kind of way of doing things 587 00:38:52,390 --> 00:38:54,810 off to the things which don't just touch one package. 588 00:38:54,950 --> 00:38:58,680 I think that's what's broken down as it were. 589 00:38:58,680 --> 00:39:02,550 We're building this bigger stuff on top of individual packages 590 00:39:02,650 --> 00:39:04,970 and we don't have a way to go off and say 591 00:39:05,100 --> 00:39:07,520 this guy is going to handle the systemd transition 592 00:39:07,520 --> 00:39:09,610 with this group of people he's got together, or something. 593 00:39:09,680 --> 00:39:14,740 Maybe that doesn't work, Bdale looks unhappy with it, so it's a bad idea 594 00:39:14,740 --> 00:39:16,740 but there must be a way to make it happen. 595 00:39:16,740 --> 00:39:18,740 Anybody else? 596 00:39:18,740 --> 00:39:26,090 [Audience]: I used to expect that at some point sooner or later Debian would effectively just split 597 00:39:26,120 --> 00:39:28,100 into multiple groups which competed with each other. 598 00:39:28,100 --> 00:39:32,310 I mean I know some people talk about Ubuntu as a fork of Debian, but it's kind of a different thing 599 00:39:32,410 --> 00:39:35,600 I really thought that some time there would just be a discussion 600 00:39:35,770 --> 00:39:38,730 where the two sides just disagreed so badly about some issue 601 00:39:38,860 --> 00:39:43,270 that you would end up with two things, basically both of which claim to be the true Debian 602 00:39:43,270 --> 00:39:46,530 obviously one would probably own the trademark, but yeah, I mean 603 00:39:46,530 --> 00:39:50,930 both of them would just think that they were the true continuation and hate each other forever. 604 00:39:50,930 --> 00:39:53,590 That seems to have become less likely now 605 00:39:53,590 --> 00:39:57,360 and it seems to me that most of the times we have big discussions 606 00:39:57,560 --> 00:40:01,110 it just ends up with not much happening 607 00:40:01,110 --> 00:40:03,610 rather than something happening that really annoys people. 608 00:40:03,610 --> 00:40:06,300 I mean in some ways that's better and some ways that's worse. 609 00:40:06,440 --> 00:40:08,720 [Joey]: That's a fascinating comment. 610 00:40:08,760 --> 00:40:12,690 That doesn't fit into any of my three models, the forking off thing. 611 00:40:12,690 --> 00:40:18,100 It's multiple universes, it fits into the cosmological model 612 00:40:18,100 --> 00:40:23,790 Yeah, that's fascinating, why is that less likely now than it used to be? 613 00:40:23,850 --> 00:40:27,350 Is there less excitement and energy around Debian or is it something else? 614 00:40:27,420 --> 00:40:33,070 [Audience]: Now I would worry more that, again, if it gets harder to push new ideas 615 00:40:33,200 --> 00:40:36,290 and you end up... well, we are still getting new people 616 00:40:36,500 --> 00:40:43,420 but if you look at the official members of Debian, we're basically only at a replacement rate 617 00:40:43,560 --> 00:40:52,330 I have to say, looking around the room, that we're definitely an aging population too. 618 00:40:52,570 --> 00:40:58,150 So although that's still fine for a few decades, yeah 619 00:40:58,220 --> 00:41:04,140 if we want to continue in the long term of Debian having a good future and still being relevant 620 00:41:04,140 --> 00:41:10,660 then, again on your graph, how do we get back into really growing, 621 00:41:10,760 --> 00:41:16,240 not just the community round the edges, helpers and contributors and so on 622 00:41:16,240 --> 00:41:20,610 but people who are members of Debian should also be growing 623 00:41:20,610 --> 00:41:23,640 and taking new ideas. 624 00:41:24,040 --> 00:41:32,750 [Audience]: Sort of replying to that: if we go a bit smaller than cosmological, and go to galactic, say 625 00:41:32,750 --> 00:41:42,000 I think Debian could be looked at as if it started out being a star nursery 626 00:41:42,130 --> 00:41:45,700 and then we turned into a galaxy 627 00:41:45,760 --> 00:41:49,700 and we're now at a stage where we need to find a way of maintaining the black hole 628 00:41:49,700 --> 00:41:55,380 because otherwise, if people aren't allowed to work on an alternative black hole 629 00:41:55,450 --> 00:42:01,840 then the arms will fly off, as... yeah, we need to suck more. 630 00:42:02,000 --> 00:42:05,540 [laughter, applause] 631 00:42:05,600 --> 00:42:10,860 So the black hole is the sort of boring, central packages 632 00:42:10,860 --> 00:42:14,210 which you're not allowed to touch, because if you do that everything will break 633 00:42:14,210 --> 00:42:18,110 and we need a way of instantiating a new galaxy next door 634 00:42:18,250 --> 00:42:20,940 and just replacing the black hole, and as you say if it doesn't work 635 00:42:21,070 --> 00:42:22,680 you can git revert. 636 00:42:22,750 --> 00:42:26,250 So, and the other thing is, if you look at the mailing lists 637 00:42:26,250 --> 00:42:28,330 you get the impression that there's a war going on 638 00:42:28,400 --> 00:42:31,900 where there is going to be a schism. 639 00:42:31,900 --> 00:42:34,920 Half the people will go off and maintain their servers 640 00:42:34,960 --> 00:42:39,500 and the other half will go off with their tablets, or whatever, and sort them out. 641 00:42:39,700 --> 00:42:43,800 But actually, the people in those discussions aren't going to build either of those things 642 00:42:43,870 --> 00:42:46,020 and the rest of Debian is just getting on with it. 643 00:42:46,090 --> 00:42:49,050 So, that's why I think Debian doesn't fragment 644 00:42:49,110 --> 00:42:51,950 because the vocal people aren't necessarily the people doing the job. 645 00:42:52,580 --> 00:42:55,430 [Audience]: I think there's another possibility 646 00:42:55,430 --> 00:42:59,100 and that is that when I think about Moray's question 647 00:42:59,130 --> 00:43:03,870 There are more derivatives of Debian than any other core distribution 648 00:43:03,870 --> 00:43:07,270 so there are certainly lots of people out there who have decided 649 00:43:07,410 --> 00:43:10,160 that the thing they wanted to to differently, or cared about 650 00:43:10,230 --> 00:43:14,110 was worth going, creating a CDD, or a fork, or whatever. 651 00:43:14,110 --> 00:43:21,090 So that's happened, it just hasn't dragged the trademark into... or the name into some kind of a pit 652 00:43:21,190 --> 00:43:23,010 which I would hate to see happen. 653 00:43:23,070 --> 00:43:28,320 But I have this sense that maybe the other thing about it is that Debian has become large enough 654 00:43:28,390 --> 00:43:30,740 and means enough things to enough people 655 00:43:30,810 --> 00:43:35,080 that the vast majority of us in the project who don't give a flying you-know-what 656 00:43:35,110 --> 00:43:37,730 about whether it's upstart or systemd 657 00:43:37,800 --> 00:43:43,920 That's an impassioned important discussion for the people for whom how the system boots 658 00:43:44,020 --> 00:43:46,810 is the thing they care about in Debian. 659 00:43:46,880 --> 00:43:49,440 But for the vast majority of us it's like, as you say 660 00:43:49,500 --> 00:43:53,270 I do that once per kernel update cycle, a reboot 661 00:43:53,340 --> 00:43:57,100 and the rest of the time I just don't care 662 00:43:57,170 --> 00:44:01,880 and so the idea that the distribution would fracture 663 00:44:02,010 --> 00:44:06,690 or somehow Debian wouldn't be Debian any more because there's a fracturous discussion 664 00:44:06,750 --> 00:44:10,820 going on in a particular sub-project or sub-part of the distribution 665 00:44:10,890 --> 00:44:12,910 is just hard for me to wrap my brain around. 666 00:44:12,970 --> 00:44:16,920 [Joey]: It seems like it would have to be something that isn't technological based. 667 00:44:16,920 --> 00:44:19,160 Some kind of, you know, we want to change the social contract 668 00:44:19,230 --> 00:44:21,850 or maybe want to change what free software is 669 00:44:22,090 --> 00:44:25,780 and that would fracture Debian. 670 00:44:29,650 --> 00:44:33,350 [Audience]: So, on the lines of what Bdale just said 671 00:44:33,420 --> 00:44:39,270 this way that we are becoming almost a preferred choice to be upstream 672 00:44:39,470 --> 00:44:42,230 is a very good thing 673 00:44:42,290 --> 00:44:45,390 and that enables our work to scale much better 674 00:44:45,520 --> 00:44:47,410 than if we try to grow the project 675 00:44:47,470 --> 00:44:50,970 and I think the reason why we aren't growing in terms of number of people 676 00:44:51,040 --> 00:44:54,740 is that we're already at some kind of limits of scaling 677 00:44:54,800 --> 00:44:57,430 We're having... a lot of things we're talking about 678 00:44:57,490 --> 00:45:01,190 are difficulties to do with coordinating and communicating between this number of people 679 00:45:01,330 --> 00:45:07,880 and allowing, and becoming upstream for people is a way for us to scale that a lot better 680 00:45:08,020 --> 00:45:12,360 and one of the things that we should be trying to do is to look outward 681 00:45:12,360 --> 00:45:14,360 rather than inward 682 00:45:14,360 --> 00:45:17,600 and to try to think of ways in which we can be a better upstream for people 683 00:45:17,740 --> 00:45:22,110 to make it easier for people to derive, so that fewer people have to do their work within Debian 684 00:45:22,110 --> 00:45:25,940 and that they're easier to do it outside Debian. 685 00:45:26,010 --> 00:45:32,330 Because after all, software freedom is about freedom to make the change yourself to the software you're using 686 00:45:32,430 --> 00:45:35,760 and that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have a huge, kind of 687 00:45:35,890 --> 00:45:39,490 get involved with a huge complicated upstream who have processes 688 00:45:39,520 --> 00:45:40,870 and decide to do things a particular way. 689 00:45:40,940 --> 00:45:42,280 No, you should just be able to it. 690 00:45:42,350 --> 00:45:48,270 At the moment if you want to do that it's quite hard, and we should make it easier. 691 00:45:48,670 --> 00:45:53,450 [Joey]: Yeah, you know, when you think about that 692 00:45:53,580 --> 00:46:00,940 maybe it's kind of what's happening now, but you have to wonder 693 00:46:01,110 --> 00:46:04,470 your scenario, you can go either one of two ways. 694 00:46:04,470 --> 00:46:08,640 You can have a lot of custom Debian distributions, and things based on Debian 695 00:46:08,640 --> 00:46:11,740 and Debian can just become a background infrastructure 696 00:46:11,800 --> 00:46:15,350 and then who wants to work on it when it's some thing that's down there in the depths 697 00:46:15,350 --> 00:46:18,700 that other exciting things are being built on top of 698 00:46:18,700 --> 00:46:22,230 You know, maybe you contribute patches back when it makes your life easier 699 00:46:22,430 --> 00:46:28,550 but do we get a sustaining model that way, or maybe we don't. 700 00:46:28,550 --> 00:46:31,850 I kind of used to have this argument with Manoj. 701 00:46:31,910 --> 00:46:34,430 I thought that Debian had to expand or we were just going to die 702 00:46:34,600 --> 00:46:38,400 and Manoj was like no, Debian is just about what I need for my system 703 00:46:38,400 --> 00:46:40,400 and what my friends need for their systems. 704 00:46:40,400 --> 00:46:44,760 I'm only interested in it in that way. 705 00:46:44,760 --> 00:46:46,760 And I don't know, maybe Manoj was right. 706 00:46:46,760 --> 00:46:52,290 I think that I was definitely wrong. 707 00:46:52,290 --> 00:46:58,850 The best arguments are always that way, right? 708 00:46:58,850 --> 00:47:04,530 [Introducer]: Okay, the time is over, so we have to take this as the closing comment 709 00:47:04,530 --> 00:47:08,900 and, yeah, you have to move it to lunch to discuss over that. 710 00:47:08,900 --> 00:47:10,900 [Joey]: Okay, thanks everybody. 711 00:47:10,900 --> 00:47:15,830 [applause]