Okay, and now for the last talk in the morning session,
Joey Hess will talk about Debian Cosmology
[applause]
Well, thanks, good morning everybody, I hope you had a good night's sleep.
I enjoyed sleeping out in the tent, in the middle of Switzerland
looking out over the lake
this is kinda the first Debconf where I've kinda had a problem
If I just look over there I'll probably just lose focus for a bit, it's so gorgeous.
I thought this would be a good place to get up on a mountaintop, as it were
and think about the bigger picture
and try to think about some of the big questions, the big vague things we wonder about
but don't really, sometimes, talk about
maybe in public in front of a live streaming audience, I don't know.
I have this crazy Debian Cosmology idea.
And, let's look at Debian, let's look at the Universal operating system
and think about thinking back 20 years back
to when Debian was founded, up to the present
and where it's going to go from here.
Back in the beginning, there was kinda this void.
and there was a gap [applause]
and Ian Murdock saw this, and he said, well...
let's make a new Linux distribution to replace SLS
It'll be great; I'll get it done in a couple of weeks.
[laughter]
And this was back in 1993.
And just as with the big bang
you have the laws of nature somehow forming out of the void
we developed these standard principles of Debian
that have pretty much stood the test of time
although some of them like the one package, one maintainer thing have changed over time.
But this is all the stuff that we think of as the core principles of Debian today, probably.
And this was in the period '94 to '98
this early period where there weren't very many people involved in Debian
and things got done fairly quickly.
I have down here one of the initial threads for the Debian Constitution.
This is where Ian Jackson said
I think we'll use this constitution proposal to bootstrap the constitution
so we'll vote on the constitution using the principles of the constitution.
That could be a kind of controversial things to say, actually
because it's a bootstrapping problem.
But the thread actually wasn't that long
by today's standards [laughter]
for something that important.
So, this was, as I said, the early period
and then in the late 90s and early 2000s
we went through this inflation period, just like the universe blew up
got bigger and bigger
we have the nice up-and-to-the-right graph
which is the number of maintainers over time
and I don't think that this data is very good
but I'm kinda happy to see that it's started going up again in the most recent election
although that's probably also just because Zack wasn't running [laughter]
So during this inflation period we had things happen
like adding ports to Debian.
One port in '98, two ports in '99
two ports in 2000; that's two ports a year.
It's a crazy rate of change.
And then we had... all these derivatives started popping up.
We'd had Debian for Hams for a while
but we got these derivatives that you don't think of much any more
like Corel Linux, Stormix, Progeny
These are names we haven't mentioned in a while
but they were the early corporate entities saying, well,
we're going to try and do something here with Debian
and modify it
and of course many more came from there.
And another big event in this period was that apt started out.
This is one of the early threads about apt
This is about a year after it started being developed.
Everybody started trying it
and realized: oh, it actually doesn't work on my system
because I have these packages that are half-configured
I have a few broken dependencies because I just forced something at some point
And everybody tried apt, and they're like, gosh, it says my system's inconsistent
and it doesn't have apt-get -f yet
so it doesn't work.
So I thought this was an amusing thread.
It's also not really too long a thread
but here's an introductory representative message
I don't know if you can read it back there
but it's just what I said, apt-get dosn't seem to work
it says my system lacks integrity
and then Jason Gunthorpe, who wrote apt, said
I don't think I've actually seen a Debian system that has a perfect dependency setup
so that apt can actually work on it.
If you think about introducing some big new change like apt
and it doesn't work at all
and this was in April of 1998
If we then move forward one month to May of 1998.
here's somebody saying
"This makes makes me wonder if we should think about dropping this autoup script..."
"...that we're using for upgrades" (some kind of a shell script or something)
"...and switch to apt."
"autoup seems to work and maybe we shouldn't postpone Debian 2.0 for apt..."
"but autoup's a hack, and apt lets you do an entire bo to hamm upgrade in dselect."
Wow. I was kinda of surprised to see this: it turns out that I wrote that.
I had no idea that I proposed converting Debian to apt for 2.0.
It didn't actually happen in May of 1998
we had to wait a whole year until March of '99 when 2.1 came out
and this is a quote from debian-history
about apt, which I thought was a great quote:
"It established a new paradigm for package acquisition and installation"
and it really did.
If you look now at things that are basically command-line compatible with apt
or more or less command line compatible
maybe they didn't quite understand the difference between upgrade and update
There's so many of them! It's crazy.
And one of the interesting things about this list
is that if you look and see which ones of these actually do it securely
it's a really small subset.
Maybe some of them use HTTPS in some way
and have a little bit of security there, I don't know.
I didn't check them all in detail.
Of course back then apt didn't have any security either.
It was just pulling stuff via HTTP off the web
and hey, it'd be the right thing, because why wouldn't it be?
So soon after apt came out... this is a screenshot from 2002
but it was around earlier
We got apt-get.org
which was all these third-party apt repositories.
And this was kinda interesting, there were hundreds of different repositories.
You could go off, edit your sources.list, get your packages
and we kinda started thinking, wow maybe we're gonna change how Debian works in some way.
Maybe we'll have some kind of a central core
and everything else will just be pulling from other repositories somewhere.
And we kinda went off on a divergent path.
We kinda went down a wormhole to some distributed apt, or app store model
where there's Debian and all this stuff you pull in from here and there
and if somebody wants to make a package they do
and this kind of is what happened today too.
You can pull, you know, signed packages from Google
and from debian-multimedia, deb-multimedia, that kind of thing
But we didn't really go down that path.
We're still very much a centralized distribution.
I kinda think it's interesting to think about what could have happened if we'd branched off in a different way there
But there were good reasons to keep it centralized, such as security.
And if you now fast-forward to the present
here's apt-get.org from 2011
it's been broken, we can't check if these repositories work any more
we're not accepting new submissions
and this is what happened to debian-multimedia.org, which is a pity.
It's a Russian domain about motorcycles or something, I don't know.
So that's kinda the inflation period of Debian.
And then we can move forward again into the modern era.
This might be where my cosmology analogy gets a little bit strained
but we'll see.
I've picked out two things about the modern era of Debian
this past 10 years, or 15 years.
So, one of them: just as in the Universe, you have large scale structures forming,
galaxies, and larger structures.
In Debian we've kind of developed all kinds of structures
on top of the "one maintainer, one package" model
and extending it, and going beyond it.
So a few of these, such as teams...
Lucas showed us the graph of team maintenance increasing over the past ten years or so.
We've just developed all these structures
Custom Debian distributions
stuff like d-i, different projects within Debian.
So it gets pretty complicated.
It's not a heterogeneous thing - a homogenous thing
It's all clumped around in different places.
If you also look at where people are using Debian
that's differentiated a lot too.
It's not just... we are the Universal operating system, we say
but a lot of people are using Debian on servers
and a few are on laptops
and basically nobody is on a mobile phone
except for a few people who are lucky enough to still have an Openmoko, or something like that.
So, we've really differentiated Debian a lot.
So that's the large scale structure thing.
I think it's interesting to think about it
because it kinda makes you think about how Debian's evolving.
Now this is where it really gets strained.
Red shift. Okay.
[laughter]
How do we have red shift in Debian?
I don't see any red when I look out
unless I've stepped into the middle of a flame war, or something.
Here's kind of an amusing paper
which I don't think has been peer-reviewed yet.
It says, what if the universe, rather than actually expanding right now
like we think it is because of red shift
what if the mass of everything is increasing at once?
And it says, well, everything would work pretty much like it does now
we wouldn't even be able to test this theory.
And while I don't know if the mass of the universe is increasing
exponentially over time, like this paper says it is
it seems a little unlikely.
Debian's mass has definitely increased.
We have an enormous mass, and an enormous momentum.
We're moving in a certain direction
and it's really hard to move Debian into a different direction now.
So, one really easy example of this
systemd.
Think of how many threads we've had about systemd lately
and, yeah.
And this isn't replacing dpkg with apt
and breaking all of our dependencies, and having to change everything.
This is changing how systems boot
which you do once a week, or once a month, or once a year.
It's a minor change as things go, right?
And yet it's an enormous controversy inside the project.
So I think we have to think about this momentum, this mass
how do we manage it, how can we make Debian nimble
on top of all this momentum.
So I think that's probably the largest problem that Debian is facing right now
and will face in the next however far out you want to look.
It's kinda hard to give a talk about Debian cosmology
because what is a long time scale in Debian?
We have twenty years of history to look back on.
Can people think in their head, wow, will Debian be around in twenty years?
I don't know.
Pick a timescale that seems to make sense to you for the rest of this talk.
I'm not going to try and force some kind of a timescale on you.
If you want to think a hundred years ahead, great.
If you want to think ten years ahead, okay.
But I'm going to try to think about moving forward
but first I have a little digression, which I forgot about.
So, one of the examples of a way that the momentum in Debian can be a problem.
I mentioned apt.
Well there's this interesting thing being developed right now
called functional package management.
It started out with nixos
and now the GNU project has gotten involved with its...
Guix? I don't know how to say it.
The idea is that it somehow takes ideas from functional programming
and applies them to package management
so it's bread and butter for me.
I'm really interested in it being a Haskell guy now.
Being in a functional program
you're like, wow, there's some interesting ways to use these ideas.
It's not really functional, but it's a neat terminology to hook on it.
And what this lets you do, it's kind of a source based system, in a way
I don't know. Has anybody used any of these systems in the audience?
I'm just curious. You have, Zack?
I'd love to chat with you about it and get a broader idea.
The idea is kind of that you never make a destructive change to the system.
Every package change is atomic.
and if you have dependencies
you might have multiple versions of a package installed at a time.
and it's completely different than the dpkg model in every way.
And it's kind of inconceivable to think that Debian would switch to something like this model now.
It would just be so incredibly hard.
You know, switching to apt would be just nothing in comparison
and it's much later in our evolution
we have a lot more structure built up around our current system
than we did back then, even.
This is an example of something that...
The universe is coming up with neat new things
How do we possibly put them into Debian?
We can obviously package up these package managers
and make it easy enough for people to use them as a third party thing
You can install stuff in your home directory with functional package management
and just have a system on top of Debian, and that kind of thing.
But how do you integrate this kind of thing
or ideas from this kind of thing into Debian?
I think the closest we're coming is the switch to more declarative systems for Debian packages
so that rather than maintainer scripts, we have triggers, and stuff like that.
But this is just taking it to a whole new level.
And there's a lot to learn from stuff like this.
So that's my kinda quick look at the modern era of Debian.
Let's move into the futures that I was talking about.
So just like in cosmology... I think you all probably know where this is going to go.
You know, one of the models for the future is
that Debian is in some way going to continue to expand and grow
for however long you want to think ahead.
And there's two ways that I think this could happen.
It could be a targeted growth where we pick a direction we want Debian to move in
and we just put everything behind that
and we have enough momentum going that we can continue to maintain growth as time goes on
and meet the needs of that one area.
So we could pick, say, the server market
and say okay, we're doing all this Debian cloud stuff.
People talked about all the talks that are going to be here at Debconf about that.
There's a lot of that going on.
If you go off to any virtual VPS provider
you can pick a Debian image, pretty much on every single one of them.
It's big in that area, obviously.
Or we could say well, we're going to try to also handle desktop, or mobile, or something.
Something a little bit more targeted might be a good idea then just something that broad.
But you know, maybe if we decide, well, we just want to do this, and this
then that would help us grow.
I don't know, it's just one model.
If you look at mobile, though, and you look at where Debian is right now...
This is a screenshot of Lil' Debi, which is an Android app
that basically debootstraps Debian, that's what it's doing there in the screenshot
and this is kinda of the current state of the art of Debian on all the mobile devices
that every single person out there has in their pocket, I'm assuming
that aren't running Debian, probably?
You know, it's pretty basic,
it really doesn't give you a system that can do a lot of wonderful things,
unless you're wanting to do wonderful things at the command line
with a virtual keyboard, which isn't much fun.
You know, you can think about what we can do to expand this.
Can we, say, add Android support into Debian in some way
so that you can install Android apps and run them.
Can we have some way of getting a... you know, installing something in a chroot of this type
and then displaying it on the normal Android display
and having a full interactive application, that kind of thing.
So that's kind of an example of how we could go into one area and try to expand
to get Debian growing in that area.
The other major way that I think we could grow Debian
or that Debian could continue growing
is this more community-driven model.
This is kind of where you have different projects doing their own thing
and Debian can somehow come in and help them out.
You know, we have some good examples, like Freedombox, and TAILS, and stuff like that
that are using Debian in great ways, and doing wonderful stuff.
Hopefully they're getting a lot of developers, I hope.
I don't know if that's the case.
But there are community-driven things.
There are ways that Debian can expand out into an area without having to move the whole project there.
You can just say, it's a custom Debian distribution, it's a blend, whatever
and we're still... it's still contributing back.
It's a wonderful ecosystem going on there.
Now, if you look at something like the Raspberry Pi
I think we kinda made a mistake with the Raspberry Pi
because we said we're not going to support the specific arm instruction set that they want to use
because it's five percent faster, or something
and so they went off and built Raspbian, and that's fine, you know
but we've kind, I think, possibly, lost a little bit of the mindshare in the Raspberry Pi community
because everybody's like, "well, okay, we've got this Raspbian thing, it's not Debian, right?"
Of course it is in pretty much every important way.
And maybe if we had been a little bit more open to this project
coming and saying, we would like to build everything for armv5, or whatever it was
maybe we would have had a bit more opportunity for growth and expansion, there.
And then, if you look at just Debian developer communities in general
there's always opportunities which we sometimes don't take advantage of
to have really good relationships with various interesting projects
that might end up using Debian in some way
or might end up contributing back, or becoming part of it, even.
And so I think... I really feel pretty bullish about this community-driven thing
I think it's kinda how Debian has always worked.
I don't know if... you know, it's hard to look out and say
in ten years Debian will be an attractive target for people doing
whatever the equivalent to Raspberry Pi is in ten years
but I hope so.
So that's the one model.
Whoa, what happened to the other model?
Ah, okay, so steady state.
It's another cosmological model, obviously.
I think we could just continue sort of coasting along indefinitely
without really saying, oh, we're going to make big changes
we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we can just keep doing our thing
and be completely happy for as long as you want to look out.
We've got a lot of momentum, we can keep going.
Even if we all stop doing much today, I think Debian will keep going for years and years
quite happily
and you know, after a while, you start having to think about generational things.
When most of our generation, or generations, got involved with Debian
we kind of had some infrastructure that we just kind of thought was there
Maybe it was a kernel, or a C compiler
or something like that.
We didn't really think about it, maybe we occasionally ran into a bug in it
and we reported the bug
but it wasn't something that was at the forefront of our minds
as something new and exciting, necessarily.
And maybe that's where Debian's going
Maybe Debian becomes an infrastructure that thing get built on top of over time
and there's enough people to keep it going
because if nothing else, companies like Google, as long they continue using Debian
are going to want to employ tons of Debian developers, just to keep it going.
So this is definitely I think a likely possible future at some point
is that Debian becomes an infrastructure, and that's fine
and if you continue looking forward does it continue being infrastructure
or at some point does it get replaced
and does it even matter if it gets replaced in X years? I don't know.
But you know, I think this is another likely possibility... we'll see.
And then of course we have this final, fun possibility that you get
and I would probably have put some bullet points up here
but I had an unexpected root canal and stuff, so I kind of ran out of slides at this point.
[laughter]
You know, you can have a big crunch.
and this is always my favorite possibility for the universe as a whole.
I don't know about for Debian.
What would happen if Debian just petered and just somehow died and fell off a cliff
and everything started going down
and everybody switched to Android on their servers or who knows what.
I mean, what are they going to replace us with? I can't possibly think.
There's got to be something out there, right?
Maybe it's all Fedora in the future, I don't know.
Hi Fedora folks.
This is definitely a possibility that we have to keep in mind
and it's not like the end of the world, right?
It would only be the end of Debian, and even if that happened
think back to that earlier slide about apt establishing a new paradigm in package management.
Even if Debian stopped being actively used and developed
at some far future point that I don't want to imagine
it would still have influenced things in a great many ways
and I think we could all be quite pleased with the work that we had done on it.
Of course we all hope that it will continue to be used
for as long as long as we're involved in the project
or maybe ten years longer so we can keep using Debian systems after we retire.
So, I kind of thought that I would take a little poll of the audience.
Who thinks that we're going to somehow continue to expand
for however long you want to imagine is a long time?
Hands? Continued expansion? I would say maybe ten percent of the room.
Okay, so who's for steady state?
Slightly fewer than for expansion. Okay, big crunchers?
[laughter, applause]
Okay, well, I think we're for expansion.
So that's really all that I came here to say
It's a fairly fluff talk, I know. I hope that you've enjoyed it.
Maybe some people have some other cosmological models that they'd like to suggest?
[Audience]: Sort of relevant to the big crunch scenario
Andrew on IRC asks
I'm watching other community distributions fragment and lose focus.
Fedora, openSUSE are killing themselves right now.
Are we doing the same?
[Joey]: I don't think that we're fragmenting as such.
We've already kind of fragmented already. There was the whole Ubuntu thing
which I think is the first time I've said that word in this talk.
I don't know if we lose focus as such.
We've never really had focus, have we?
We've all just done our own thing and...
[laughter, applause]
[Audience]: I was just saying to somebody over here
that one of the differences is that
those distros are actually more tightly tied to something else that matters
whether it's the commercial distribution organization that they were sort of spawned out of, or whatever.
They've had a less completely community-driven reason to exist
and to continue to exist than Debian has
so I would not be surprised if we don't end up having an entirely different life-cycle
than something like Fedora or openSUSE.
The question I was going to to pose:
I've noticed as you have, and you made a couple of references to this
the average length of thread about almost anything has gotten a lot larger.
One of the things that I observed a while back, though
is that the average number of participants per thread had not actually increased all that much.
It was certainly for any given thread a much smaller percentage of the people currently active in the project
than used to be the case when there were thirty of us and five of us were screaming at each other.
I'm wondering if there's... I don't know exactly what to take from that
But the notion that a similar number of people can just scream at each other for a whole lot longer
and still not come to a conclusion.
I don't know if there's anything to take from that, or learn from it, or not.
[Joey]: Yeah, I don't know, I'd actually meant to say I was going to put the systemd thread on here
but despite this being a pretty zoomy thing, there are limits to floating point resolution
and eventually you can't actually represent the whole thread in Iceweasel
or whatever I'm running here.
Maybe what's happened is that we have either...
we just have more people and so the number of people who feel strongly about something
they feel much more strongly about it.
You have a small subset, who all feel that they have to win.
And so they just keep talking about this and they don't come to a consensus.
Do you have a thought?
[Audience]: It's really interesting because as a project
I think we have this sense about ourselves that we're all about freedom and so forth
and somewhere along the way freedom got translated into
"we should all be able to have our own way"
and that was really not part of the freedom that we cared about when this project was young.
Even when there were strong debates, they were debates about technical details
or when the constitution was being drafted
there were a few big questions about how should this should be structured
and then a draft got generated, a lot of folks looked at it
and went, yeah, that's close enough, and off we ran.
And the amount of bikeshedding that goes on these days just scares me a little bit
because it seems like taking that word freedom, and translating it way too much
into not needing to collaborate, or not needing to come to agreement and consensus.
Now, I don't know how we change that, or fix it.
But it bothers me sometimes when I see people take the things that I thought of
when I first joined the project in 1994
as being fundamental tenets of the project
and they use the same words, but they mean something very different.
and it causes their behaviors to be very different from what I would like to see.
[Joey]: When the constitution was originally proposed, I was kinda against it.
And I thought, well, this seems like a lot of faff around for something that shouldn't matter.
I didn't even bother to vote on it.
I was like, if Ian wants to do this, great! Ian can do this, you know? He'll take care of it.
If it breaks, he'll fix it.
And I think we've kinda...
Maybe it's just that we have a lot of people now who...
Debian is an important part of their life, maybe professionally, or personally, much more important.
How many people here in the room have their livelihood in some way connected to Debian?
So probably about as many as want Debian to continue growing.
[Audience]: One thing I just wanted to add to what Bdale was saying about the bikeshedding and stuff
I'm in preparation for my BoF later this week about the code of conduct.
I've actually been reading a lot of other codes of conduct
on a page prepared by Zack, thanks for that
and one item that I saw coming back a few times
and which I've also taken into my proposed code of conduct that we'll be discussing
is about: be collaborative.
Try to work with other people.
And I think that it could help to put something like that there.
It's just a proposal, and we still have to discuss it.
[Audience]: So let me as a dark and destructive person
focus on the big crunch model for a moment.
The question is: what would happen?
What would we be able to do in Debian if we would be in this big crunch situation?
Because, okay, now we are big.
We are very important, and we are quite central to the Free software world
in a number of ways.
What happens if this world in some ways disintegrates?
Obviously there must be a replacement.
We should be open to change and re-evolve in a way that makes the world go on
even if we in the way we are now fundamentally change.
[Joey]: You know, I didn't really think about the big crunch as affecting the Free software community as a whole.
I just assumed that was some background noise which kept everything going
even if Debian went away.
I mean, yeah, it seems to me that Debian can definitely go away
without the Free software community fragmenting or imploding
or whatever, or turning to BSD licenses
vanishing down the Apple rabbit-hole, or whatever.
[Audience]: That's not what I was about here.
It's more, we have one model of working in our Free software ecosystem
that maybe this model at some point in time is not relevant any more.
It's like, maybe some of you know this model of evolving systems.
There is a first system which is a big hack
the second system is built by a community and great and does everything
but at some point in time this second system becomes irrelevant
fundamental ideas will be changed
and a third system or third systems will evolve
on the remains of the second system.
That's just what's happening now, slowly, with X for example.
X will not be completely disintegrating
but people will evolve on it
and I think we should have some thoughts about the same ideas in Debian
and we should prepare
what might happen if this case starts growing on us.
[Joey]: Thank you for that; you're thinking further ahead than I am and that's great.
Anybody else with a question, I'm not sure how we are on time.
[Audience]: I think the disintegrating is not really an interesting point
Debian is, I think, there to... itch our scratch
if we don't have the scratch left, there's no reason to itch
as long as we are community-driven
as long there will be a scratch, we will continue to itch.
[Joey]: Or the other way round, but I take your point.
[Audience]: And to the mailing list problem
I think I see a tendency on mailing lists that we have something like
this anti-politician and anti-intellectual point.
It's too often everything that's on a mailing list that's bikeshedding
if you give a point against something
if it's not the opinion that you are, it's bikeshedding, it's not a technical argument
you are against progress
and I think we need to be a bit more collaborative at this point.
To more listen to each other, and not to dismiss everything
as everything you don't understand doesn't make sense.
It's only people that want their old stuff keeping there.
It's, I think, the reason some flames go up very much is that it's important to people
and then it's important to listen to them
and not just tell them, oh, old fart, we don't care.
[Joey]: I think if you go back and look at older threads in Debian like I did for this talk
or if you go whereever stuff's getting done, and look at what a thread looks like
when stuff is getting done and people are busy making things happen
versus when people are busy complaining about other people making things happen, or whatever
there's a really different tone there. I think you could learn to recognise that tone
I don't know if you could teach people who are part of the problem
which we all probably are from time to time
to squelch that down, or, not.
I think it's something we need... yeah. Enrico?
It's right there, go up to the stand.
[Audience]: On that point, it's interesting that you made that point
I found myself, after some frustrating discussion I was having
asking people to please... real life discussion, about something completely different
asking people... telling people, can you please stick to...
I'm more interesting in hearing your personal story.
I'm more interested in hearing your experience in what you have done.
Please don't... I'm less interested in hearing what you wish would happen.
I'm less interested in what you wish I would do.
Please let me choose what I would do, and I'm happy to hear your experience.
And I think that is a pattern that also matches very well what you mentioned.
When people are getting things done, they are not discussing about
the way they wish everybody else would believe
or the way they wish everybody else would have done something
but they bring in their experience:
When I did this last time I did it this way, and it didn't work. Let's try another way.
But when it comes from personal experience
it is more about getting things done
than about seeing who has the better ideas, or something
which is rather pointless.
So yeah, I wish on mailing lists to see people bringing in their experience
their stories at work, the way they fixed a problem like that before and how
rather than: "people should do this".
"People should do this" is possibly something I don't want to see on a mailing list any more.
[applause]
[Joey]: I think we have to somehow learn to be more accepting
of just doing something, and if it's a mistake, reverting it.
It would be great if we had more technology around this
but just socially, deciding, if somebody wants to go off and do something
then let them
and if it turns out to be a bad idea, we can undo it later.
I think if you look at where we're really good in Debian at making things happen
it is stuff like the one maintainer per package model
where people are given the power to go off and do something
and it's their responsibility, and if you have a flamewar about it
well we have processes but we don't use them very often
and it would be great if we could find more ways to expand that kind of way of doing things
off to the things which don't just touch one package.
I think that's what's broken down as it were.
We're building this bigger stuff on top of individual packages
and we don't have a way to go off and say
this guy is going to handle the systemd transition
with this group of people he's got together, or something.
Maybe that doesn't work, Bdale looks unhappy with it, so it's a bad idea
but there must be a way to make it happen.
Anybody else?
[Audience]: I used to expect that at some point sooner or later Debian would effectively just split
into multiple groups which competed with each other.
I mean I know some people talk about Ubuntu as a fork of Debian, but it's kind of a different thing
I really thought that some time there would just be a discussion
where the two sides just disagreed so badly about some issue
that you would end up with two things, basically both of which claim to be the true Debian
obviously one would probably own the trademark, but yeah, I mean
both of them would just think that they were the true continuation and hate each other forever.
That seems to have become less likely now
and it seems to me that most of the times we have big discussions
it just ends up with not much happening
rather than something happening that really annoys people.
I mean in some ways that's better and some ways that's worse.
[Joey]: That's a fascinating comment.
That doesn't fit into any of my three models, the forking off thing.
It's multiple universes, it fits into the cosmological model
Yeah, that's fascinating, why is that less likely now than it used to be?
Is there less excitement and energy around Debian or is it something else?
[Audience]: Now I would worry more that, again, if it gets harder to push new ideas
and you end up... well, we are still getting new people
but if you look at the official members of Debian, we're basically only at a replacement rate
I have to say, looking around the room, that we're definitely an aging population too.
So although that's still fine for a few decades, yeah
if we want to continue in the long term of Debian having a good future and still being relevant
then, again on your graph, how do we get back into really growing,
not just the community round the edges, helpers and contributors and so on
but people who are members of Debian should also be growing
and taking new ideas.
[Audience]: Sort of replying to that: if we go a bit smaller than cosmological, and go to galactic, say
I think Debian could be looked at as if it started out being a star nursery
and then we turned into a galaxy
and we're now at a stage where we need to find a way of maintaining the black hole
because otherwise, if people aren't allowed to work on an alternative black hole
then the arms will fly off, as... yeah, we need to suck more.
[laughter, applause]
So the black hole is the sort of boring, central packages
which you're not allowed to touch, because if you do that everything will break
and we need a way of instantiating a new galaxy next door
and just replacing the black hole, and as you say if it doesn't work
you can git revert.
So, and the other thing is, if you look at the mailing lists
you get the impression that there's a war going on
where there is going to be a schism.
Half the people will go off and maintain their servers
and the other half will go off with their tablets, or whatever, and sort them out.
But actually, the people in those discussions aren't going to build either of those things
and the rest of Debian is just getting on with it.
So, that's why I think Debian doesn't fragment
because the vocal people aren't necessarily the people doing the job.
[Audience]: I think there's another possibility
and that is that when I think about Moray's question
There are more derivatives of Debian than any other core distribution
so there are certainly lots of people out there who have decided
that the thing they wanted to to differently, or cared about
was worth going, creating a CDD, or a fork, or whatever.
So that's happened, it just hasn't dragged the trademark into... or the name into some kind of a pit
which I would hate to see happen.
But I have this sense that maybe the other thing about it is that Debian has become large enough
and means enough things to enough people
that the vast majority of us in the project who don't give a flying you-know-what
about whether it's upstart or systemd
That's an impassioned important discussion for the people for whom how the system boots
is the thing they care about in Debian.
But for the vast majority of us it's like, as you say
I do that once per kernel update cycle, a reboot
and the rest of the time I just don't care
and so the idea that the distribution would fracture
or somehow Debian wouldn't be Debian any more because there's a fracturous discussion
going on in a particular sub-project or sub-part of the distribution
is just hard for me to wrap my brain around.
[Joey]: It seems like it would have to be something that isn't technological based.
Some kind of, you know, we want to change the social contract
or maybe want to change what free software is
and that would fracture Debian.
[Audience]: So, on the lines of what Bdale just said
this way that we are becoming almost a preferred choice to be upstream
is a very good thing
and that enables our work to scale much better
than if we try to grow the project
and I think the reason why we aren't growing in terms of number of people
is that we're already at some kind of limits of scaling
We're having... a lot of things we're talking about
are difficulties to do with coordinating and communicating between this number of people
and allowing, and becoming upstream for people is a way for us to scale that a lot better
and one of the things that we should be trying to do is to look outward
rather than inward
and to try to think of ways in which we can be a better upstream for people
to make it easier for people to derive, so that fewer people have to do their work within Debian
and that they're easier to do it outside Debian.
Because after all, software freedom is about freedom to make the change yourself to the software you're using
and that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have a huge, kind of
get involved with a huge complicated upstream who have processes
and decide to do things a particular way.
No, you should just be able to it.
At the moment if you want to do that it's quite hard, and we should make it easier.
[Joey]: Yeah, you know, when you think about that
maybe it's kind of what's happening now, but you have to wonder
your scenario, you can go either one of two ways.
You can have a lot of custom Debian distributions, and things based on Debian
and Debian can just become a background infrastructure
and then who wants to work on it when it's some thing that's down there in the depths
that other exciting things are being built on top of
You know, maybe you contribute patches back when it makes your life easier
but do we get a sustaining model that way, or maybe we don't.
I kind of used to have this argument with Manoj.
I thought that Debian had to expand or we were just going to die
and Manoj was like no, Debian is just about what I need for my system
and what my friends need for their systems.
I'm only interested in it in that way.
And I don't know, maybe Manoj was right.
I think that I was definitely wrong.
The best arguments are always that way, right?
[Introducer]: Okay, the time is over, so we have to take this as the closing comment
and, yeah, you have to move it to lunch to discuss over that.
[Joey]: Okay, thanks everybody.
[applause]