0:00:07.700,0:00:11.900 Okay, and now for the last talk in the morning session, 0:00:11.930,0:00:14.660 Joey Hess will talk about Debian Cosmology 0:00:14.960,0:00:21.950 [applause] 0:00:22.020,0:00:26.930 Well, thanks, good morning everybody, I hope you had a good night's sleep. 0:00:27.030,0:00:30.960 I enjoyed sleeping out in the tent, in the middle of Switzerland 0:00:31.000,0:00:32.780 looking out over the lake 0:00:33.100,0:00:35.740 this is kinda the first Debconf where I've kinda had a problem 0:00:35.740,0:00:41.420 If I just look over there I'll probably just lose focus for a bit, it's so gorgeous. 0:00:41.490,0:00:47.310 I thought this would be a good place to get up on a mountaintop, as it were 0:00:47.370,0:00:50.670 and think about the bigger picture 0:00:50.740,0:00:56.320 and try to think about some of the big questions, the big vague things we wonder about 0:00:56.450,0:00:58.540 but don't really, sometimes, talk about 0:00:58.540,0:01:01.800 maybe in public in front of a live streaming audience, I don't know. 0:01:01.800,0:01:06.070 I have this crazy Debian Cosmology idea. 0:01:06.070,0:01:10.810 And, let's look at Debian, let's look at the Universal operating system 0:01:10.810,0:01:15.680 and think about thinking back 20 years back 0:01:15.750,0:01:18.070 to when Debian was founded, up to the present 0:01:18.110,0:01:20.860 and where it's going to go from here. 0:01:20.930,0:01:25.970 Back in the beginning, there was kinda this void. 0:01:25.970,0:01:31.590 and there was a gap [applause] 0:01:31.690,0:01:35.150 and Ian Murdock saw this, and he said, well... 0:01:35.150,0:01:39.960 let's make a new Linux distribution to replace SLS 0:01:39.960,0:01:42.690 It'll be great; I'll get it done in a couple of weeks. 0:01:42.690,0:01:45.070 [laughter] 0:01:45.070,0:01:49.410 And this was back in 1993. 0:01:49.510,0:01:52.740 And just as with the big bang 0:01:52.810,0:01:55.830 you have the laws of nature somehow forming out of the void 0:01:55.970,0:01:59.830 we developed these standard principles of Debian 0:01:59.830,0:02:01.950 that have pretty much stood the test of time 0:02:02.020,0:02:05.790 although some of them like the one package, one maintainer thing have changed over time. 0:02:05.950,0:02:13.520 But this is all the stuff that we think of as the core principles of Debian today, probably. 0:02:13.520,0:02:18.030 And this was in the period '94 to '98 0:02:18.160,0:02:22.800 this early period where there weren't very many people involved in Debian 0:02:22.900,0:02:25.090 and things got done fairly quickly. 0:02:25.120,0:02:29.860 I have down here one of the initial threads for the Debian Constitution. 0:02:29.930,0:02:33.430 This is where Ian Jackson said 0:02:33.560,0:02:38.970 I think we'll use this constitution proposal to bootstrap the constitution 0:02:38.970,0:02:41.760 so we'll vote on the constitution using the principles of the constitution. 0:02:41.900,0:02:44.450 That could be a kind of controversial things to say, actually 0:02:44.560,0:02:47.600 because it's a bootstrapping problem. 0:02:47.600,0:02:51.850 But the thread actually wasn't that long 0:02:51.850,0:02:53.670 by today's standards [laughter] 0:02:53.670,0:02:56.360 for something that important. 0:02:56.630,0:03:00.760 So, this was, as I said, the early period 0:03:00.860,0:03:05.840 and then in the late 90s and early 2000s 0:03:05.910,0:03:08.600 we went through this inflation period, just like the universe blew up 0:03:08.600,0:03:10.080 got bigger and bigger 0:03:10.080,0:03:12.080 we have the nice up-and-to-the-right graph 0:03:12.080,0:03:15.730 which is the number of maintainers over time 0:03:15.730,0:03:20.160 and I don't think that this data is very good 0:03:20.230,0:03:24.200 but I'm kinda happy to see that it's started going up again in the most recent election 0:03:24.270,0:03:27.930 although that's probably also just because Zack wasn't running [laughter] 0:03:27.930,0:03:32.270 So during this inflation period we had things happen 0:03:32.340,0:03:35.230 like adding ports to Debian. 0:03:35.300,0:03:37.720 One port in '98, two ports in '99 0:03:37.850,0:03:40.370 two ports in 2000; that's two ports a year. 0:03:40.370,0:03:43.060 It's a crazy rate of change. 0:03:43.060,0:03:47.870 And then we had... all these derivatives started popping up. 0:03:47.940,0:03:49.790 We'd had Debian for Hams for a while 0:03:49.820,0:03:52.380 but we got these derivatives that you don't think of much any more 0:03:52.380,0:03:55.790 like Corel Linux, Stormix, Progeny 0:03:55.790,0:03:58.700 These are names we haven't mentioned in a while 0:03:58.800,0:04:02.450 but they were the early corporate entities saying, well, 0:04:02.450,0:04:04.450 we're going to try and do something here with Debian 0:04:04.450,0:04:05.490 and modify it 0:04:05.490,0:04:08.050 and of course many more came from there. 0:04:08.110,0:04:13.630 And another big event in this period was that apt started out. 0:04:13.760,0:04:18.100 This is one of the early threads about apt 0:04:18.100,0:04:20.959 This is about a year after it started being developed. 0:04:20.959,0:04:22.200 Everybody started trying it 0:04:22.300,0:04:25.460 and realized: oh, it actually doesn't work on my system 0:04:25.530,0:04:29.310 because I have these packages that are half-configured 0:04:29.310,0:04:32.290 I have a few broken dependencies because I just forced something at some point 0:04:32.290,0:04:36.060 And everybody tried apt, and they're like, gosh, it says my system's inconsistent 0:04:36.160,0:04:38.900 and it doesn't have apt-get -f yet 0:04:38.900,0:04:40.900 so it doesn't work. 0:04:40.900,0:04:43.120 So I thought this was an amusing thread. 0:04:43.180,0:04:46.160 It's also not really too long a thread 0:04:46.160,0:04:50.750 but here's an introductory representative message 0:04:50.820,0:04:52.630 I don't know if you can read it back there 0:04:52.700,0:04:55.320 but it's just what I said, apt-get dosn't seem to work 0:04:55.460,0:04:57.210 it says my system lacks integrity 0:04:57.270,0:04:59.290 and then Jason Gunthorpe, who wrote apt, said 0:04:59.360,0:05:04.470 I don't think I've actually seen a Debian system that has a perfect dependency setup 0:05:04.500,0:05:09.780 so that apt can actually work on it. 0:05:09.780,0:05:12.470 If you think about introducing some big new change like apt 0:05:12.540,0:05:14.020 and it doesn't work at all 0:05:14.150,0:05:16.680 and this was in April of 1998 0:05:16.780,0:05:19.950 If we then move forward one month to May of 1998. 0:05:19.950,0:05:21.350 here's somebody saying 0:05:21.480,0:05:25.330 "This makes makes me wonder if we should think about dropping this autoup script..." 0:05:25.330,0:05:28.380 "...that we're using for upgrades" (some kind of a shell script or something) 0:05:28.380,0:05:29.760 "...and switch to apt." 0:05:29.760,0:05:35.240 "autoup seems to work and maybe we shouldn't postpone Debian 2.0 for apt..." 0:05:35.240,0:05:41.930 "but autoup's a hack, and apt lets you do an entire bo to hamm upgrade in dselect." 0:05:42.130,0:05:45.830 Wow. I was kinda of surprised to see this: it turns out that I wrote that. 0:05:45.900,0:05:49.800 I had no idea that I proposed converting Debian to apt for 2.0. 0:05:49.860,0:05:53.430 It didn't actually happen in May of 1998 0:05:53.490,0:05:57.130 we had to wait a whole year until March of '99 when 2.1 came out 0:05:57.260,0:05:59.460 and this is a quote from debian-history 0:05:59.460,0:06:01.460 about apt, which I thought was a great quote: 0:06:01.460,0:06:05.530 "It established a new paradigm for package acquisition and installation" 0:06:05.530,0:06:07.750 and it really did. 0:06:08.220,0:06:14.070 If you look now at things that are basically command-line compatible with apt 0:06:14.140,0:06:16.060 or more or less command line compatible 0:06:16.120,0:06:19.050 maybe they didn't quite understand the difference between upgrade and update 0:06:19.150,0:06:22.140 There's so many of them! It's crazy. 0:06:22.140,0:06:25.370 And one of the interesting things about this list 0:06:25.440,0:06:29.410 is that if you look and see which ones of these actually do it securely 0:06:29.410,0:06:31.410 it's a really small subset. 0:06:31.410,0:06:36.740 Maybe some of them use HTTPS in some way 0:06:36.740,0:06:40.030 and have a little bit of security there, I don't know. 0:06:40.030,0:06:44.470 I didn't check them all in detail. 0:06:44.470,0:06:47.360 Of course back then apt didn't have any security either. 0:06:47.430,0:06:49.850 It was just pulling stuff via HTTP off the web 0:06:49.920,0:06:53.410 and hey, it'd be the right thing, because why wouldn't it be? 0:06:53.620,0:06:59.670 So soon after apt came out... this is a screenshot from 2002 0:06:59.670,0:07:01.150 but it was around earlier 0:07:01.150,0:07:03.150 We got apt-get.org 0:07:03.150,0:07:06.230 which was all these third-party apt repositories. 0:07:06.230,0:07:10.630 And this was kinda interesting, there were hundreds of different repositories. 0:07:10.730,0:07:13.590 You could go off, edit your sources.list, get your packages 0:07:13.720,0:07:19.370 and we kinda started thinking, wow maybe we're gonna change how Debian works in some way. 0:07:19.440,0:07:22.600 Maybe we'll have some kind of a central core 0:07:22.670,0:07:25.980 and everything else will just be pulling from other repositories somewhere. 0:07:26.100,0:07:28.590 And we kinda went off on a divergent path. 0:07:28.720,0:07:33.710 We kinda went down a wormhole to some distributed apt, or app store model 0:07:33.710,0:07:38.400 where there's Debian and all this stuff you pull in from here and there 0:07:38.470,0:07:40.220 and if somebody wants to make a package they do 0:07:40.290,0:07:43.040 and this kind of is what happened today too. 0:07:43.110,0:07:46.150 You can pull, you know, signed packages from Google 0:07:46.150,0:07:50.270 and from debian-multimedia, deb-multimedia, that kind of thing 0:07:50.270,0:07:52.460 But we didn't really go down that path. 0:07:52.460,0:07:54.680 We're still very much a centralized distribution. 0:07:54.750,0:07:58.650 I kinda think it's interesting to think about what could have happened if we'd branched off in a different way there 0:07:58.650,0:08:03.190 But there were good reasons to keep it centralized, such as security. 0:08:03.190,0:08:05.190 And if you now fast-forward to the present 0:08:05.190,0:08:09.070 here's apt-get.org from 2011 0:08:09.070,0:08:13.370 it's been broken, we can't check if these repositories work any more 0:08:13.510,0:08:14.790 we're not accepting new submissions 0:08:14.920,0:08:18.690 and this is what happened to debian-multimedia.org, which is a pity. 0:08:18.690,0:08:23.460 It's a Russian domain about motorcycles or something, I don't know. 0:08:25.140,0:08:30.320 So that's kinda the inflation period of Debian. 0:08:30.390,0:08:34.559 And then we can move forward again into the modern era. 0:08:34.559,0:08:40.380 This might be where my cosmology analogy gets a little bit strained 0:08:40.539,0:08:42.220 but we'll see. 0:08:42.360,0:08:49.420 I've picked out two things about the modern era of Debian 0:08:49.620,0:08:52.580 this past 10 years, or 15 years. 0:08:52.780,0:08:58.570 So, one of them: just as in the Universe, you have large scale structures forming, 0:08:58.700,0:09:03.270 galaxies, and larger structures. 0:09:03.410,0:09:06.940 In Debian we've kind of developed all kinds of structures 0:09:07.070,0:09:09.190 on top of the "one maintainer, one package" model 0:09:09.330,0:09:12.320 and extending it, and going beyond it. 0:09:12.450,0:09:15.580 So a few of these, such as teams... 0:09:15.650,0:09:21.400 Lucas showed us the graph of team maintenance increasing over the past ten years or so. 0:09:21.400,0:09:24.730 We've just developed all these structures 0:09:24.730,0:09:27.850 Custom Debian distributions 0:09:28.020,0:09:31.720 stuff like d-i, different projects within Debian. 0:09:31.860,0:09:34.070 So it gets pretty complicated. 0:09:34.140,0:09:38.040 It's not a heterogeneous thing - a homogenous thing 0:09:38.140,0:09:40.260 It's all clumped around in different places. 0:09:40.400,0:09:43.890 If you also look at where people are using Debian 0:09:43.960,0:09:45.570 that's differentiated a lot too. 0:09:45.610,0:09:48.370 It's not just... we are the Universal operating system, we say 0:09:48.400,0:09:50.720 but a lot of people are using Debian on servers 0:09:50.720,0:09:52.720 and a few are on laptops 0:09:52.720,0:09:54.720 and basically nobody is on a mobile phone 0:09:54.720,0:09:59.800 except for a few people who are lucky enough to still have an Openmoko, or something like that. 0:09:59.800,0:10:06.690 So, we've really differentiated Debian a lot. 0:10:06.830,0:10:09.750 So that's the large scale structure thing. 0:10:09.820,0:10:12.680 I think it's interesting to think about it 0:10:12.810,0:10:18.090 because it kinda makes you think about how Debian's evolving. 0:10:18.490,0:10:23.300 Now this is where it really gets strained. 0:10:23.640,0:10:26.160 Red shift. Okay. 0:10:26.330,0:10:29.960 [laughter] 0:10:29.960,0:10:31.960 How do we have red shift in Debian? 0:10:31.960,0:10:33.730 I don't see any red when I look out 0:10:33.860,0:10:36.250 unless I've stepped into the middle of a flame war, or something. 0:10:36.480,0:10:39.310 Here's kind of an amusing paper 0:10:39.370,0:10:42.330 which I don't think has been peer-reviewed yet. 0:10:42.400,0:10:46.200 It says, what if the universe, rather than actually expanding right now 0:10:46.200,0:10:47.920 like we think it is because of red shift 0:10:47.980,0:10:50.200 what if the mass of everything is increasing at once? 0:10:50.200,0:10:53.970 And it says, well, everything would work pretty much like it does now 0:10:54.070,0:10:57.670 we wouldn't even be able to test this theory. 0:10:57.670,0:11:03.280 And while I don't know if the mass of the universe is increasing 0:11:03.280,0:11:05.740 exponentially over time, like this paper says it is 0:11:05.800,0:11:07.280 it seems a little unlikely. 0:11:07.350,0:11:11.010 Debian's mass has definitely increased. 0:11:11.010,0:11:14.340 We have an enormous mass, and an enormous momentum. 0:11:14.340,0:11:15.890 We're moving in a certain direction 0:11:15.960,0:11:19.320 and it's really hard to move Debian into a different direction now. 0:11:19.320,0:11:24.730 So, one really easy example of this 0:11:24.800,0:11:26.620 systemd. 0:11:26.720,0:11:30.200 Think of how many threads we've had about systemd lately 0:11:30.200,0:11:31.690 and, yeah. 0:11:31.830,0:11:35.460 And this isn't replacing dpkg with apt 0:11:35.530,0:11:38.420 and breaking all of our dependencies, and having to change everything. 0:11:38.550,0:11:40.300 This is changing how systems boot 0:11:40.440,0:11:44.240 which you do once a week, or once a month, or once a year. 0:11:44.240,0:11:46.390 It's a minor change as things go, right? 0:11:46.390,0:11:50.420 And yet it's an enormous controversy inside the project. 0:11:50.420,0:11:54.960 So I think we have to think about this momentum, this mass 0:11:55.100,0:11:59.810 how do we manage it, how can we make Debian nimble 0:12:00.010,0:12:03.710 on top of all this momentum. 0:12:03.810,0:12:08.600 So I think that's probably the largest problem that Debian is facing right now 0:12:08.600,0:12:13.090 and will face in the next however far out you want to look. 0:12:13.090,0:12:17.090 It's kinda hard to give a talk about Debian cosmology 0:12:17.220,0:12:22.130 because what is a long time scale in Debian? 0:12:22.230,0:12:26.970 We have twenty years of history to look back on. 0:12:27.140,0:12:31.480 Can people think in their head, wow, will Debian be around in twenty years? 0:12:31.550,0:12:32.760 I don't know. 0:12:32.860,0:12:38.340 Pick a timescale that seems to make sense to you for the rest of this talk. 0:12:38.370,0:12:40.900 I'm not going to try and force some kind of a timescale on you. 0:12:40.960,0:12:43.110 If you want to think a hundred years ahead, great. 0:12:43.180,0:12:46.510 If you want to think ten years ahead, okay. 0:12:46.510,0:12:50.550 But I'm going to try to think about moving forward 0:12:50.550,0:12:54.610 but first I have a little digression, which I forgot about. 0:12:55.660,0:13:04.030 So, one of the examples of a way that the momentum in Debian can be a problem. 0:13:04.160,0:13:05.840 I mentioned apt. 0:13:06.080,0:13:09.240 Well there's this interesting thing being developed right now 0:13:09.270,0:13:10.920 called functional package management. 0:13:11.090,0:13:13.580 It started out with nixos 0:13:13.610,0:13:16.540 and now the GNU project has gotten involved with its... 0:13:16.640,0:13:19.090 Guix? I don't know how to say it. 0:13:19.190,0:13:24.940 The idea is that it somehow takes ideas from functional programming 0:13:25.040,0:13:27.060 and applies them to package management 0:13:27.100,0:13:28.040 so it's bread and butter for me. 0:13:28.100,0:13:30.530 I'm really interested in it being a Haskell guy now. 0:13:30.630,0:13:32.070 Being in a functional program 0:13:32.140,0:13:35.570 you're like, wow, there's some interesting ways to use these ideas. 0:13:35.640,0:13:39.540 It's not really functional, but it's a neat terminology to hook on it. 0:13:39.570,0:13:44.780 And what this lets you do, it's kind of a source based system, in a way 0:13:44.850,0:13:48.520 I don't know. Has anybody used any of these systems in the audience? 0:13:48.620,0:13:50.530 I'm just curious. You have, Zack? 0:13:50.630,0:13:53.290 I'd love to chat with you about it and get a broader idea. 0:13:53.290,0:13:58.800 The idea is kind of that you never make a destructive change to the system. 0:13:58.840,0:14:01.260 Every package change is atomic. 0:14:01.260,0:14:02.870 and if you have dependencies 0:14:02.940,0:14:05.430 you might have multiple versions of a package installed at a time. 0:14:05.500,0:14:09.190 and it's completely different than the dpkg model in every way. 0:14:09.300,0:14:14.710 And it's kind of inconceivable to think that Debian would switch to something like this model now. 0:14:14.710,0:14:16.710 It would just be so incredibly hard. 0:14:16.710,0:14:20.630 You know, switching to apt would be just nothing in comparison 0:14:20.690,0:14:23.250 and it's much later in our evolution 0:14:23.380,0:14:27.020 we have a lot more structure built up around our current system 0:14:27.120,0:14:29.970 than we did back then, even. 0:14:29.970,0:14:33.000 This is an example of something that... 0:14:33.000,0:14:35.490 The universe is coming up with neat new things 0:14:35.560,0:14:37.170 How do we possibly put them into Debian? 0:14:37.200,0:14:40.260 We can obviously package up these package managers 0:14:40.330,0:14:44.160 and make it easy enough for people to use them as a third party thing 0:14:44.230,0:14:47.260 You can install stuff in your home directory with functional package management 0:14:47.490,0:14:50.550 and just have a system on top of Debian, and that kind of thing. 0:14:50.550,0:14:53.380 But how do you integrate this kind of thing 0:14:53.510,0:14:55.930 or ideas from this kind of thing into Debian? 0:14:56.000,0:15:02.360 I think the closest we're coming is the switch to more declarative systems for Debian packages 0:15:02.460,0:15:05.350 so that rather than maintainer scripts, we have triggers, and stuff like that. 0:15:05.420,0:15:07.500 But this is just taking it to a whole new level. 0:15:07.630,0:15:11.260 And there's a lot to learn from stuff like this. 0:15:11.260,0:15:15.840 So that's my kinda quick look at the modern era of Debian. 0:15:15.840,0:15:18.900 Let's move into the futures that I was talking about. 0:15:18.900,0:15:25.590 So just like in cosmology... I think you all probably know where this is going to go. 0:15:25.590,0:15:28.010 You know, one of the models for the future is 0:15:28.110,0:15:30.840 that Debian is in some way going to continue to expand and grow 0:15:30.840,0:15:35.070 for however long you want to think ahead. 0:15:35.070,0:15:38.270 And there's two ways that I think this could happen. 0:15:38.440,0:15:44.890 It could be a targeted growth where we pick a direction we want Debian to move in 0:15:44.960,0:15:46.980 and we just put everything behind that 0:15:47.110,0:15:52.090 and we have enough momentum going that we can continue to maintain growth as time goes on 0:15:52.090,0:15:55.990 and meet the needs of that one area. 0:15:56.050,0:15:59.080 So we could pick, say, the server market 0:15:59.150,0:16:00.900 and say okay, we're doing all this Debian cloud stuff. 0:16:00.960,0:16:04.120 People talked about all the talks that are going to be here at Debconf about that. 0:16:04.430,0:16:07.320 There's a lot of that going on. 0:16:07.320,0:16:10.750 If you go off to any virtual VPS provider 0:16:10.750,0:16:14.110 you can pick a Debian image, pretty much on every single one of them. 0:16:14.110,0:16:16.700 It's big in that area, obviously. 0:16:16.700,0:16:23.660 Or we could say well, we're going to try to also handle desktop, or mobile, or something. 0:16:23.660,0:16:27.830 Something a little bit more targeted might be a good idea then just something that broad. 0:16:27.830,0:16:33.310 But you know, maybe if we decide, well, we just want to do this, and this 0:16:33.310,0:16:34.990 then that would help us grow. 0:16:35.060,0:16:37.880 I don't know, it's just one model. 0:16:38.020,0:16:41.820 If you look at mobile, though, and you look at where Debian is right now... 0:16:41.820,0:16:46.020 This is a screenshot of Lil' Debi, which is an Android app 0:16:46.020,0:16:50.260 that basically debootstraps Debian, that's what it's doing there in the screenshot 0:16:50.260,0:16:55.270 and this is kinda of the current state of the art of Debian on all the mobile devices 0:16:55.270,0:16:57.820 that every single person out there has in their pocket, I'm assuming 0:16:57.860,0:17:00.240 that aren't running Debian, probably? 0:17:00.240,0:17:01.720 You know, it's pretty basic, 0:17:01.720,0:17:06.030 it really doesn't give you a system that can do a lot of wonderful things, 0:17:06.099,0:17:08.920 unless you're wanting to do wonderful things at the command line 0:17:08.920,0:17:12.990 with a virtual keyboard, which isn't much fun. 0:17:12.990,0:17:17.260 You know, you can think about what we can do to expand this. 0:17:17.290,0:17:20.050 Can we, say, add Android support into Debian in some way 0:17:20.119,0:17:22.670 so that you can install Android apps and run them. 0:17:22.740,0:17:28.089 Can we have some way of getting a... you know, installing something in a chroot of this type 0:17:28.089,0:17:32.290 and then displaying it on the normal Android display 0:17:32.290,0:17:35.650 and having a full interactive application, that kind of thing. 0:17:35.720,0:17:40.660 So that's kind of an example of how we could go into one area and try to expand 0:17:40.760,0:17:43.220 to get Debian growing in that area. 0:17:43.220,0:17:48.400 The other major way that I think we could grow Debian 0:17:48.500,0:17:50.310 or that Debian could continue growing 0:17:50.410,0:17:53.810 is this more community-driven model. 0:17:53.880,0:17:58.180 This is kind of where you have different projects doing their own thing 0:17:58.280,0:18:02.520 and Debian can somehow come in and help them out. 0:18:02.520,0:18:09.210 You know, we have some good examples, like Freedombox, and TAILS, and stuff like that 0:18:09.340,0:18:13.580 that are using Debian in great ways, and doing wonderful stuff. 0:18:13.580,0:18:16.410 Hopefully they're getting a lot of developers, I hope. 0:18:16.410,0:18:19.950 I don't know if that's the case. 0:18:19.950,0:18:22.120 But there are community-driven things. 0:18:22.190,0:18:26.160 There are ways that Debian can expand out into an area without having to move the whole project there. 0:18:26.190,0:18:30.290 You can just say, it's a custom Debian distribution, it's a blend, whatever 0:18:30.390,0:18:32.480 and we're still... it's still contributing back. 0:18:32.550,0:18:35.640 It's a wonderful ecosystem going on there. 0:18:35.770,0:18:38.870 Now, if you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 0:18:39.000,0:18:42.900 I think we kinda made a mistake with the Raspberry Pi 0:18:43.070,0:18:49.090 because we said we're not going to support the specific arm instruction set that they want to use 0:18:49.120,0:18:51.580 because it's five percent faster, or something 0:18:51.710,0:18:56.640 and so they went off and built Raspbian, and that's fine, you know 0:18:56.640,0:19:02.670 but we've kind, I think, possibly, lost a little bit of the mindshare in the Raspberry Pi community 0:19:02.740,0:19:06.570 because everybody's like, "well, okay, we've got this Raspbian thing, it's not Debian, right?" 0:19:06.610,0:19:10.540 Of course it is in pretty much every important way. 0:19:10.540,0:19:14.040 And maybe if we had been a little bit more open to this project 0:19:14.110,0:19:19.080 coming and saying, we would like to build everything for armv5, or whatever it was 0:19:19.150,0:19:24.530 maybe we would have had a bit more opportunity for growth and expansion, there. 0:19:24.530,0:19:29.980 And then, if you look at just Debian developer communities in general 0:19:29.980,0:19:35.630 there's always opportunities which we sometimes don't take advantage of 0:19:35.690,0:19:41.380 to have really good relationships with various interesting projects 0:19:41.580,0:19:44.030 that might end up using Debian in some way 0:19:44.100,0:19:46.920 or might end up contributing back, or becoming part of it, even. 0:19:47.020,0:19:52.940 And so I think... I really feel pretty bullish about this community-driven thing 0:19:53.040,0:19:55.950 I think it's kinda how Debian has always worked. 0:19:55.950,0:20:01.650 I don't know if... you know, it's hard to look out and say 0:20:01.720,0:20:04.580 in ten years Debian will be an attractive target for people doing 0:20:04.710,0:20:07.500 whatever the equivalent to Raspberry Pi is in ten years 0:20:07.500,0:20:10.530 but I hope so. 0:20:10.530,0:20:12.530 So that's the one model. 0:20:12.530,0:20:14.900 Whoa, what happened to the other model? 0:20:14.970,0:20:17.350 Ah, okay, so steady state. 0:20:17.490,0:20:22.200 It's another cosmological model, obviously. 0:20:22.200,0:20:27.580 I think we could just continue sort of coasting along indefinitely 0:20:27.580,0:20:30.300 without really saying, oh, we're going to make big changes 0:20:30.370,0:20:32.720 we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we can just keep doing our thing 0:20:32.860,0:20:37.290 and be completely happy for as long as you want to look out. 0:20:37.360,0:20:39.110 We've got a lot of momentum, we can keep going. 0:20:39.180,0:20:42.940 Even if we all stop doing much today, I think Debian will keep going for years and years 0:20:43.080,0:20:45.500 quite happily 0:20:45.570,0:20:51.250 and you know, after a while, you start having to think about generational things. 0:20:51.480,0:20:57.570 When most of our generation, or generations, got involved with Debian 0:20:57.810,0:21:00.900 we kind of had some infrastructure that we just kind of thought was there 0:21:00.900,0:21:03.790 Maybe it was a kernel, or a C compiler 0:21:03.860,0:21:04.800 or something like that. 0:21:04.870,0:21:07.420 We didn't really think about it, maybe we occasionally ran into a bug in it 0:21:07.520,0:21:08.530 and we reported the bug 0:21:08.530,0:21:12.400 but it wasn't something that was at the forefront of our minds 0:21:12.470,0:21:15.020 as something new and exciting, necessarily. 0:21:15.160,0:21:16.970 And maybe that's where Debian's going 0:21:17.040,0:21:21.010 Maybe Debian becomes an infrastructure that thing get built on top of over time 0:21:21.070,0:21:24.670 and there's enough people to keep it going 0:21:24.810,0:21:29.820 because if nothing else, companies like Google, as long they continue using Debian 0:21:29.880,0:21:34.690 are going to want to employ tons of Debian developers, just to keep it going. 0:21:36.520,0:21:43.600 So this is definitely I think a likely possible future at some point 0:21:43.670,0:21:48.280 is that Debian becomes an infrastructure, and that's fine 0:21:48.280,0:21:51.810 and if you continue looking forward does it continue being infrastructure 0:21:51.840,0:21:52.950 or at some point does it get replaced 0:21:53.050,0:21:57.930 and does it even matter if it gets replaced in X years? I don't know. 0:21:57.930,0:22:04.180 But you know, I think this is another likely possibility... we'll see. 0:22:04.180,0:22:08.220 And then of course we have this final, fun possibility that you get 0:22:08.220,0:22:11.440 and I would probably have put some bullet points up here 0:22:11.510,0:22:16.420 but I had an unexpected root canal and stuff, so I kind of ran out of slides at this point. 0:22:16.490,0:22:17.900 [laughter] 0:22:17.900,0:22:20.720 You know, you can have a big crunch. 0:22:20.790,0:22:24.710 and this is always my favorite possibility for the universe as a whole. 0:22:24.710,0:22:28.050 I don't know about for Debian. 0:22:28.390,0:22:32.730 What would happen if Debian just petered and just somehow died and fell off a cliff 0:22:32.760,0:22:34.070 and everything started going down 0:22:34.170,0:22:37.270 and everybody switched to Android on their servers or who knows what. 0:22:37.340,0:22:40.560 I mean, what are they going to replace us with? I can't possibly think. 0:22:40.630,0:22:43.220 There's got to be something out there, right? 0:22:43.220,0:22:45.220 Maybe it's all Fedora in the future, I don't know. 0:22:45.220,0:22:49.370 Hi Fedora folks. 0:22:49.370,0:22:53.000 This is definitely a possibility that we have to keep in mind 0:22:53.070,0:22:55.290 and it's not like the end of the world, right? 0:22:55.360,0:22:59.120 It would only be the end of Debian, and even if that happened 0:22:59.120,0:23:04.940 think back to that earlier slide about apt establishing a new paradigm in package management. 0:23:05.080,0:23:11.060 Even if Debian stopped being actively used and developed 0:23:11.160,0:23:14.150 at some far future point that I don't want to imagine 0:23:14.150,0:23:17.480 it would still have influenced things in a great many ways 0:23:17.550,0:23:21.220 and I think we could all be quite pleased with the work that we had done on it. 0:23:21.380,0:23:24.410 Of course we all hope that it will continue to be used 0:23:24.510,0:23:26.430 for as long as long as we're involved in the project 0:23:26.500,0:23:30.460 or maybe ten years longer so we can keep using Debian systems after we retire. 0:23:30.700,0:23:35.940 So, I kind of thought that I would take a little poll of the audience. 0:23:35.980,0:23:39.070 Who thinks that we're going to somehow continue to expand 0:23:39.340,0:23:43.110 for however long you want to imagine is a long time? 0:23:43.240,0:23:48.590 Hands? Continued expansion? I would say maybe ten percent of the room. 0:23:48.650,0:23:51.950 Okay, so who's for steady state? 0:23:51.950,0:23:57.600 Slightly fewer than for expansion. Okay, big crunchers? 0:23:57.600,0:24:04.830 [laughter, applause] 0:24:04.890,0:24:10.430 Okay, well, I think we're for expansion. 0:24:17.000,0:24:21.370 So that's really all that I came here to say 0:24:21.440,0:24:24.830 It's a fairly fluff talk, I know. I hope that you've enjoyed it. 0:24:24.940,0:24:31.880 Maybe some people have some other cosmological models that they'd like to suggest? 0:24:37.950,0:24:44.540 [Audience]: Sort of relevant to the big crunch scenario 0:24:44.670,0:24:48.470 Andrew on IRC asks 0:24:48.610,0:24:52.310 I'm watching other community distributions fragment and lose focus. 0:24:52.310,0:24:57.590 Fedora, openSUSE are killing themselves right now. 0:24:57.590,0:24:59.590 Are we doing the same? 0:24:59.590,0:25:04.440 [Joey]: I don't think that we're fragmenting as such. 0:25:04.480,0:25:08.650 We've already kind of fragmented already. There was the whole Ubuntu thing 0:25:08.680,0:25:12.990 which I think is the first time I've said that word in this talk. 0:25:13.150,0:25:18.750 I don't know if we lose focus as such. 0:25:18.750,0:25:20.550 We've never really had focus, have we? 0:25:20.620,0:25:22.700 We've all just done our own thing and... 0:25:22.770,0:25:28.620 [laughter, applause] 0:25:28.620,0:25:30.170 [Audience]: I was just saying to somebody over here 0:25:30.170,0:25:32.860 that one of the differences is that 0:25:32.930,0:25:38.840 those distros are actually more tightly tied to something else that matters 0:25:38.840,0:25:45.470 whether it's the commercial distribution organization that they were sort of spawned out of, or whatever. 0:25:45.470,0:25:51.790 They've had a less completely community-driven reason to exist 0:25:51.890,0:25:53.370 and to continue to exist than Debian has 0:25:53.440,0:25:58.280 so I would not be surprised if we don't end up having an entirely different life-cycle 0:25:58.350,0:26:01.070 than something like Fedora or openSUSE. 0:26:01.070,0:26:03.320 The question I was going to to pose: 0:26:03.320,0:26:08.500 I've noticed as you have, and you made a couple of references to this 0:26:08.600,0:26:14.150 the average length of thread about almost anything has gotten a lot larger. 0:26:14.150,0:26:17.240 One of the things that I observed a while back, though 0:26:17.310,0:26:21.950 is that the average number of participants per thread had not actually increased all that much. 0:26:22.020,0:26:28.040 It was certainly for any given thread a much smaller percentage of the people currently active in the project 0:26:28.040,0:26:33.250 than used to be the case when there were thirty of us and five of us were screaming at each other. 0:26:33.250,0:26:38.560 I'm wondering if there's... I don't know exactly what to take from that 0:26:38.630,0:26:42.950 But the notion that a similar number of people can just scream at each other for a whole lot longer 0:26:42.950,0:26:44.950 and still not come to a conclusion. 0:26:44.950,0:26:49.390 I don't know if there's anything to take from that, or learn from it, or not. 0:26:49.420,0:26:55.100 [Joey]: Yeah, I don't know, I'd actually meant to say I was going to put the systemd thread on here 0:26:55.170,0:27:02.970 but despite this being a pretty zoomy thing, there are limits to floating point resolution 0:27:03.070,0:27:06.170 and eventually you can't actually represent the whole thread in Iceweasel 0:27:06.200,0:27:10.020 or whatever I'm running here. 0:27:10.020,0:27:15.820 Maybe what's happened is that we have either... 0:27:15.880,0:27:21.260 we just have more people and so the number of people who feel strongly about something 0:27:21.330,0:27:23.080 they feel much more strongly about it. 0:27:23.150,0:27:27.080 You have a small subset, who all feel that they have to win. 0:27:27.180,0:27:31.350 And so they just keep talking about this and they don't come to a consensus. 0:27:31.490,0:27:33.240 Do you have a thought? 0:27:33.240,0:27:36.460 [Audience]: It's really interesting because as a project 0:27:36.560,0:27:42.580 I think we have this sense about ourselves that we're all about freedom and so forth 0:27:42.680,0:27:46.690 and somewhere along the way freedom got translated into 0:27:46.790,0:27:49.210 "we should all be able to have our own way" 0:27:49.210,0:27:55.830 and that was really not part of the freedom that we cared about when this project was young. 0:27:56.000,0:28:03.700 Even when there were strong debates, they were debates about technical details 0:28:03.800,0:28:06.690 or when the constitution was being drafted 0:28:06.790,0:28:10.290 there were a few big questions about how should this should be structured 0:28:10.360,0:28:14.060 and then a draft got generated, a lot of folks looked at it 0:28:14.120,0:28:18.160 and went, yeah, that's close enough, and off we ran. 0:28:18.230,0:28:23.290 And the amount of bikeshedding that goes on these days just scares me a little bit 0:28:23.290,0:28:27.610 because it seems like taking that word freedom, and translating it way too much 0:28:27.740,0:28:34.430 into not needing to collaborate, or not needing to come to agreement and consensus. 0:28:34.430,0:28:36.430 Now, I don't know how we change that, or fix it. 0:28:36.430,0:28:42.640 But it bothers me sometimes when I see people take the things that I thought of 0:28:42.670,0:28:45.390 when I first joined the project in 1994 0:28:45.460,0:28:47.550 as being fundamental tenets of the project 0:28:47.550,0:28:51.330 and they use the same words, but they mean something very different. 0:28:51.330,0:28:56.760 and it causes their behaviors to be very different from what I would like to see. 0:28:56.760,0:29:02.140 [Joey]: When the constitution was originally proposed, I was kinda against it. 0:29:02.210,0:29:06.380 And I thought, well, this seems like a lot of faff around for something that shouldn't matter. 0:29:06.410,0:29:10.880 I didn't even bother to vote on it. 0:29:10.980,0:29:14.560 I was like, if Ian wants to do this, great! Ian can do this, you know? He'll take care of it. 0:29:14.560,0:29:16.560 If it breaks, he'll fix it. 0:29:16.560,0:29:19.490 And I think we've kinda... 0:29:19.690,0:29:23.320 Maybe it's just that we have a lot of people now who... 0:29:23.460,0:29:28.640 Debian is an important part of their life, maybe professionally, or personally, much more important. 0:29:28.700,0:29:34.120 How many people here in the room have their livelihood in some way connected to Debian? 0:29:34.120,0:29:39.330 So probably about as many as want Debian to continue growing. 0:29:42.690,0:29:47.900 [Audience]: One thing I just wanted to add to what Bdale was saying about the bikeshedding and stuff 0:29:47.900,0:29:54.390 I'm in preparation for my BoF later this week about the code of conduct. 0:29:54.460,0:29:56.810 I've actually been reading a lot of other codes of conduct 0:29:56.920,0:29:59.300 on a page prepared by Zack, thanks for that 0:29:59.570,0:30:03.510 and one item that I saw coming back a few times 0:30:03.610,0:30:08.110 and which I've also taken into my proposed code of conduct that we'll be discussing 0:30:08.180,0:30:12.420 is about: be collaborative. 0:30:12.420,0:30:14.420 Try to work with other people. 0:30:14.420,0:30:19.170 And I think that it could help to put something like that there. 0:30:19.170,0:30:22.400 It's just a proposal, and we still have to discuss it. 0:30:23.980,0:30:29.360 [Audience]: So let me as a dark and destructive person 0:30:29.430,0:30:32.730 focus on the big crunch model for a moment. 0:30:32.730,0:30:37.160 The question is: what would happen? 0:30:37.230,0:30:43.690 What would we be able to do in Debian if we would be in this big crunch situation? 0:30:43.820,0:30:47.660 Because, okay, now we are big. 0:30:47.720,0:30:54.720 We are very important, and we are quite central to the Free software world 0:30:54.750,0:30:57.410 in a number of ways. 0:30:57.410,0:31:03.020 What happens if this world in some ways disintegrates? 0:31:03.020,0:31:09.010 Obviously there must be a replacement. 0:31:09.010,0:31:18.990 We should be open to change and re-evolve in a way that makes the world go on 0:31:19.090,0:31:25.850 even if we in the way we are now fundamentally change. 0:31:25.850,0:31:32.070 [Joey]: You know, I didn't really think about the big crunch as affecting the Free software community as a whole. 0:31:32.070,0:31:36.080 I just assumed that was some background noise which kept everything going 0:31:36.080,0:31:38.160 even if Debian went away. 0:31:38.290,0:31:41.250 I mean, yeah, it seems to me that Debian can definitely go away 0:31:41.250,0:31:44.550 without the Free software community fragmenting or imploding 0:31:44.680,0:31:48.250 or whatever, or turning to BSD licenses 0:31:48.350,0:31:50.800 vanishing down the Apple rabbit-hole, or whatever. 0:31:50.970,0:31:54.670 [Audience]: That's not what I was about here. 0:31:54.670,0:32:03.550 It's more, we have one model of working in our Free software ecosystem 0:32:03.550,0:32:09.460 that maybe this model at some point in time is not relevant any more. 0:32:09.460,0:32:18.240 It's like, maybe some of you know this model of evolving systems. 0:32:18.310,0:32:21.470 There is a first system which is a big hack 0:32:21.540,0:32:26.110 the second system is built by a community and great and does everything 0:32:26.210,0:32:30.550 but at some point in time this second system becomes irrelevant 0:32:30.550,0:32:33.780 fundamental ideas will be changed 0:32:33.910,0:32:40.570 and a third system or third systems will evolve 0:32:40.700,0:32:43.660 on the remains of the second system. 0:32:43.760,0:32:47.560 That's just what's happening now, slowly, with X for example. 0:32:47.700,0:32:52.980 X will not be completely disintegrating 0:32:53.080,0:32:55.090 but people will evolve on it 0:32:55.230,0:33:02.420 and I think we should have some thoughts about the same ideas in Debian 0:33:02.560,0:33:06.390 and we should prepare 0:33:06.390,0:33:12.340 what might happen if this case starts growing on us. 0:33:12.340,0:33:18.700 [Joey]: Thank you for that; you're thinking further ahead than I am and that's great. 0:33:18.700,0:33:23.680 Anybody else with a question, I'm not sure how we are on time. 0:33:23.680,0:33:28.650 [Audience]: I think the disintegrating is not really an interesting point 0:33:28.650,0:33:33.830 Debian is, I think, there to... itch our scratch 0:33:33.830,0:33:38.770 if we don't have the scratch left, there's no reason to itch 0:33:38.770,0:33:42.300 as long as we are community-driven 0:33:42.510,0:33:48.570 as long there will be a scratch, we will continue to itch. 0:33:48.570,0:33:50.410 [Joey]: Or the other way round, but I take your point. 0:33:50.510,0:33:54.240 [Audience]: And to the mailing list problem 0:33:54.340,0:34:03.290 I think I see a tendency on mailing lists that we have something like 0:34:03.450,0:34:11.120 this anti-politician and anti-intellectual point. 0:34:11.120,0:34:19.260 It's too often everything that's on a mailing list that's bikeshedding 0:34:19.360,0:34:23.780 if you give a point against something 0:34:23.780,0:34:28.840 if it's not the opinion that you are, it's bikeshedding, it's not a technical argument 0:34:28.840,0:34:30.840 you are against progress 0:34:30.840,0:34:38.290 and I think we need to be a bit more collaborative at this point. 0:34:38.420,0:34:43.770 To more listen to each other, and not to dismiss everything 0:34:43.770,0:34:48.710 as everything you don't understand doesn't make sense. 0:34:48.780,0:34:53.760 It's only people that want their old stuff keeping there. 0:34:53.920,0:35:03.470 It's, I think, the reason some flames go up very much is that it's important to people 0:35:03.610,0:35:06.370 and then it's important to listen to them 0:35:06.370,0:35:12.250 and not just tell them, oh, old fart, we don't care. 0:35:12.250,0:35:19.950 [Joey]: I think if you go back and look at older threads in Debian like I did for this talk 0:35:20.020,0:35:25.060 or if you go whereever stuff's getting done, and look at what a thread looks like 0:35:25.060,0:35:28.890 when stuff is getting done and people are busy making things happen 0:35:28.890,0:35:32.390 versus when people are busy complaining about other people making things happen, or whatever 0:35:32.460,0:35:36.430 there's a really different tone there. I think you could learn to recognise that tone 0:35:36.490,0:35:40.760 I don't know if you could teach people who are part of the problem 0:35:40.870,0:35:42.610 which we all probably are from time to time 0:35:42.750,0:35:46.110 to squelch that down, or, not. 0:35:46.180,0:35:50.210 I think it's something we need... yeah. Enrico? 0:35:55.660,0:36:00.000 It's right there, go up to the stand. 0:36:10.290,0:36:16.040 [Audience]: On that point, it's interesting that you made that point 0:36:16.100,0:36:21.350 I found myself, after some frustrating discussion I was having 0:36:21.380,0:36:26.760 asking people to please... real life discussion, about something completely different 0:36:26.760,0:36:33.490 asking people... telling people, can you please stick to... 0:36:33.620,0:36:37.090 I'm more interesting in hearing your personal story. 0:36:37.190,0:36:40.650 I'm more interested in hearing your experience in what you have done. 0:36:40.780,0:36:48.380 Please don't... I'm less interested in hearing what you wish would happen. 0:36:48.490,0:36:52.590 I'm less interested in what you wish I would do. 0:36:52.590,0:36:57.090 Please let me choose what I would do, and I'm happy to hear your experience. 0:36:57.090,0:37:04.930 And I think that is a pattern that also matches very well what you mentioned. 0:37:05.030,0:37:08.930 When people are getting things done, they are not discussing about 0:37:08.930,0:37:11.520 the way they wish everybody else would believe 0:37:11.620,0:37:16.160 or the way they wish everybody else would have done something 0:37:16.330,0:37:18.780 but they bring in their experience: 0:37:18.850,0:37:24.300 When I did this last time I did it this way, and it didn't work. Let's try another way. 0:37:24.360,0:37:27.740 But when it comes from personal experience 0:37:27.740,0:37:32.430 it is more about getting things done 0:37:32.430,0:37:38.150 than about seeing who has the better ideas, or something 0:37:38.250,0:37:40.840 which is rather pointless. 0:37:41.040,0:37:46.020 So yeah, I wish on mailing lists to see people bringing in their experience 0:37:46.080,0:37:52.740 their stories at work, the way they fixed a problem like that before and how 0:37:52.780,0:37:55.570 rather than: "people should do this". 0:37:55.700,0:38:00.110 "People should do this" is possibly something I don't want to see on a mailing list any more. 0:38:01.270,0:38:06.090 [applause] 0:38:06.190,0:38:11.400 [Joey]: I think we have to somehow learn to be more accepting 0:38:11.570,0:38:15.610 of just doing something, and if it's a mistake, reverting it. 0:38:15.670,0:38:18.300 It would be great if we had more technology around this 0:38:18.360,0:38:21.990 but just socially, deciding, if somebody wants to go off and do something 0:38:21.990,0:38:23.990 then let them 0:38:23.990,0:38:27.440 and if it turns out to be a bad idea, we can undo it later. 0:38:27.440,0:38:33.900 I think if you look at where we're really good in Debian at making things happen 0:38:33.930,0:38:36.890 it is stuff like the one maintainer per package model 0:38:36.890,0:38:39.880 where people are given the power to go off and do something 0:38:40.020,0:38:44.170 and it's their responsibility, and if you have a flamewar about it 0:38:44.170,0:38:46.710 well we have processes but we don't use them very often 0:38:46.710,0:38:52.390 and it would be great if we could find more ways to expand that kind of way of doing things 0:38:52.390,0:38:54.810 off to the things which don't just touch one package. 0:38:54.950,0:38:58.680 I think that's what's broken down as it were. 0:38:58.680,0:39:02.550 We're building this bigger stuff on top of individual packages 0:39:02.650,0:39:04.970 and we don't have a way to go off and say 0:39:05.100,0:39:07.520 this guy is going to handle the systemd transition 0:39:07.520,0:39:09.610 with this group of people he's got together, or something. 0:39:09.680,0:39:14.740 Maybe that doesn't work, Bdale looks unhappy with it, so it's a bad idea 0:39:14.740,0:39:16.740 but there must be a way to make it happen. 0:39:16.740,0:39:18.740 Anybody else? 0:39:18.740,0:39:26.090 [Audience]: I used to expect that at some point sooner or later Debian would effectively just split 0:39:26.120,0:39:28.100 into multiple groups which competed with each other. 0:39:28.100,0:39:32.310 I mean I know some people talk about Ubuntu as a fork of Debian, but it's kind of a different thing 0:39:32.410,0:39:35.600 I really thought that some time there would just be a discussion 0:39:35.770,0:39:38.730 where the two sides just disagreed so badly about some issue 0:39:38.860,0:39:43.270 that you would end up with two things, basically both of which claim to be the true Debian 0:39:43.270,0:39:46.530 obviously one would probably own the trademark, but yeah, I mean 0:39:46.530,0:39:50.930 both of them would just think that they were the true continuation and hate each other forever. 0:39:50.930,0:39:53.590 That seems to have become less likely now 0:39:53.590,0:39:57.360 and it seems to me that most of the times we have big discussions 0:39:57.560,0:40:01.110 it just ends up with not much happening 0:40:01.110,0:40:03.610 rather than something happening that really annoys people. 0:40:03.610,0:40:06.300 I mean in some ways that's better and some ways that's worse. 0:40:06.440,0:40:08.720 [Joey]: That's a fascinating comment. 0:40:08.760,0:40:12.690 That doesn't fit into any of my three models, the forking off thing. 0:40:12.690,0:40:18.100 It's multiple universes, it fits into the cosmological model 0:40:18.100,0:40:23.790 Yeah, that's fascinating, why is that less likely now than it used to be? 0:40:23.850,0:40:27.350 Is there less excitement and energy around Debian or is it something else? 0:40:27.420,0:40:33.070 [Audience]: Now I would worry more that, again, if it gets harder to push new ideas 0:40:33.200,0:40:36.290 and you end up... well, we are still getting new people 0:40:36.500,0:40:43.420 but if you look at the official members of Debian, we're basically only at a replacement rate 0:40:43.560,0:40:52.330 I have to say, looking around the room, that we're definitely an aging population too. 0:40:52.570,0:40:58.150 So although that's still fine for a few decades, yeah 0:40:58.220,0:41:04.140 if we want to continue in the long term of Debian having a good future and still being relevant 0:41:04.140,0:41:10.660 then, again on your graph, how do we get back into really growing, 0:41:10.760,0:41:16.240 not just the community round the edges, helpers and contributors and so on 0:41:16.240,0:41:20.610 but people who are members of Debian should also be growing 0:41:20.610,0:41:23.640 and taking new ideas. 0:41:24.040,0:41:32.750 [Audience]: Sort of replying to that: if we go a bit smaller than cosmological, and go to galactic, say 0:41:32.750,0:41:42.000 I think Debian could be looked at as if it started out being a star nursery 0:41:42.130,0:41:45.700 and then we turned into a galaxy 0:41:45.760,0:41:49.700 and we're now at a stage where we need to find a way of maintaining the black hole 0:41:49.700,0:41:55.380 because otherwise, if people aren't allowed to work on an alternative black hole 0:41:55.450,0:42:01.840 then the arms will fly off, as... yeah, we need to suck more. 0:42:02.000,0:42:05.540 [laughter, applause] 0:42:05.600,0:42:10.860 So the black hole is the sort of boring, central packages 0:42:10.860,0:42:14.210 which you're not allowed to touch, because if you do that everything will break 0:42:14.210,0:42:18.110 and we need a way of instantiating a new galaxy next door 0:42:18.250,0:42:20.940 and just replacing the black hole, and as you say if it doesn't work 0:42:21.070,0:42:22.680 you can git revert. 0:42:22.750,0:42:26.250 So, and the other thing is, if you look at the mailing lists 0:42:26.250,0:42:28.330 you get the impression that there's a war going on 0:42:28.400,0:42:31.900 where there is going to be a schism. 0:42:31.900,0:42:34.920 Half the people will go off and maintain their servers 0:42:34.960,0:42:39.500 and the other half will go off with their tablets, or whatever, and sort them out. 0:42:39.700,0:42:43.800 But actually, the people in those discussions aren't going to build either of those things 0:42:43.870,0:42:46.020 and the rest of Debian is just getting on with it. 0:42:46.090,0:42:49.050 So, that's why I think Debian doesn't fragment 0:42:49.110,0:42:51.950 because the vocal people aren't necessarily the people doing the job. 0:42:52.580,0:42:55.430 [Audience]: I think there's another possibility 0:42:55.430,0:42:59.100 and that is that when I think about Moray's question 0:42:59.130,0:43:03.870 There are more derivatives of Debian than any other core distribution 0:43:03.870,0:43:07.270 so there are certainly lots of people out there who have decided 0:43:07.410,0:43:10.160 that the thing they wanted to to differently, or cared about 0:43:10.230,0:43:14.110 was worth going, creating a CDD, or a fork, or whatever. 0:43:14.110,0:43:21.090 So that's happened, it just hasn't dragged the trademark into... or the name into some kind of a pit 0:43:21.190,0:43:23.010 which I would hate to see happen. 0:43:23.070,0:43:28.320 But I have this sense that maybe the other thing about it is that Debian has become large enough 0:43:28.390,0:43:30.740 and means enough things to enough people 0:43:30.810,0:43:35.080 that the vast majority of us in the project who don't give a flying you-know-what 0:43:35.110,0:43:37.730 about whether it's upstart or systemd 0:43:37.800,0:43:43.920 That's an impassioned important discussion for the people for whom how the system boots 0:43:44.020,0:43:46.810 is the thing they care about in Debian. 0:43:46.880,0:43:49.440 But for the vast majority of us it's like, as you say 0:43:49.500,0:43:53.270 I do that once per kernel update cycle, a reboot 0:43:53.340,0:43:57.100 and the rest of the time I just don't care 0:43:57.170,0:44:01.880 and so the idea that the distribution would fracture 0:44:02.010,0:44:06.690 or somehow Debian wouldn't be Debian any more because there's a fracturous discussion 0:44:06.750,0:44:10.820 going on in a particular sub-project or sub-part of the distribution 0:44:10.890,0:44:12.910 is just hard for me to wrap my brain around. 0:44:12.970,0:44:16.920 [Joey]: It seems like it would have to be something that isn't technological based. 0:44:16.920,0:44:19.160 Some kind of, you know, we want to change the social contract 0:44:19.230,0:44:21.850 or maybe want to change what free software is 0:44:22.090,0:44:25.780 and that would fracture Debian. 0:44:29.650,0:44:33.350 [Audience]: So, on the lines of what Bdale just said 0:44:33.420,0:44:39.270 this way that we are becoming almost a preferred choice to be upstream 0:44:39.470,0:44:42.230 is a very good thing 0:44:42.290,0:44:45.390 and that enables our work to scale much better 0:44:45.520,0:44:47.410 than if we try to grow the project 0:44:47.470,0:44:50.970 and I think the reason why we aren't growing in terms of number of people 0:44:51.040,0:44:54.740 is that we're already at some kind of limits of scaling 0:44:54.800,0:44:57.430 We're having... a lot of things we're talking about 0:44:57.490,0:45:01.190 are difficulties to do with coordinating and communicating between this number of people 0:45:01.330,0:45:07.880 and allowing, and becoming upstream for people is a way for us to scale that a lot better 0:45:08.020,0:45:12.360 and one of the things that we should be trying to do is to look outward 0:45:12.360,0:45:14.360 rather than inward 0:45:14.360,0:45:17.600 and to try to think of ways in which we can be a better upstream for people 0:45:17.740,0:45:22.110 to make it easier for people to derive, so that fewer people have to do their work within Debian 0:45:22.110,0:45:25.940 and that they're easier to do it outside Debian. 0:45:26.010,0:45:32.330 Because after all, software freedom is about freedom to make the change yourself to the software you're using 0:45:32.430,0:45:35.760 and that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have a huge, kind of 0:45:35.890,0:45:39.490 get involved with a huge complicated upstream who have processes 0:45:39.520,0:45:40.870 and decide to do things a particular way. 0:45:40.940,0:45:42.280 No, you should just be able to it. 0:45:42.350,0:45:48.270 At the moment if you want to do that it's quite hard, and we should make it easier. 0:45:48.670,0:45:53.450 [Joey]: Yeah, you know, when you think about that 0:45:53.580,0:46:00.940 maybe it's kind of what's happening now, but you have to wonder 0:46:01.110,0:46:04.470 your scenario, you can go either one of two ways. 0:46:04.470,0:46:08.640 You can have a lot of custom Debian distributions, and things based on Debian 0:46:08.640,0:46:11.740 and Debian can just become a background infrastructure 0:46:11.800,0:46:15.350 and then who wants to work on it when it's some thing that's down there in the depths 0:46:15.350,0:46:18.700 that other exciting things are being built on top of 0:46:18.700,0:46:22.230 You know, maybe you contribute patches back when it makes your life easier 0:46:22.430,0:46:28.550 but do we get a sustaining model that way, or maybe we don't. 0:46:28.550,0:46:31.850 I kind of used to have this argument with Manoj. 0:46:31.910,0:46:34.430 I thought that Debian had to expand or we were just going to die 0:46:34.600,0:46:38.400 and Manoj was like no, Debian is just about what I need for my system 0:46:38.400,0:46:40.400 and what my friends need for their systems. 0:46:40.400,0:46:44.760 I'm only interested in it in that way. 0:46:44.760,0:46:46.760 And I don't know, maybe Manoj was right. 0:46:46.760,0:46:52.290 I think that I was definitely wrong. 0:46:52.290,0:46:58.850 The best arguments are always that way, right? 0:46:58.850,0:47:04.530 [Introducer]: Okay, the time is over, so we have to take this as the closing comment 0:47:04.530,0:47:08.900 and, yeah, you have to move it to lunch to discuss over that. 0:47:08.900,0:47:10.900 [Joey]: Okay, thanks everybody. 0:47:10.900,0:47:15.830 [applause]