[Script Info]
Title: 
[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Hi, everybody, I'm Eric Doland.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I'm the automake maintainer,\Namong other things.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Today I'm going to talk about removing obsolete packages.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,This is meant to be a BOF.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I only have sixteen slides,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,so I'm going to talk about my experiences
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,in removing old versions of automake.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Please feel free to interrupt with questions
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,or criticisms or comments as we go.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Hopefully with a bit of discussion about how to do this better in the future,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,or maybe not better, we'll see.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,So just to set the context a little bit,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,automake in Debian,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I started maintaining it a really long time ago.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,It's making me feel old. 2002.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,This was around the time that automake 1.6 came out, I think.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,One of the problems automake has is
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,that new releases of it usually have incompatibilities
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,with backwards-compatible completely.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,There's various reasons why this is,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,it provides a very weird interface,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,because you're basically embedding things inside make files,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and it's hard to control the API of a make file.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Back in the day, there was, for a very long time,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,automake 1.4, and that just sort of worked,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and then, automake 1.5 was introduced,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Debian upgraded to automake 1.5, and lots of packages broke.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,So what ended up happening is that automake 1.5 got moved into its own package,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and automake 1.4 was automake package.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Nowadays, the older versions get moved into their own packages,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and generally, the currently released version--the most up-to-date version--
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,is the automake package.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,This has some downsides, because it's not necessarily fully backwards-compatible,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,but this is usually what people want.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,They want the latest version of automake, and they don't want to have to install
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,a new package any time a new version of automake comes out.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,All the automake packages provide an alternative
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,so that you can have your /usr/bin/automake
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,be exactly which automake you want it to be.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,The priority of that alternative usually means that the latest version of automake
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,is the one automatically selected, but of course, you can override that.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,There's a note here that, depending on automake directly, is a little risky,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,because fancy automake files, new versions of automake, might break you, potentially.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Anyway, this is not the automake BOF, this is just a little context
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,about why automake is what it is in Debian.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,So there's problems with this, because these backwards-compatible issues, as I said,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,were packaging all the versions of automake.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Each new version was getting a new package, basically,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and we've gone through a lot of automake packages over the years.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I didn't count them up, but it looks like almost close to ten, I guess,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,which is a lot of packages you have to deal with.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,People will depend on these individual packages, for whatever reason,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and then getting them out of the system, when they become old, is troublesome.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,As of the wheezy release, we had four different automakes in the wheezy release.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,So we had what the old, old--as you can see, 1.4, 1.9, 1.10, and 1.11--
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and they say that at one point we're going to have five different versions of automake,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,which is a lot of versions of automake.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,You can also see that the 1.4 version was released in 2002,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,when I started maintaining this stuff, so it's really old.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,No one should be using it, and no one should have been using it for the last ten years,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,but we sort of kept it around because people were like
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,"oh, maybe there's old software that, you know, still depends on automake 1.4."
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Um, yeah.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,This is crazy. \NThere are too many versions of automake.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,No one really wants them. So, I started out on this mission
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,to bring us down to, hopefully, one or two versions of automake for the next release.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I've been doing this over the last year, and I was makign these slides
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and I was thinking about, it sort of had these weird parallels
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,with some things I'd read about, so now I present to you
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,the five stages of removing an obsolete package from Debian.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,The first stage is denial.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,[laughter]
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,"If I send mail to debian-devel asking everyone to very nicely
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,move off of these old versions of automake, they'll just do it, right?
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I mean, doesn't everyone agree that that's what will happen?
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Yeah, so that's what I started out by doing.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I'm going to talk a little bit about the tools and stuff that I used in this process,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,so this is sort of technical, and sort of procedural.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,If you've got questions about either side, just shoot up your hand.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,The first thing you do, or the first thing I did, is that I used grep-dctrl to figure out
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,which packages were build dependent on automake.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Automake basically has no actual binary dependencies, it's all build dependencies.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,There were one hundred and sixty-nine packages--source packages.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,That's a lot, but in Debian scale, it's not that much. It should be fine, right?
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Then, I used the dlist tool to turn that list of packages into a list of maintainers,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,with their packages. It's a very nice tool for just ??
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Then, I sent out an email debian-devel saying,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,"Here's my plan: I want to get rid of these old versions of automake.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Here are the packages that are build-dependent on them.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Please, do your part and fix this.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I sent that mail out on May 27, 2013, so before last DebConf, which I was not at.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Stage Two: Anger.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,People aren't fixing these things!
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I'm going to have to actually do something other than send an email. All right, fine.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,The next thing I did, to try to encourage people again to make this move,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Lintian has this really nice facility. One of tests is actually--there's a list of obsolete packages.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,If you put your package in that list,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,lintian will complain any time anyone depends on that package,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,to try to force maintainers that are paying attention,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,that they should't actually be depending on these packages.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,That's good. It's cheap to do. Just sent the patch to lintian.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I don't see any reason they wouldn't take it if it made sense.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Now, I have to file bugs. People don't read debian-devel.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,It's sort of, it's fair I guess. So I basically just went through the list of packages I had,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,with a simple substitution script, so now it mailed a mail that was like
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,"Please stop depending on automake blank." with a very boiler-plate thing saying
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,"this is why we're getting rid of these old versions of automake"
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and I sent that off to BTS. Which is really easy, right? Because BTS is just email.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,So you can just do that. You can file a bunch of bugs that way.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I should note that my initial email was a proposal for this mass bug filing, as well,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,which you're supposed to do as part of the procedure of sending out mass bug filings.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,When I did this, I had to file one hundred and seventeen bugs.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,There's fifty two packages that got fixed between me sending my initial email
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and the bugs. So that's good, I shouldn't be that angry, maybe.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I did wait four months between these two events, though, so there's plenty of time.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,The other thing I used was using BTS user tags, to track all of these bugs very easily easily
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,using this automake clean-up 2013 tag. I added the date because
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I knew this would not be the last automake clean-up that I would have to do,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,so I keep these separate.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Always good to date your work if you think you might have to repeat it.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Yeah, no, I did not finish in 2013. I started in 2013.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,It should've been automake clean-up 2015 or something, if I wanted the finish date.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,All right, so stage three. Bargaining.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Okay, so, I'm past the anger stage, and now I'm like "okay, I've filed all these bugs,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,but not much is happening, so let me just fix this for you.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I'll give you the exact fix on how to much to the newer version of automake.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Here's the patch. Just apply it and upload your package.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I've done all the work; I've done all the hard stuff."
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,So, before I even did this, thirty four packages were fixed
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,without supplying a patch. I began the patching in late October of 2013
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and--this is the hard part, this is the part that's tough to automate--in many cases,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,just switching to the new version of automake worked, and then it was easy,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,but that was maybe 50% of the cases.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,I didn't keep good statistics about how tough this was exactly,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,but in a lot of cases, I had to fiddle with the build system,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,or a lot of build rules would run automake itself,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,instead of using dh-autoreconf.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,There was a lot of actual fiddling with packages, trying to get them to build,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,and then just waiting to build these things, which can take a very long time,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,to test that this worked. So this is a lot of actual, tough work.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,What else? I used pbuilder to do the builds and then if I successfully built something,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,with the new version of automake,\NI would just mail off a patch
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,to the existing bug, in BTS, and flip the patch tag, saying "here's the patch."
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,So I thought, okay, at this point, you know, there's patches out there
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,for almost all of these problems.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,There should be a wave of uploads and everything should be great.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Stage Four: Depression.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,That's not what happened. I was pretty much on my own.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,The responsible maintainers have already fixed this problem.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,So we're into this, sort of, long tale of people who don't care,
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,or people who are too busy to deal with their packages or do anything here.
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Now I have to upload NMUs. I started this in late January, I think
Dialogue: 0,9:59:59.99,9:59:59.99,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,