Hi, my name is Sindhu

and I'm gonna talk about

"Newcomer experience in Debian packaging"

"Who? Where? Why?"

From 2006 to 2009

were my first few years using

GNU/Linux systems and

I was majorly just distro hopping

kind of get the latest desktop and ??? everyone of them

and when I couldn't find the latest

packages I would install

things from the testing repositories

and it didn't make much of a difference, you know?

I would have the latest packages

and I soon learnt that testing and

devel package repositories where

really testing and that would be unstable and

break my system.

So I went back to fix my system

and for the next three years

this is what I was doing

you know... ???

Later I was looking for a career change

and a friend came along to teach me how to make a patch

this is about the time when Outreach Program for Women

was announced and

I became a Documentation Intern for GNOME

and I also went on to Google Summer of Code internship

with Gnome I contributed code to gitg project

and I'm now a mentor for Documentation interns

at the Outreach Program.

"What?"

My first failed attempt at packaging

was when I tried to package a

a ??? called cnetworkmanager

which is a command line

application to access network manager

and looking at the ??? documentation then

pretty overwhelming and

in retrospect I think that

I abandoned my efforts quickly

because I wasn't experienced in using GNU/Linux systems

and because there was a lot of documentation, truly.

My second failed attempt was as recent as last year

and I just wanted to package something for Fedora

and looking at the specs files and so many things to

do about it, I was quick to just dismiss it.

Other commitments came along

but this was a ???

"So then?"

My first job ??? two years

when I was contributing to GNOME, was

not just about learning for myself

but also teaching other newcomers

and helping people get into the community

Soon I was speaking to many newcomers on mailing lists

and in person teaching at local colleges

and events on how to contribute to GNOME

and subliminally

you know, you tend to summarise in your head

telling the same things to many different people

It's just really four steps to

start, to really start contributing to any project.

And that would be to go to the official website and

read the pages about how to help Project X

or "Get Involved" or "Help us" pages

and next step would be to set up the developement environment

and do your ground work

and find a willing mentor

who will be able to take you from there.

So, where's Debian in the picture?

"Enter Debian"

I have used Ubuntu extensively

and I knew my way around apt-get

but this is all I knew about Debian

and Debian based distributions

but learning about Debian MiniConf

made me realise that this is my opportunity to

change the memories I had about failing

something and it would be a great way to get a headstart

in such vibrant community

and start packaging.

"Choosing your tools"

Choosing your tools.

My first step to contributing to

Debian would be to get Debian!

I was an Arch Linux user and

there are a couple of things to keep in mind when you

try to contribute to a distribution.

For example, the time it takes to set up

and the time it takes to

transfer your work over this new distribution

and the disk space it would require

and whether or not your device...

...you can set up this distribution easily on your device

Not to mention the bandwidth required for

the Internet bandwidth required for

downloading and upgrading packages.

In GNOME, to make this transition easier

to have this quickstart with newcomers, we have

a virtual machine image preloaded

with our build system, so they can try it out and setup

they don't have to setup stuff from scratch

and when they're confident they can go set it up on disk

Debian didn't offer me any

such - you know - instant noodle like

VM image but, it wasn't hard to set up

so I went about using another fast project called Vagrant

and I made a Debian box

which I pre-filled with packaging tools

???

I also learned about another project called Docker

which is an even more elegant solution

to have newcomers try out different environments in a GNU/Linux system.

So what happened after this?

"So..."

My first experience when I was contributing to GNOME

was trying to understand how ???

and after learning how to make a patch I realized

the meaning of the word "upstream", you know,

realizing concepts about stable and unstable stages

releases, and what kind of ???

and all this information was pieced together

over time of reading GNOME wiki pages

including the content of GNOME Love,

and interacting with my mentor

and also from this knowledge I had

from previously distro hopping

I also made a upstream release myself

and become the maintainer of

one of the projects I was contributing

a user documentation tool.

So, doing all of this peripheral work

made me a nice picture, a visualization in my head

of how software development in facts takes place.

So when I started with Debian

I navigated to the Debian website

read the introductory page about packaging

I went to the Developer's Corner

and the landing page for Documentation

and I clicked on everything that was related to packagin.

Since I knew that GNOME had a wiki

it was likely that Debian also maintained a wiki

and there was also a really helpful Teams page

which made me realize

how Debian is separated in terms of

division of labour

And I started doing all the things

that were required for packaging

and I kind of get stuck.

"Hello, I am..."

In my excitement of wanting to generate a deb file

and at this point thinking that this was

all that was to packaging

I went through #debian-devel, #debian-gnome, #debian-mentors

and #debian-women

to told them that I was stuck because

my deb file was empty

and lot of them suggested in good intentions

they suggested do this, do that but

nothing made sense because...

I had no idea what they were talking about

So even though I was talking in English

I was not able to communicate

and it was quite frustrating because

they did not know where I was coming from.

So I went back to

#debian-bcn2014 and Ana

who first helped me put together

my talk for this conference

said "calm down and

I'm gonna lead you through the steps"

and she went by this ideology of learn

to package first, and then making the package

so this was fine

this suited me fine because that's the way I learnt.

I guess the most important thing that

we can take away from this episode

is to be a good mentor, you have to

assume a very little baseline

knowledge with the person ???

be clear with instructions

and don't expect them to have

done XYZ

because they may not

know about it, but they may know ABC

Ask if they have done XYZ

and - you know - take it from there.

So, what exactly did I do?

"Actual work"

I'm currently packaging GNOME Code Assistance

and Gedit Code Assistance modules

for GNOME.

The former gives code assistance services for GNOME

Basically if you have an IDE

or any text editor

in GNOME that you want to

putting syntax error checking features

for a particular language,

then this is the package that does it.

While the latter is a package

that emits the dbus signal

in Gedit text editor

back to GNOME Code Assistance

so when the correct backend is enabled

this two packages interact with each other

to give syntax validation features

So far these are the things I've done

I've gotten past in generating

a working deb file

but it can be improved

and I really understood

what dependencies meant.

And that how autotools work

and I started seen

I really started paying attention

and ??? how autotools

are related to configuration files

and I also patched our own build system called jhbuild

to build these two modules in GNOME

My next immediate concerns

are getting the upstream author to

bring it to a...

usable position, because it works for some people

and for some it doesn't: it works for the upstream author

it works for him...

and Ana suggested that I

update a package

that it is in QA and I think

that's a small contribution

for me to start from and then she

sponsor it, so that's my next task.

I want to document it

for end users

So one of the bugs that ??? against all of these packages are

that there is no user documention so nobody knows

how to use it, it's all magic

So, packaging has also made

these things my priority

and I have few ideas

that come from GNOME love

A few ideas I feel

Debian can benefit

and to have a greater newcomers engage in the community

or having the concept of GNOME Love like

in packaging

For example, tagging packages

that are orphaned or are in QA

that can be updated by anyone and this would make a great

beginner contribution

Specifically having a tutorial to do this

would be nice

And wiki pages about

packaging that could reutilize videos

and BoF sessions from previous Debian conferences

For example there was a wiki page about

Debtags, which uses a 2007 video to

talk about what Debtags is, and what it does

and there are some great videos

I found in the archives of Debian conferences

the first one is "Documentation in Debian"

another one is "How contribute and get involved"

and there's another great video about how other FLOSS communities mentor

and the last idea is

it's some ??? an idea is something ???

Vincent Untz conducted

an interesting session in FOSDEM 2010

where they discussed what would be a good move

to make life of packagers downstream easier

So from the point of view of GNOME

what should we be doing in order to make their life easier

A reverse session

??? developers on how to say in Debian

packaging and you know, make them interact

and learn how packaging...

how upstream changes affect packaging

and what they can or cannot do

to make our life easier would be great

And a newcomers IRC channel or mailing list specifically

for dealing with newcomers

issues would be great

and even local packaging workshops,

BoFs, and parties

if this hasn't already been done it would be nice.

And all the links to the resources I'm talking about

are there in my blogpost

you can go it's sindhus.bitbucket.org

I'd like to thank Tassia and Ana for having

giving me this opportunity to present remotely, thank you very much!

"Thank you"

Thank you for listening so far

and I hope I've given some interesting insights on how

we make newcomers experience

easy in GNOME and I hope

to stick around in the Debian community and meet

you all in the next Debian conference

Thank you so much Tassia and Ana

for helping me put this together

and I hope to see you soon!

"Thank you"

Thank you so much for listening this far

it's a shame I cannot be there

in person to say this

Thank you Tassia and Ana for

helping me put this together

I hope to stay involved in Debian

in the packaging scene, contributing to it

and all the things that I've spoken about

in this talk is available on my blog

it's sindhus.bitbucket.org

So if you have any feedback, please do email me

it will be good to hear from you

I hope you guys enjoy your time at this conference, thank you bye bye!