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Tue, 10 Aug 2010

How an "active" developer is defined

Apparently some people misunderstood Christian's recent statistics how Debian Developers are distributed over countries a bit. Especially the the sentence We now have 62% of active DDs while we had 73% last year. is kind of misleading, if you don't know how an active developer is defined. And especially, if you ignore the following sentence: This year's campaign of MIA work has been somehow "successful", apparently

So, let's start with the active developers. To be precise: Neither Christian (nor did I back then) tried in any way to decide which developer is active, in the meaning of: He is actively contributing to Debian. That's pretty difficult data to get. Instead we just took the data available, and looked for activated accounts. And that's an important difference.

See, if an Debian Developer leaves the project, his account doesn't get deleted (for various reasons), it just gets deactivated in our central account setup. So, when Christian wrote, he counted active developers he basically said: I didn't counted the deactivated accounts.

So far so good. But indeed quite a lot accounts got disabled last year. Is that a bad sign (as some journalist say)? Actually no. As it's quite complex to check, who's still using his account (see http://wiki.debian.org/MIA for some explanation), it is quite possible for someone to still have his account active, who isn't using it. During the last year many of these Karteileichen (nominal members, if you will) have been deactivated (after being pinged several times).

Or, to write it this way: While indeed quite some accounts have been disabled, Debian hasn't lost much through at, as these account's weren't used!

postet at 15:50 into [Debian] permanent link


Fri, 06 Aug 2010

Release Critical Bug report for Week 31

The unofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:

In Total:433
Affecting Squeeze:314
Squeeze only:69
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:245

Of these 245 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:18
Patched in Squeeze:45
Duplicates in Squeeze:28
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:10
Claimed in Squeeze:2
Delayed in Squeeze:7
Can fixed in a security Update:9
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:32

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 145 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released.

However, with the view of the Release Managers, 220 need to be dealt with for the release to happen.

Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.

postet at 13:00 into [Debian/rc-stats/6.0-squeeze] permanent link


Thu, 05 Aug 2010

DDs, please feel free to commit to the DPN directly

The svn repository used to draft the Debian Project News just passed the sixth hundreds commit. If my calculations are correct, that's quite more than the number of edits done, back when the DPN was drafted in the wiki. I take it as a hint, that the new work flow works better than the old one.

However, playing a bit with statistics (done by horrible shell one liners ;) I noticed, that - while every Debian Developer may commit to the subversion repository - not that many commits from other DDs where made: Of the 602 commits so far, only 70 where done by other DDs:

alex@melusine:~$ svn log --xml svn://svn.debian.org/svn/publicity \
|xmlstarlet sel -t -m "/log/logentry/author" -v "concat(.,' ')" | \
sed -e "s/ /\n/g"|sort|uniq -c|sort -n|grep -v guest|grep -v tolimar
      1
      1 abe
      1 hertzog
      1 holger
      1 mika
      1 paravoid
      2 pabs
      3 alfie
     15 zobel
     20 gio
     25 spaillard

To give credit where credit is due, here are the guest commits:

     16 tpeteul-guest
     21 jeremiah-guest
     25 gmascellani-guest
     36 madamezou-guest
    122 taffit-guest

Many thanks so far, but I would like to advertise the Debian Project News and invite every DD to help us and to commit directly. It's quite easy:

Run svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/publicity/dpn/en/current, edit the index.wml file, and then commit your changes back to the repository. (Well, ideally you would also honor Status flag and won't commit, if it's not open-for-edit.)

As for the format: While we indeed use wml, you just need some basic HTML knowledge. To add a paragraph just use the following with proper content:

<a name="X"></a>
<h2>Fancy title</h2>

<p>More details about the topic.</p>

Usually the articles are kind of sorted by importance, so unless you are pretty sure it might be the easiest to just add your article at the end of the regular news, just before the other news sections.

Should you not be able to fill an entire paragraph, feel free to just a one or two sentences to the other news section (just add a <p>...</p> with your content to the end of the other news).

Don't worry about style, your English or syntax: It won't end up on the web page directly, it's reviewed and checked, so you can't do anything wrong.

More details are available in the wiki at http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute. Feel free to ask any questions unanswered on the publicity list at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org. Feel also free to contact us there, if you would like to help by translations or reviews. The more people help, the less work it's for everyone :)

If you are not a Debian Developer, but still would like to help us, it's no problem. All you need is an account on our Alioth System (very easy to get, you just need to ask) and request to join the publicity project. See http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute#Becominganeditoryourself for the respective links.

postet at 16:41 into [Debian] permanent link


Tue, 03 Aug 2010

DebConf gone Web 2.0

For those of us, who can't attend this years Debian Conference might be interesting, that thanks to valesio you can also participate via http://debianart.org/live/.

You need either a HTML5 capable browser or Java.

Also many thanks to the video team for the very nice streams!

postet at 09:20 into [Debian/events/DebConf10] permanent link


Fri, 30 Jul 2010

Release Critical Bug report for Week 30

The unofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:

In Total:433
Affecting Squeeze:328
Squeeze only:74
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:254

Of these 254 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:21
Patched in Squeeze:41
Duplicates in Squeeze:20
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:12
Claimed in Squeeze:0
Delayed in Squeeze:7
Can fixed in a security Update:17
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:25

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 150 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released.

However, with the view of the Release Managers, 238 need to be dealt with for the release to happen.

Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.

postet at 13:00 into [Debian/rc-stats/6.0-squeeze] permanent link


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About

Alexander Tolimar Reichle-Schmehl lives in Tuttlingen / Germany. He works as IT manager (specialized on Unix and SAN/Storage) for an international automotive supplier.

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