Living in San Francisco

For those who care--No, I'm not dead or anything. I've just relocated twice (or thrice, depending on how you see these things) in less than 2 years and that involved way more trouble than I can tell you.

I've been living in San Francisco for two months now and things started calming down a bit. The next steps are clear and the good news is that they involve Debian. I miss #debian-*, the MLs and the whole mess. Oh, and last but not least--debconfs. Cool, huh?! Peace!

slack roles!

Just uploaded some very rough slack roles in github to be used with slack. If you want to give a pull-only configuration management system a try, slack may be useful for you. It is also part of Debian for a while and may make Lenny, thanks to Andrew Pollock. He managed to package it before Alan Sundell allowed me to setup a project in code.google.com to keep it under a VCS.

slack advantage if compared with cfengine and puppet is that there's no need to have a daemon running in the client side and learn a new language to set things up. The disadvantage is that there is a central configuration in place but you can't manage from that central location (read push changes).

 

I plan to add more roles and polish the existing ones, I may split Debian/Ubuntu support in multiple branches as well. Let me know if you want to contribute or just want to know more about slack.

Let's wrap it up. Slack is a configuration management system maintained in code.google.com using SVN. Slack has the concept of roles to work properly and slack as is in code.google.com comes with no roles. slack-roles in github tries to fill the gap for Debian. You may need to fork it for internal usage, but I want to provide fully functional templates.

ps: Yeah, I've a laptop named trinity. duh!

Debian Project 2.0 (rc bugs and site).

The title of this post sucks, so that's up to you help me come with an alternative. It's also a bit sarcastic to remember that Debian is around for ages, Internet was smaller and poor, web wasn't a hit on the streets. Debian GNU/Linux is successful being an universal operating system. The question is: What's next? Lenny is the short term answer, but we can do more...

Do we really need to stop and discuss everything? Let's discuss everything yeah, but always do the fun work in parallel. Let's force ourselves to much higher standards.

Please remember that in many cases it isn't that easy to contribute with more than ideas when an alternative implementation requires additional privileges. Higher standards doesn't mean lock everything even more, no. It involves release the keys and make sure we can revert any changes that are clearly bad.

Flame a new installer idea (remember that? nobody does...) or initial code is easy. Give it some room and see what happens later... Ask yourself now: Do I have any privileges in Debian that may be forbidding people to help this project? Well, if you answered yes please post in your blog, come out on IRC and talk to others. Make sure you act as an useful bridge not as a blocker. If you don't have enough time, share your privilege with a secondary (hint: Maintain a package is a privilege).

I'm on vacation from my regular job and committed to help Debian full-time on the following tasks, if folks from the respective projects are interested, drop me a comment. Those who disagree, please keep working on whatever you are. It will be much more productive to us. There we go:

RC bugs - Do downgrades/removals from packages with less XXX users (as in popcon) now. Higher standards! I can't do that by myself since I have no access, if you are a release team member and is happy with that, we define the number and I prepare the list based on BTS.

Site - I would like to help the team working on the web site to split it in two. "current" and "legacy". current would be a very small one with content related to a few topics such as: Lenny, download, documentation, how to contribute and more. It would have a new UI (multiple languages yes), use XHTML or whatever the team feels ok. The key detail is that current would be www.debian.org on the day we release Lenny and after. current would have a link (or multiple links) to legacy website. People are free to cross-post current content to legacy website as well, but the best would be move from legacy to current.

I have some more ideas, but let's focus on a few things so I can deliver. release team and www, it's your turn now.