It was planned to support five projects with a three-day workshop
held in an old convent outside of Cologne. However, right after
we applied for such a workwhop, we were informed, that the planned
support from the German Ministry of Research and Education is not
going to show up. After it looked quite well for a long time they
finally rejected the GUUG
application for the money. Hence, all workshops are cancelled
this year.
Application for a Workshop
From: Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org>
Project: Debian Project
Project Description
The Debian Project is the largest GNU/Linux-Distribution named
Debian GNU/Linux and released for more then eleven Architectures
(including intel x86 and IA-64, Motorola 680x0, Alpha, IBM S/390, Sun
SPARC, Mips). The Project consists of more than 1000 developers
creating the Distribution according to the strict policies
Debian has.
Workshop Description
We have two possible workshops. Only one of them will really be held, but i
cannot decide yet which one. Both of them are important and for both of
them I have to ask some people wether they have time to attend at the
workshop. I will do this in the next one/two weeks and inform you
which one we really held, if that is ok. If that is not then please
choose the second one, Quality Assurance for your decision and send me
note about it. Thank you.
Development: Debian Installation
The next release of Debian will probably support more than eleven
hardware architectures and may also support different kernels
besides the Linux kernel. This requires a well designed
installation process that will support all of them
and overcomes the limitations of the current installer. Enhancements
which need to be developed include:
- support for different kernels (Linux / Hurd / *BSD)
- seperation of front- and backend, so that both a text-based as well
as a graphical frontend can be provided
- support for (half-)automatic hardware detection
- support for scripting the installation process (automated
installation)
- better multi-language support in all parts of the installation
The old boot-floppies method is abandoned and will be replaced by the
debian-installer.
Development: Bug Squashing Party / Quality Assurance Work
Debian is known as one of the most robust and reliable Linux distributions.
There are several efforts within Debian to ensure that its quality is
upheld. In the workshop, people involved in Debian Quality Assurance (QA)
would come together and tackle specific issues as well as plan and deploy
infrastructure which will help with QA efforts. In particular, we would:
- Go through outstanding bug reports in Debian's base and standard
system. These packages are installed on virtually any Debian
machine (and apart from some Debian specific packages on other
Linux distributions, too) and therefore have to be of great
quality. We would try to reproduce bug reports, follow the
reports to the upstream maintainers of the programs and supply
patches if possible. This would not only lead to an increase in
Debian's quality but in that of other Linux distributions as well.
- Find developers who are no longer active and packages which are no
longer maintained. Debian is a very big project with over 1000
developers. Some of them, however, are no longer active; yet, they
are responsible for certain packages. Therefore, the packages are
neglected. We would try to find such maintainers who are Missing
in Action (MIA) and orphan their packages so other maintainers can
take over.
- Create infrastructure for various QA efforts.
- Important bugs (for example, bugs in base and standard packages,
bugs marked as "release critical") have to be visible so people
can do something about them. There are various lists; however,
they are shattered around in many places. We could create one
unified location with all this information.
- The search for MIA maintainers can only be done with sufficient
information. Tools which let QA people handle this data are
needed. While some tools exist, they have to be extended.
- There are plans to develope a new Bug Tracking System (BTS)
which would replace our current system. The design could be done
in the workshop and probably some coding, too. (Other projects,
such as KDE, use Debian's BTS. Since KDE developers will be at
Linux Kongress too we could coordinate with them as see which
features they need).
All of these tasks take much coordination so a get-together in real life
would be very beneficial.
Special equipment that you are planning to bring to the workshop
Lots of computers and networking hardware
Special equipment that you need for the workshop
Lots of bandwidth...
If possible lots of computers and networking hardware.
Idea how you are planning to present the results of your workshop at
the Linux-Kongress.
We could give several presentations of interest to the Linux community
at large. We can summarize the progress made during the workshop and
show which specific bugs or packages we handled. Furthermore, we can
discuss QA problems found in Debian, but which are not common to other
free software projects (e.g. developers who vanish without trace) and
explain what we do about it. An overview of Debian's Bug Tracking
System (compared to other similar systems) is possible, too.
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