Free Software Activities for 2020-04

Debian project leader

This month contained the first week and a half or so of my term as Debian Project Leader. So far my focus has been getting up to speed and keeping the gears turning with day to day DPL tasks. The updates listed here will also be available on the DPL blog, where I aim to make more frequent updates.

During May, Debian Brazil will host Debian talks throughout the month which they will stream to their YouTube channel. You can find the schedule in this git repository, most of the talks will be in Portuguese, but on the 4th of May at 21:00 UTC, I’ll be covering some Debian project topics for an hour or so and take some questions if there’s time left.

2020-04-19: Handover session with Sam, our outgoing DPL. We covered a lot of questions I had and main areas that the DPL works in. Thanks to Sam for having taken the time to do this.

2020-04-21: First day of term! Thank you to everybody who showed support and have offered to help!

2020-04-21: Request feedback from the trademark team on an ongoing trademark dispute.

2020-04-21: Join the GNOME Advisory Board as a representative from Debian.

2020-04-21: Reply on an ongoing community conflict issue.

2020-04-21: Update Debian project summary for SPI annual report.

2020-04-21: Received a great e-mail introduction from Debian France and followed up on that.

2020-04-21: Posted “Bits from the new DPL” to debian-devel-announce.

2020-04-22: Became Debian’s OSI Affilliate representative.

2020-04-22: Reply to a bunch of media inquiries for interviews, will do them later when initial priorities are on track.

2020-04-23: Resign as Debian FTP team trainee and mailing list moderator. In both these areas there are enough people taking care of it and I intend to maximise available time for DPL and technical areas in the project.

2020-04-25: Review outgoing mail for trademark team.

2020-04-25: Answer some questions in preparation for DAM/Front Desk delegation updates.

2020-04-26: Initiated wiki documentation for delegation updates process.

2020-04-27: Update delegation for the Debian Front Desk team.

2020-04-29: Schedule video call with Debian treasurer team.

2020-04-29: OSI affiliate call. Learned about some Open Source projects including OpenDev, OpenSourceMatters, FOSS Responders and Democracy Labs.

Debian Social

Work on the Debian Social project is progressing, we plan to start a separate blog syndicated to Planet Debian that contains progress and status updates. I’ve been terrible at tracking the work we’ve been doing on this, so for now, here are some micro updates:

• We currently have more than 30 beta testers using and testing the Debian Social services.
• PeerTube seems to be working quite well for the kind of needs Debian has for a video platform, our instance currently hosts 1379 videos (most of it being from DebConf and other Debian meetings) with a video archive source size of 449.9GB (videos are also re-encoded to other resolutions which uses additional space) and with 2 093 170 total views. We currently follow 9 other instances and have 2 users who have added non-DebConf content.
• We set up a Jitsi instance for testing. After a bunch of initial hick-ups it seems to be very stable now. By default videos are 720p, but we capped it down to 480p so that it works better for people who have weaker connections. Please avoid using FireFox with this service for now, since it doesn’t support some features that reduce bandwidth which leads to a drastically worse experience for other participants in the call. This should get better with some experimental new features in FireFox that should land in version 76 and that can be enabled in configuration flags. In the meantime, please use Chromium or another webkit(ish) based browser. We changed also changed from using Google’s STUN servers (which brokers P2P connections when there are just two participants in a call) to using upstream’s STUN servers which should result in some better privacy.
• It’s now possible for Debian projects to authenticate against Salsa, as nm.debian.org now does, although not all the sites we host yet supports that. We’ve filed some bugs with upstream too with promising results so far. In the meantime, Debian is also looking at other solutions for identity management, like Keycloak and LemonLDAP NG. It will probably be a significant amount of time before this problem is completely solved, so at some point we’re going to have to decide whether we want to keep authentication using Debian services as a must-have for our services in order to leave their beta state (otherwise they seem to be working fine).

MiniDebConf Online

In the DebConf video team, we’ve been wondering whether we have all the tools required to successfully host a DebConf (or even a mini DebConf) entirely online. There’s really just one way to know for sure, so we’re going to host MiniDebConf Online from 28 May to 31 May. The first two days will be an online MiniDebCamp, where we can try to hold online spints, meetings and general chit-chat. The last two days will be for talks and lightnight talks, with BoFs likely to take place throughout the 4 days (this will probably be decided once we have a content team). Announcements should go out within the next week, in the meantime, save the dates.

Debian package uploads

2020-04-07: Upload package flask-autoindex (0.6.6-1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-07: Upload package gamemode (1.5.1-1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-08: Accept MR#2 for live-tasks (add usbutils to live-task-standard).

2020-04-08: Upload package live-tasks (11.0.2) to Debian unstable (Closes: #955526, #944578, #942837, #942834).

2020-04-08: Close live-config bug #655198 (Only affects squeeze which is no longer supported).

2020-04-08: Upload package live-config (11.0.1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-08: Upload package calamares (3.2.22-1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-15: Upload package xabacus (8.2.6-1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-16: Merge MR#1 for gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock (new upstream release).

2020-04-16: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock (67+git20200225-1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-16: Merge MR#1 for gnome-shell-extension-hard-disk-led (fix some lintian issues).

2020-04-16: Merge MR#1 for gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor (fix some lintian issues).

2020-04-17: Upload package calamares (3.2.23-1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-17: Upload package catimg (2.6.0-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #956150).

2020-04-17: Upload package fabulous (0.3.0+dfsg1-7) to Debian unstable (Closes: #952242).

2020-04-17: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor (38+git20200414-32cc79e-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #956656, #956171).

2020-04-17: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-arc-menu (45-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #956168).

2020-04-18: Upload package toot (0.26.0-1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-23: Update packaging for gnome-shell-extension-tilix-shortcut, upstream section needs some additional work before release is possible.

2020-04-23: Upload package xabacus (8.2.7-1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-27: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (37-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #956162, #954978).

2020-04-27: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (37-2) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-27: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock (68-1) to Debian unstable.

2020-04-30: Merge MR#8 for gamemode (add symbol files) (Closes: #952425).

2020-04-30: Merge MR#9 for gamemode (reduce number of -dev packages generated).

2020-04-30: Merge MR#10 for gamemode (deal better with upgrades on a buggy version).

2020-04-30: Manually merge changes from MR#11 for gamemode (packaging fixes).

2020-04-30: Upload package gamemode (1.5.1-2) to Debian unstable.