Re: Request for an open dialog between projects
On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 03:03:30PM -0700, i...@bandshed.net wrote: I truly appreciate what Adrian is proposing and appreciate as always that willingness to help especially with JACK and ffado etc. I do understand that an idea like Adrian's somewhat can be seen as a 'slippery slope' and if you let one mongrel dog in from the cold soon you will have ten of them all with specific needs that differ from Debian's core mandate. Either I lost you or you are confusing who said what: Benjamin suggests to tell your users to bypass us and go straight upstream with bugs in upstream code. I recommend to report all bugs at the upstream level closest to you, the way that upstream level prefer to have them reported. Adrian suggests that you systematically add a hint that the packages are tied to a derived distribution. I am not against that specifically, but am concerned generally that lowers awareness among _end-users_ about who are their closest upstream compared to who they are reporting bugs to. It seems to me that the mongrel dog you are talking about is derived distributions, and that I dislike working with those. I don't! I love Debian being used - both directly by end-users and by indirectly via derived distributions like yours. My concern is another: It is to help you as derivative and your users to maintain a good relationship with Debian. Debian consists of a big bunch of individuals and teams, not all of them equally happy working with bugreports coming from all corners of the world. Heck, some even dislike working on bugs coming from me, even if I am a Debian Developer for 10+ years. One thing I believe helps in communication is to talk straight. Here it means that the person filing a bugreport - end-users of your derived distro - are aware that they are using a derivative, and that they are filing the bugreport and discussing it with someone who are quite likely unfamiliar with that particular derivation and might have political opinions against working with derivatives or whatever. I believe it is better to educate end-users about this than to add a tag to the initial bugreport. It is not lost on me that the rigorous and unflinching adherence to it's ideals and conventions is what make Debian the wonder that it is, and what makes it the ideal choice for projects like mine. To be blunt what I am asking really is for you to be aware of my project and in the infrequent case that a bug report comes your way for a pkg-multimedia issue to say OK we've heard of it and we'll see if we can help rather than 'AV Linux...never heard of it, go away! If (or when, because it _does_ happen) we say go away to _indirect_ users of Debian, I believe we violate §4 of the Debian Social Contract: Our priorities are our users and free software Indirect users are users too, IMO. Some may disagree and say that only direct users of Debian are our users which means it is only our priority to talk to _you_ the maintainer of the derivative, not your users. Since Adrian do not suggest to have you always work as proxy between your users and us, I feel we basically agree on interpreting as indirect users also being our users. And I recommend to help teach them what is the relationship when they report bugs directly to their grandparents. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
Re: Request for an open dialog between projects
Jonas (Adrian, Benjamin) I've given this a bit more thought and firstly Jonas don't put too much weight in the 'mongrel dog' comment...it was just a (failed) attempt at viewing derivatives with a bit of humor. I don't pretend to know what you like or dislike, just what possibilities are within the Debian framework to keep things efficient. ;) Perhaps a combination of all ideas could work like this: I personally bring pkg-multimedia related bugs to this mailing list from my users that they report to my forum. That way you deal with only one bug reporter from AV Linux (me) and the unique identifier that Adrian alluded to is simply my name on this mailing list and the info I provide. This also lets me determine if the bug is worth reporting to you or it is something I can fix or address with the upstream developer to save wasting your time. Regarding fixes, like you guys I am personally in contact with many of the upstream developers as well, for instance I recently have worked closely with Yoshimi's developer on fixing some bugs on his 0.060 series that you guys I'm sure will be interested in. In this way I can get help with bugs and hopefully equally contribute some information to help fix them or make you aware of upstream developments that you may not have noted yet. I am preparing my user manual for the 5.0 release and would like to put a Support section in there to clarify how to get help. To paraphrase our discussion here I will explain the difference between my packages and yours and suggest people report all bugs to me first, and then go from there depending on if it is pkg-multimedia related or not. Does this sound like a workable arrangement? -GLEN On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 03:03:30PM -0700, i...@bandshed.net wrote: I truly appreciate what Adrian is proposing and appreciate as always that willingness to help especially with JACK and ffado etc. I do understand that an idea like Adrian's somewhat can be seen as a 'slippery slope' and if you let one mongrel dog in from the cold soon you will have ten of them all with specific needs that differ from Debian's core mandate. Either I lost you or you are confusing who said what: Benjamin suggests to tell your users to bypass us and go straight upstream with bugs in upstream code. I recommend to report all bugs at the upstream level closest to you, the way that upstream level prefer to have them reported. Adrian suggests that you systematically add a hint that the packages are tied to a derived distribution. I am not against that specifically, but am concerned generally that lowers awareness among _end-users_ about who are their closest upstream compared to who they are reporting bugs to. It seems to me that the mongrel dog you are talking about is derived distributions, and that I dislike working with those. I don't! I love Debian being used - both directly by end-users and by indirectly via derived distributions like yours. My concern is another: It is to help you as derivative and your users to maintain a good relationship with Debian. Debian consists of a big bunch of individuals and teams, not all of them equally happy working with bugreports coming from all corners of the world. Heck, some even dislike working on bugs coming from me, even if I am a Debian Developer for 10+ years. One thing I believe helps in communication is to talk straight. Here it means that the person filing a bugreport - end-users of your derived distro - are aware that they are using a derivative, and that they are filing the bugreport and discussing it with someone who are quite likely unfamiliar with that particular derivation and might have political opinions against working with derivatives or whatever. I believe it is better to educate end-users about this than to add a tag to the initial bugreport. It is not lost on me that the rigorous and unflinching adherence to it's ideals and conventions is what make Debian the wonder that it is, and what makes it the ideal choice for projects like mine. To be blunt what I am asking really is for you to be aware of my project and in the infrequent case that a bug report comes your way for a pkg-multimedia issue to say OK we've heard of it and we'll see if we can help rather than 'AV Linux...never heard of it, go away! If (or when, because it _does_ happen) we say go away to _indirect_ users of Debian, I believe we violate §4 of the Debian Social Contract: Our priorities are our users and free software Indirect users are users too, IMO. Some may disagree and say that only direct users of Debian are our users which means it is only our priority to talk to _you_ the maintainer of the derivative, not your users. Since Adrian do not suggest to have you always work as proxy between your users and us, I feel we basically agree on interpreting as indirect users also being our users. And I recommend to help teach them what is the relationship when they report bugs directly
Re: Request for an open dialog between projects
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 08:29:25AM -0700, i...@bandshed.net wrote: I've given this a bit more thought and firstly Jonas don't put too much weight in the 'mongrel dog' comment...it was just a (failed) attempt at viewing derivatives with a bit of humor. I don't pretend to know what you like or dislike, just what possibilities are within the Debian framework to keep things efficient. ;) I believe I did write that I was unclear what you meant by that. I still am, but guess it isn't important. [snip] I am preparing my user manual for the 5.0 release and would like to put a Support section in there to clarify how to get help. To paraphrase our discussion here I will explain the difference between my packages and yours and suggest people report all bugs to me first, and then go from there depending on if it is pkg-multimedia related or not. Does this sound like a workable arrangement? Sounds sensible to me. Seems like same mindset as I prefer: Start locally, and extend from there as relevant. For a vital ecosystem it is crucial to be nice to our upstreams. Passing relevant stuff (patches, bugs etc.) back upstream is nice, but passing irrelevant stuff back upstream is not nice. Skipping some hops in the upstream chain is a delicate matter: When you skip Debian and pass bugs and patches directly to the upstream of Debian, then your intent is no doubt good: not bother Debian with irrelevant chit-chat between you and our common upstream. But in a hypothetic case of our common upstream then not accepting a patch you offered, it makes sense to then also offer it to Debian. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
Re: Request for an open dialog between projects
Benjamin, Thanks for taking time to reply and for being willing to examine a course of action. If there is no further comment from the team I will very cautiously pass this along to AV Linux users with the clear understanding of the scope you are talking about. For your information AV Linux 5.0 is to be released in roughly a month based on Squeeze (with some Sid/Debian GIT) modifications to be current with ffado and JACK/JACK Session. Because it will not be Wheezy/Sid based it should automatically cut down on the need for pkg-multimedia to fix or maintain it's packages. Although I am praying that the Squeeze Backports come to fruition to fortify and improve Squeeze's long term viability. I realize you guys already have much to do. Thanks for your consideration. -GLEN Am Montag, den 28.03.2011, 10:15 -0700 schrieb i...@bandshed.net: The point of all this background is to pose a question about maintaining pkg-multimedia packages in AV Linux. My custom packages in AV Linux all have an 'avlinux' suffix appended to them to differentiate them from your packages, these packages of course I maintain myself. When users have an issue with one of your packages I find it a little 'politically' awkward to handle. I would very much like an open dialog with pkg-multimedia so we can have a good working relationship and I would like to be able to openly send users and bug reports that pertain to you without masking the true origin of where these reports are coming from. Although I am an arms length project that may politically differ from Debian ideals I think we have far more in common than these minor differences. Here's my opinion: Send users to us if they experience a packaging bug or to the (original) upstream developers if it is an upstream bug. For small package, you can forward all bug reporters to us. For big packages, there's the risk to collect too many bugs without having the manpower to process and forward them all. -- Benjamin Drung Debian Ubuntu Developer ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
Re: Request for an open dialog between projects
On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 09:10:34PM +0200, Benjamin Drung wrote: Am Montag, den 28.03.2011, 10:15 -0700 schrieb i...@bandshed.net: The point of all this background is to pose a question about maintaining pkg-multimedia packages in AV Linux. My custom packages in AV Linux all have an 'avlinux' suffix appended to them to differentiate them from your packages, these packages of course I maintain myself. When users have an issue with one of your packages I find it a little 'politically' awkward to handle. I would very much like an open dialog with pkg-multimedia so we can have a good working relationship and I would like to be able to openly send users and bug reports that pertain to you without masking the true origin of where these reports are coming from. Although I am an arms length project that may politically differ from Debian ideals I think we have far more in common than these minor differences. Here's my opinion: Send users to us if they experience a packaging bug or to the (original) upstream developers if it is an upstream bug. For small package, you can forward all bug reporters to us. For big packages, there's the risk to collect too many bugs without having the manpower to process and forward them all. I am of a different opinion: Generally I encourage all users of Debian to file bugreports at Debian. Just make sure to mention anything unusual about the installed system. Since you use Debian as basis for your distro, you and all your users are also Debian users. But since you infect your Debian installation with custom parts, please make sure to mention that when filing bugreports, to make it easier for package maintainers to take that into account (and to help those package maintainers feeling differently than me to easily ban such bugreports). Regards, - Jonas P.S. Same goes for Ubuntu and other distros derived from Debian. Having said that, I must add that specifically Ubuntu I personally am quite sceptical getting bugreports from, due to my experience with that distribution quite heavily distorting core parts of their system compared to Debian. But the principle of them being users of Debian remain. -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
Re: Request for an open dialog between projects
On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 09:17:45PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: Generally I encourage all users of Debian to file bugreports at Debian. I second this. Just make sure to mention anything unusual about the installed system. Seems useful. Maybe Glenn could ship a custom /etc/reportbug.conf, adding something like X-AV-Linux: $VERSION I don't know if it's too much work, and I guess we can derive the use of AVLinux from the fact that some libs or packages might be called -avlinux (the list at the bottom of a bug report) Glenn: I'm still waiting for jackd2-1.9.7 to be released, containing some important changes. No idea when this will finally happen, if need be, let's package a svn snapshot again before you release AV5.0. HTH -- mail: a...@thur.de http://adi.thur.de PGP/GPG: key via keyserver ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
Re: Request for an open dialog between projects
On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 10:53:16PM +0200, Adrian Knoth wrote: On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 09:17:45PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: Generally I encourage all users of Debian to file bugreports at Debian. I second this. Just make sure to mention anything unusual about the installed system. Seems useful. Maybe Glenn could ship a custom /etc/reportbug.conf, adding something like X-AV-Linux: $VERSION I don't know if it's too much work, and I guess we can derive the use of AVLinux from the fact that some libs or packages might be called -avlinux (the list at the bottom of a bug report) Well, it would be nice with such hint but really I don't see the need: Instead of trying to encourage redistributors to derive even further from Debian by hinting explicitly, I would prefer if we all - Debian users, redistributors and anyone else helping other users with e.g. adding backports.org or in other ways distort systems from using Debian the way it was tested to be used - clearly tell such users that if/when they later run into problems with their systems they are better off to a) report back to the mothership but also b) clearly mentions how they are off of the mainstream usage pattern, e.g. by simply mentioning which derivative distribution or what mixin repository they've used. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
Re: Request for an open dialog between projects
Jonas, I truly appreciate what Adrian is proposing and appreciate as always that willingness to help especially with JACK and ffado etc. I do understand that an idea like Adrian's somewhat can be seen as a 'slippery slope' and if you let one mongrel dog in from the cold soon you will have ten of them all with specific needs that differ from Debian's core mandate. It is not lost on me that the rigorous and unflinching adherence to it's ideals and conventions is what make Debian the wonder that it is, and what makes it the ideal choice for projects like mine. To be blunt what I am asking really is for you to be aware of my project and in the infrequent case that a bug report comes your way for a pkg-multimedia issue to say OK we've heard of it and we'll see if we can help rather than 'AV Linux...never heard of it, go away! -GLEN On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 10:53:16PM +0200, Adrian Knoth wrote: On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 09:17:45PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: Generally I encourage all users of Debian to file bugreports at Debian. I second this. Just make sure to mention anything unusual about the installed system. Seems useful. Maybe Glenn could ship a custom /etc/reportbug.conf, adding something like X-AV-Linux: $VERSION I don't know if it's too much work, and I guess we can derive the use of AVLinux from the fact that some libs or packages might be called -avlinux (the list at the bottom of a bug report) Well, it would be nice with such hint but really I don't see the need: Instead of trying to encourage redistributors to derive even further from Debian by hinting explicitly, I would prefer if we all - Debian users, redistributors and anyone else helping other users with e.g. adding backports.org or in other ways distort systems from using Debian the way it was tested to be used - clearly tell such users that if/when they later run into problems with their systems they are better off to a) report back to the mothership but also b) clearly mentions how they are off of the mainstream usage pattern, e.g. by simply mentioning which derivative distribution or what mixin repository they've used. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
Request for an open dialog between projects
Hi, I recently noticed the link in the Debian Multimedia Wiki to AV Linux which I maintain. It is no secret that the excellent work you guys do here is a huge factor in the growing acceptance of the project. I have also noted a couple of names of maintainers here are also members of the AV Linux forum. To give an idea of the relative scope, AV Linux ISO's see about 10,000 accesses per month, of course this does not indicate actual successful downloads or end users it simply indicates there is measurable interest in the project. About 80% of the packages in AV Linux are of pkg-multimedia origin. The remaining packaging is done by me and includes some commercial Linux Audio software demos that would not meet Debian's criteria. I can guess there may be some question as to why I don't just join pkg-multimedia for the other packaging I do, and the simple answer is my packaging is narrowly focused and would not meet all Debian standards and more importantly maintaining a distro by myself has become all I can currently handle and then some! The point of all this background is to pose a question about maintaining pkg-multimedia packages in AV Linux. My custom packages in AV Linux all have an 'avlinux' suffix appended to them to differentiate them from your packages, these packages of course I maintain myself. When users have an issue with one of your packages I find it a little 'politically' awkward to handle. I would very much like an open dialog with pkg-multimedia so we can have a good working relationship and I would like to be able to openly send users and bug reports that pertain to you without masking the true origin of where these reports are coming from. Although I am an arms length project that may politically differ from Debian ideals I think we have far more in common than these minor differences. I know there is discussion of reviving demudi and I also know AV Linux would not be a candidate to evolve or adapt into demudi however currently AV Linux is the only actively maintained Debian non-Ubuntu multimedia distro out there. I make it a priority with every release to promote and give pkg-multimedia the attribution you most certainly deserve. I am also willing to allocate donated funds upstream, for instance to assist with the proposed Squeeze backports or other purposes, I certainly do not expect this to be a one-sided relationship. To summarize I don't expect you to endorse or assist AV Linux only to be open to maintaining and fixing the pkg-multimedia content within it. Thanks for taking to time to read and consider this, whatever you may decide I am grateful for all your efforts and truly and sincerely hope to increase our collaborative efforts. Best Regards, Glen MacArthur - AV Linux maintainer. ___ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
