Sam Hocevar’s .plan

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Bits from the DPL: DSA and a few other things

Posted on Sat, 3 Nov 2007 16:26:00 +0100 - Keywords: debian, dpl

I have been rather quiet during the last few months. Not really because I wasn’t doing anything, but because most of what I have been doing was done by private e-mail. Apparently people are expecting the DPL to disappear around the middle of their term, because I did not get many complaints. But yes, I know that sucked. And well, I now have a reason to regain motivation.

\o/ DSA++ \o/

I am very, very pleased to let you know that this morning Phil Hands (fil) added Peter Palfrader (weasel) to the adm group. Which means that the DSA team now has a new member! The first since, wow, quite some time.

I am grateful to everyone who made this possible, for bearing with my insistance, for making concessions, for being patient, and I hope this is only the first step to bigger and better teams in Debian. Of course the path is still long but I must admit this is truly refreshing. I wish great success to Peter for the thankless job that awaits him.

Nexenta

After meeting Michael Man and several Sun people at Debconf and seeing Michael’s great talk I got really convinced that the technology present in OpenSolaris could benefit Debian in many ways. And the shortest path to there seemed to be Nexenta.

I am currently discussing the possibility of having a Nexenta machine accessible to Debian developers to port and test their packages. I also suggested the Nexenta people to submit patches directly to Debian and try to join friendly packaging teams. Please be nice to them!

Conferences

Last month I attended Encuentro Linux 2007 in Arica, Chile where I gave a talk about the history and organisation of Debian and how to help and become a member of the project. Due to various issues (such as my passport being stolen when I was 2000 km away from the conference) I did not have the time to give my other planned talk about attracting developers who do not speak English to Debian and FLOSS projects.

Fortunately I was able to discuss it with members of the local communities. My goal is to understand why such a large Spanish-speaking area has so few Debian developers, and what we can do about that. One of my observations was that two very important documents (the Debian Policy and the Debian Developer’s Reference) were not translated into Spanish, while for instance there is a French translation of the latter. Any volunteers?