Dear all, This would be a biggish one so please have a chai/coffee or something stronger as it would take a while.
I would start with attempt at some alcohol humor. While some people know that I have had a series of convulsive epileptic seizure I had shared bits about it in another post as well. Recovery is going through allopathic medicines as well as physiotherapy which I go to every alternate day.
One of the exercises that I do in physiotherapy sessions is walk cross-legged on a line. While doing it today, it occurred to me that this is the same test that a Police inspector would do if they caught you drinking or are suspected of drunk driving. While some in the police force have now also have breath analyzer machines to determine alcohol content in the breath and body (and ways to deceive it are also there) the above exercise is still an integral part of examination. Now few of my friends who do drink have and had made expertise of walking on a line, while I due to this neurological disorder still have issues of walking on a line. So while I don’t think of a drinking party in the near future (6 months at least), if I ever do get caught with a friend who is drunk (by association I would also be a suspect) by a policeman who doesn’t have a breath analyzer machine, I could be in a lot of trouble. In addition if I tell him I have a neurological disorder I am bound to land up in a cell as he will think I’m trying to make a fool of him. If you are able to picturize the situation, I’m sure you will get a couple of laughs.
Now coming to the release party, I was a bit apprehensive. It’s been quite a while I had faced an audience and just coming out of illness didn’t know how well or ill-prepared I would be for the session. I had forsaken/given up exercising two days earlier before the event as I wanted to have loose body, loose limbs all over. I also took a mild sedative (1mg) the day before just so I will have a fit night sleep and be able to focus all my energies on the big day. (I don’t recommend sedatives unless the doctor prescribes) and I did have a doctor prescription so was able to have a nice sleep. I didn’t do any Debian study as I hoped my somewhat long experience with both Ubuntu and Debian should help me.
On the d-day, I had asked dhanesh (the organizer of the event) to accompany me from home to venue and back as I was unsure of the journey as it was around 9-10 kms. from my place and while I had been to the venue about couple of years back, I had just a mild remembrance of the place.
Anyways, Dhanesh compiled with my request and together we reached the venue before the appointed 1500 hrs. As it was a Sunday I was unsure as how many people would turn up as people usually like to cozy up on a Sunday.
Around 1530 hrs everybody showed up
It included couple of co-organizers with most people being newbies so while I had thought of showing how to contribute via reporting bugs or putting up patches, had to set that aside and explain how things work in free software and open-source world. We didn’t get into the debate of free vs open-source or free/open-source/open-core as that would have been counter-productive and probably confusing for newbies.
We did however share the debian tree structure
I was stumped by /var and /proc . I hadn’t taken my lappy as it is expensive (a lenovo thinkpad I love very dearly) and I was unsure if I would be able to take care of it (weight wise). Dhanesh had told me that he had Debian on his lappy + zsh both of which are my favourites.
While back at home I realized /var has been relegated to having apache/server logs and stuff like that, I do recall (vaguely) a thread on debian-devel about removing /var although that discussion went nowhere.
One of the bugs that we hit early on is that nobody had enough space on their hdd to have Debian comfortably. It took a while to get an external hdd and push some of the content from somebody’s lappy to the external drive to have space for the installation.
I did share the /. /home, optional swap while Dhanesh helped by sharing about having a separate /boot partition as well which I had forgotten. I can’t even begin to remember the number of times having a separate /boot partition has helped me in all of my systems.
That done, we did try to install/show Debian 9 without network but were hit with #866629 so wasn’t able to complete the installation. We had got the latest 9.0.1 as I had seen Steve’s message about issues with the live images but even then we were hit with the above bug. As shared in the bug history, it might be a good idea to have the last couple of RC’s (Release Candidate releases) as pre-release parties so people have a chance to report bugs and get them fixed. It was also nice to see Praveen raising the seriousness of the bug shared above.
The next day I also filed #866971 as I had mistaken the release to be a regular release and not the live instance. I have pushed my rationale and hope the right thing happens.
As installation takes a bit of time, we used the time to share about Google’s Summer of Code and absence of Debian from GSoC this year. I should have directed them to an itfoss article I wrote sometime ago and also shared that Debian is also looking to having a similar apprenticeship within Debian itself. There were questions about why Debian would like to take the administrative overhead, my response was that it probably had to do with Debian wanting more control over the process. While Debian has had some great luck getting all number of seats that it asks for in GSoC, the ball is always in Google’s court. Having that uncertainty off would be beneficial to Debian both in short-term as well as long-term. One interesting stat that was shared with me was that something akin to 89 students from India had been selected this year to GSoC even with the lower stipend and that is a far cry from the 10-15 students who are able to complete GSoC every year. Let’s see what happens this year.
One of the interesting fact/gossip I shared with them is that Google uses a modified/forked Debian internally which it probably would never release ever.
There were quite a few queries about GSoC which resulted into how contributions are made and how git had become the master of all VCS (Version Control Systems). While I do have pet bugs about git (the biggest one being for places/countries having not big bandwidth git fails many a times while cloning). I *think* the bug has been reported enough times but haven’t seen any improvements yet. There is a need of a solution like wget and wget -c so git just works even under the most trying circumstances (bandwidth wise)
We also shared what a repo is and Dhanesh helpfully did a git shortlog to show people how commits are commented. It was from his official work so he couldn’t show anything apart from the shortlog.
I also shared how non-technical people can help with regard to documentation, artwork but didn’t get into any concrete examples although wiki.debian.org would have been a good start. I also don’t know if it’s a fact or not but it seems/seemed that moinmoin (the current wiki solution used by debian) seems to have got sectional edit feature which I used sometime back. If moinmoin has got this feature then it is on par with mediawiki, although do know that mediawiki has lot more features going for it.
Dhanesh did manage to install a Debian 8.0.7 (while 8.8.0 was the last release) which might have been better. The debian-installer (d-i) looks the same even though I know there are improvements with respect to UEFI and many updated components.
There are and were many bugs which I wanted to share but didn’t know if it was the right forum or not, for e.g. #597176 which probably needs improvements in other libraries along with the JPEG 2000 support #604859 all of which I’m subscribed to.
We also had a talk about code documentation and code readability, python (as almost everything in Debian is based on python) I had actually wanted to show metrics.debian.net but had seen it was down the day before and again checked to see it is down now as well, hence reported it, will hopefully come on Debian BTS some time soonish. The idea was to share that Debian does have/uses other programming languages as well and is only limited by people interested in a specific language and be willing to package and maintain packages in that specific programming language.
As Dhanesh was part of Firefox OS and a Campus Ambassador we did discuss what went wrong in Firefox OS deployment and Firefox as a whole, specifically between the community and Mozilla the Corporation.
In this there were lots that was lot that I wasn’t able to share as had become tired otherwise would have shared that ncurses debian-installer interface although bit ugly to look at is still good as it has speech for visually differently abled people as well as people with poor sight.
There is and was lots to share about Debian but was conscious that I might over-burden the audience and my stamina was also stretched.
We also shared about automated builds bud didn’t show either travis.debian.net or jeankins.debian.net
We also had a small discussion about Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and how the outlook for people coming in Computer Science looks today.
One thing I forgot to share we did do the cake-cutting together
Dhanesh is on the left while I’m on the right.
We did have a cute 3-4 year old boy as our guest as well bud didn’t get good pictures of him.
Lastly, the Debian cake itself
We also talked about the kernel and subsystem maintainers and how Linus is the overlord.
Look forward to comments. I am hoping Dhanesh might recollect some points that I might have missed/forgotten.
Update 07/07/17 – All programming languages stats. can be seen here
Experiences in the community 