Interdependence in Debian, how to suffer less from it

Listening to Martin Krafft’s talk at Debconf (related to his PhD) shed some new light on the idea that I expressed last year — I wanted that each maintainer regularly answers a questionnaire so that he has to ask himself whether he does a good enough job with his packages.

When thinking of this idea, I only saw the QA side of ensuring good maintenance on all packages, however I believe that the root problem lies further and this project would not be enough: we are interdependent but we are not equipped to deal with this reality. Martin’s only merit has been to mention that we are interdependent, but it’s worth analyzing a bit.

Our organization is centered around individuals acting as package maintainers, and in theory each package maintainer can work on his corner and all goes well. We know that this model doesn’t hold any more: transitions to testing require coordination of uploads and timely fixes of RC bugs, keeping up with the work frequently requires several volunteers that have to coordinate, etc. More and more of the work requires a level of availability that a single individual can’t offer, yet in our day-to-day work we mainly interact with individuals. Wouldn’t it be better if we could immediately know what we can expect from any Debian developer:

• mean time to reply to Debian mail (reading every day or once a week is not the same);
• amount/periods of time spent on Debian (knowing that they spend up to 4 hours mainly on Saturday can be useful);
• current availability for Debian (if they are currently busy with life, we should be able to know it, if they know when it will end, it would also be good to share);
• best way to get in touch for issues (they might have preference between IRC or mail);
• kind of relationship they have with packages where they are listed in Maintainer/Uploaders (an active maintainer that uses the software daily is not the same than a passive maintainer that only packaged the software because it was a build-dependency for some other software that they care about);
• any other information that the maintainer wants to share (about his habits/constraints/values/goals/whatever).

All this information should be shared by all Debian maintainers (some of it is already available but either not publicly or not in any machine-parseable way) and we should actively use it. Here are some examples of use: for each RC bug report, you could look up if at least one maintainer is available and you could ping him explicitly if needed. When you plan an NMU, you could look up if the maintainer is likely to respond in the next day or not, and possibly adjust the number of days spent in the DELAYED queue. When organizing a large-scale transition, you could extract a list of packages whose maintainers are not available and arrange immediate NMUs.

Furthermore there are many cases where the project’s usual expectation exceed what the maintainer is ready to do. Documenting what part of the job is done (or not) by the maintainer makes it clear for volunteers whether their help is needed and whether they could/would be a better maintainer for a given package.

Designing solutions to all these problems is going to be the scope of the DEP2 that I reserved some time ago. It’s likely to be some sort of dedicated web interface. I would welcome supplementary drivers for this DEP, so if you’re interested, get in touch with me.