On Sun, 2022-04-10 at 21:23 +0100, Peter Michael Green wrote:
> Recently andreas-tille sent the following message about libzstd to
> debian-devel
>
> > I'd like to repeat that I'm really convinced that libzstd should
> > *not*
> > be maintained in the Debian Med team but rather some core team in
> > Debian. It is here for historic reasons but should have moved
> > somewhere
> > more appropriately since it became its general importance.
>
> It ended up being transferred to the rpm team, which got it out of
> the
> med team's
> hair but I'm not convinced the rpm team satisfies "some core team"
> any
> better
> than the med team does.
>
> As far as I can tell Debian has broadly 3 types of teams.
>
> 1. Teams focussed on an application area, for example the med team,
> the
> science team, the games team.
> 2. Teams focussed on a programming language, for example the python
> team, the perl team, the rust team. There is however no such team for
> software written in C, C++ or shell script.
> 3. Teams focussed on a particular piece of software
>
> As far as I can tell this means that there are a bunch of packages
> that
> "fall between the gaps", packages
> that are of high importance to Debian as a whole but are not a great
> fit
> for any team. They either end up not associated with a team at all or
> sometimes associated with a team who happened to be the first to
> use the library.
>
> I decided to get a sample of packages that could be considered
> "core",
> obviously different people have different ideas of what should be
> considered core but I decided to do the following to get a list of
> packages that hopefully most people would consider core.
>
> debootstrapped a new sid chroot
> ran tasksel install standard (a bit less spartan than just the base
> system)
> ran apt-get install build-essential (we are an opensource project,
> development tools are essential to us)
> ran apt-get install dctrl-tools (arguablly not core, but I needed it
> to
> run the test commands and it's only one package)
>
> There were 355 packages installed, built from 223 source packages. I
> got
> a list of source packages with
> the command
>
> grep-dctrl installed /var/lib/dpkg/status -n -ssource:package | cut -
> d '
> ' -f 1 | sort | uniq > sourcepks.txt
>
> I then extracted the source stanzas with.
>
> grep-dctrl -e -F Package `sed "s/.*/^&$/" sourcepks.txt | paste -s -d
> '|'`
> /var/lib/apt/lists/deb.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_source_Source
> s >
> sourcestanzas.txt
>
> Then wrote a little python script to extract teams from those
> stanzas.
>
> #!/usr/bin/python3
> from debian import deb822
> import collections
> import sys
> f = open(sys.argv[1])
> counts = collections.defaultdict(int)
> for source in deb822.Sources.iter_paragraphs(f):
> maintainers = [source['maintainer']]
> if 'uploaders' in source:
> maintainers += source['uploaders'].split(',')
> maintainers = [s.strip() for s in maintainers if s.strip() !=
> '']
> teams = [s for s in maintainers if ('team' in s.lower()) or
> ('lists' in s.lower()) or ('maintainers' in s.lower()) or ('group' in
> s.lower())]
> teams.sort()
> counts[tuple(teams)] += 1
> #print(repr(maintainers))
> #print(repr(teams));
>
> for teams , count in sorted(counts.items(), key = lambda x: x[1]):
> if len(teams) == 0:
> teamtext = 'no team'
> else:
> teamtext = ', '.join(teams)
> print(str(count) + ' ' + teamtext)
>
> This confirms my suspiscions, of the 223 source packages responsible
> for the packages installed in my "reasonablly but not super minimal"
> environment more than half of them were not associated with a team at
> all.
>
> I also saw a couple of packages in there maintained by the science
> team
> and the med team. two source packages telnet and apt-listchanges
> were orphaned.
>
> I do not know what the soloution is, whether a "core team" is a good
> idea
> or even whether one is possible at all but I feel this is an elephant
> that
> should have some light shone on it.+1 for team maintainership, especially of core packages. To walk the walk, I've asked the Kernel Team to have iproute2 (Priority: important) moved under the team, and they've accepted, so it's now done: https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/iproute2 It's a low-hanging fruit given there's an existing team it clearly fits into, but it's a start. -- Kind regards, Luca Boccassi
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