Sun, 19 Oct 2008
Packaging, and other joys of Debconf
I was trying to explain to my friend Emily (C.) some of the fun things about Debconf.
On one of the first days I attended, I was standing around while some people I didn't yet know discussed piuparts, an automated Debian package tester.
At this point when talking to Emily, I thought, Maybe I shouldn't bother explaining what piuparts is. If I do explain it, it will make me much more interested in the telling of the story, as well as let her make sense of the story. Or I could be vague to avoid boring her, but then I'll bore myself by only teling the skeleton of a story.
I know Emily well enough that she'll forgive me boring her, I decided. So I'll give it a try.
"The bulk of work in Debian is packaging, which means finding up-to-date open source software and bundling it up into a nice installer," I began. "Windows installers, if you're lucky, will create an entry in Add/Remove Programs. But Debian installers, to comply with Debian Policy, have to do a lot more."
"Let's say you already had the Safari web browser installed and you wanted to install Google Chrome, their new browser based on the same core as Safari. When you upgrade Safari, it would be nice if Google Chrome also benefitted from the upgrade."
"In Debian, it would." I continued with another obscure fact about the Debian Policy. "Another element of the Policy is that when a package is fully removed, it must leave no files and leave no programs running."
Suddenly she was interested! For a moment I didn't understand why. Then I realized what I had said: Something I take for granted in Debian, the "leave no trace" element, is something Windows users often wish they had.
I continued, "There is an automated tool called piuparts which takes packages, creates a small virtual install of Debian, run the package's installer, the uninstalls it and verifies that the package does in fact leave no trace."
Explaining the rest was easy: The first day I was at Debconf, I ran into some people discussing piuparts. Lucas explained he was slow to program in Python, the language piuparts is written in, and Emily rightly picked up on the fact that Python is my favorite programming language. Lucas explained that piuparts needed a machine-readable report format so that you could automatically run it on the whole Debian archive and get a list of which packages have problems. I volunteered to add that.
After a few days of hardly working on this, I finally was sitting with some new friends Thursday night. They left, and I worked on everything I could possibly justify working on. Then it was 5 a.m., and I knew there was no more time to waste if I wanted to actually finish the modification to piuparts. So I began it, ate breakfast, and finished it.
It was really great having a comfortable environment to work all night in. It was even better that I had people to stay up late talking to about geeky things that came from a shared interest in programming, system administration, and Free Software principles. When people left, there was always a great reason to stay awake: more great people to talk to, or finally the assignment I gave myself at the start of Debconf. I had that joyous feeling from the people every evening at Debconf, and Thursday night the feeling brought me all the way to morning.
