the last year hasn't been an easy one for debian. we've seen lots of fights, unproductive discussions, & in general behaviour which contributed to what enrico in his brilliant blog post called the "stink in the kitchen". people's feelings were hurt, some became less active, others resigned from a specific position or retired completely.

it happened to me as well that reading through threads full of trolling, aggressiveness, finger-pointing, unrespectful or abusive behaviour, etc. made me frustrated, or sad, or angry, or all kinds of other negative feelings.

but then I usually told myself: this is not the debian project as I know it; this is only a small part – a part which urgently needs improvement! –; but if we only look at it alone, our picture of debian at large is distorted.

the much bigger part of the debian life I know doesn't happen on this handful of high-profile mailing lists; it happens on dozens of specialized mailing lists, in many small IRC channels, in the BTS, & in in-person meetings. – & what I see there is most of the time constructive, collaborative, respectful communication, & committed, helpful, funny, awesome people.

the idea of this advent calendar was to give examples of some of my recent experiences which demonstrate what the bright side of debian is in my opinion & what contributes to my fun in debian. with the aim of sharing my impression that the proverbial "stink" is, if we take a step back, only one piece of the bigger picture, & that we shouldn't let ourselves get demotivated by only staring at this puzzle piece. – thanks to all the awesome contributors for polishing existing & adding new shiny puzzle pieces to our common picture every day!

finally: thanks for reading this series of posts, & especially thank you to all who provided positive feedback – this in turn motivated me to follow through!

& now: back to work, & don't forget to help cleaning the kitchen :)

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

when I think about debian, one term that comes to my mind is "quality". of course it can be annoying when the ftp-masters REJECT a new package or when potential sponsors nit-pick on packaging details but in general this all leads to our excellent software quality. & yes, I've also seen less-than-excellent packages when working on RC bugs but I still believe that as a whole we strive to Do Things Right™. - thanks to all mentors, QA people, ftp-masters, & diligent package maintainers!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

today I read about a nice & successful example that shows that a debian derivative works best by contributing back to debian & working on debian directly. - great to see again that debian is at the center of a whole ecosystem, & thanks to the grml team!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

today I got two private mails from fellow DDs; both were personal messages & a pleasure to read. but what I also realized is that both emails were encrypted. which reminded me how hard it is to communicate securely with most people, & how easy it is with debian people. – & this is something we can be proud of!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

today seen on IRC: a maintainer was surprised & happy that their package had migrated to testing without having filed an unblock request. once again an example of the awesome work of the release team which pro-actively unblocked the package. – a big thank you to the members of the release team!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

yesterday I learned that I can go to FOSDEM in early 2015 because a conflicting event was cancelled. that makes me happy because FOSDEM is great for seeing other debian folks, & especially for meeting friends.

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

what constantly fascinates me in debian is that people sit at home, have an idea, work on it, & then suddenly present it to an unexpecting public; all without prior announcements or discussions, & totally apart from any hot discussion-de-jour. the last example I encountered & tried out just now is the option to edit source packages online & submit patches. - I hope we as a project can keep up with this creativity!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

my list of IRC channels (& the list of people I'm following on micro-blogging platforms) has a heavy debian bias. a thing I noticed today is that I had read (or at least: seen) messages in 6 languages (English, German, Castilian, Catalan, French, Italian). – thanks guys for the free language courses :) (& the opportunity to at least catch a glimpse into other cultures)

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

today I met with a young friend (attending the final year of technical high school) for coffee. he's exploring free software since one or two years, & he's running debian jessie on his laptop since some time. it's really amazing to see how exciting this travel into the free software cosmos is for him; & it's good to see that linux & debian are not only appealing to greybeards like me :)

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

nothing exciting today in my debian life. just yet another nice example of collaboration around an RC bug where the bug submitter, the maintainer & me investigated via the BTS, & the maintainer also got support on IRC from others. – now we just need someone to come up with an actual fix for the problem :)

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

I just got a couple of mails from the BTS. like almost every day, several times per day. now it made me realize how much I like the BTS, & how happy I am that it works so well & even gets new features. – thanks to the BTS maintainers for their continuous work!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

it's getting harder to find "nice" RC bugs, due to the efforts of various bug hunters & the awesome auto-removal-from-testing feature. – anyway, here's the list of bugs I worked on in the last 2 weeks:

• #766740 – gamera: "gamera FTBFS on arm64, testsuite failure."
  sponsor maintainer upload
• #766773 – irssi-plugin-xmpp: "irssi-plugin-xmpp: /query <JID> fails with "Irssi: critical query_init: assertion 'query->name != NULL' failed""
  add some speculation to the bug report, request binNMU after submitter's confirmation, close this bug afterwards
• #768127 – dhelp: "Fails to build the index when invalid UTF-8 is met"
  apply patch from Daniel Getz, upload to DELAYED/5
• #770672 – src:gnome-packagekit: "gnome-packagekit: FTBFS without docbook: reference to entity "REFENTRY" for which no system identifier could be generated"
  provide information, ask for clarification, severity lowered by maintainer
• #771496 – dpkg-cross: "overwrites user changes to configuration file /etc/dpkg-cross/cross-compile on upgrade (violates 10.7.3)"
  tag confirmed and add information, later downgraded by maintainer, then set back to RC by submitter …
• #771500 – darcsweb: "darcsweb: postinst uses /usr/share/doc content (Policy 12.3): /usr/share/doc/darcsweb/examples/darcsweb.conf"
  install config sample into /usr/share/<package>, upload to DELAYED/5
• #771501 – pygopherd: "pygopherd: postinst uses /usr/share/doc content (Policy 12.3): /usr/share/doc/pygopherd/examples/gophermap"
  sponsor NMU from Cameron Norman, upload to DELAYED/5
• #771727 – fex: "fex: postinst uses /usr/share/doc content (Policy 12.3)"
  propose patch, installing config templates under /usr/share/<package>, upload to DELAYED/5 later, patch then integrated into maintainer upload
• #772005 – libdevice-cdio-perl: "libdevice-cdio-perl: Debian patch causes Perl crashes in Device::Cdio::ISO9660::IFS's readdir: "Error in `/usr/bin/perl': realloc(): invalid next size: 0x0000000001f05850""
  reproduce the bug (pkg-perl)
• #772159 – ruby-moneta: "ruby-moneta: leaves mysqld running after build"
  apply patch from Colin Watson, upload to DELAYED/2

not sure if it it's me or debian but today was a quiet day. time to look back & see what has happened this year … & this brings up memories of this year's & earlier debconfs, with their pkg-perl BOFs & their outdoor hacklabs. – looking through these photos of past events makes me grateful, both to the tireless organizers of debconf, & to the people who can share a bench with me for hours :)

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

debian is again taking part in the OPW, & this afternoon I happened to read the backlog of the first weekly IRC meeting (in #debian-qa) between the mentors & the mentee for one of the projects. it was great to see that the participant's first patch is already merged & deployed, & that she closed her first bug report & is really getting into this debian world. – yay to great mentoring & increasing diversity!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

is enthusiasm contagious? I think so. a recent example: another advent posting. – ¡gracias!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

debian has a bigger role than "just" providing a free operating system to our users (& derivatives), it's also an important player in the free software world at large. a recent indication of this is the composition of the FSF's High Priority Projects Committee: if I'm counting correctly, there are two active & one former DDs listed as members; oh, & the contact person is yet another DD :) – great to see many debianistas active all around!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

today, I again had a pleasant experience around an RC bug, featuring a diligent patch submitter, & a maintainer showing his appreciation for the help. – motivating!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

today, a pkg-perl member who was not very active for the last 2 or so years "re-appeared", & together we prepared & uploaded a new package. – always good to see people coming back!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

creating a free operating system in general & fixing bugs in particular is a collaborative effort. today's example is bug report #766773 (& friends) which involved communication in the BTS & on IRC between the bug submitter, the maintainer of a related package, the release team, & me as a bug triager. & 2.5 hours later, another block for the jessie release is gone. – thanks everybody for yet another pleasant collaboration experience!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

positive feedback is motivating (probably not only) for me. a recent example showing that our work on creating a great operating system is appreciated was sent to the debian-project list yesterday. – thanks!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

today I had a short chat with a fellow DD living in a neighbouring country. nothing spectacular in itself; but it reminded me again that debian is more than creating an operating system together for me – it's also about a couple of friendships that grow out of it & which are dear to me.

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

I'm reading planet debian since many years, & I still enjoy it. I like the mixture of personal thoughts/stories & insightful technical tips. – today's recommendation: Don't ask your questions in private. very much agreed.

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

as russ wrote some weeks ago in an excellent mail to debian-vote, upstreams are the raison d'être for linux distributions. my experience in collaborating with upstream authors is mostly very positive, the most recent example from today being #728345. – thanks to all upstream authors for their passion in writing software & sharing it. & for caring about it later as well!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

after the GR is before the GR. the next one is about limiting the term of TC members. & it's a pleasure for me to watch how the proponents of different variants & other interested people work together most constructively in order to prepare the best possible ballot for the voters. – hat tip to everyone involved!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.

this morning I received no less than two private "thank you" mails from fellow debian contributors. – thanks guys, this made a good start into the week!

this posting is part of GDAC (gregoa's debian advent calendar), a project to show the bright side of debian & why it's fun for me to contribute.