PSA: low quality ITP/RFS submissions from @northeastern.edu people

[Andrey Rakhmatullin]

Hello.
It looks like the phenomenon of obvious students mass-submitting open
source changes, because they were requested to, has come to Debian in the
form of ITP+RFS. While those changes are, in my experience, almost never
worth the time spent reviewing, they are sometimes good. But there can be
no good *one-time* ITP+RFS, and I don't think the assignment requires the
students to actually maintain the packages in Debian. So I suggest people
doing reviews to not spent extra time explaining why specifically packages
like https://mentors.debian.net/package/broot/ or
https://mentors.debian.net/package/stc/ are bad (but it's up to you, just
be aware).
Thanks.

[Phil Wyett]

Post by Andrey Rakhmatullin
Hello.
It looks like the phenomenon of obvious students mass-submitting open
source changes, because they were requested to, has come to Debian in the
form of ITP+RFS. While those changes are, in my experience, almost never
worth the time spent reviewing, they are sometimes good. But there can be
no good *one-time* ITP+RFS, and I don't think the assignment requires the
students to actually maintain the packages in Debian. So I suggest people
doing reviews to not spent extra time explaining why specifically packages
like https://mentors.debian.net/package/broot/ or
https://mentors.debian.net/package/stc/ are bad (but it's up to you, just
be aware).
Thanks.

Morning Andrey,

Did not spot that, good catch.

If there is no intention to maintain the packages beyond getting them into
Debian as a project, I would feel whomever allocated them this task is being
very disrespectful to the project and its people.

I will work with these submitters, however it will be with a low priority and
many questions regards motivation and future plans for the submitted
package(s).

Again, thanks for the heads-up Andrey.

Regards

Phil
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[Phil Wyett]

[private message]
Hi Phil,

Post by Phil Wyett
If there is no intention to maintain the packages beyond getting them into
Debian as a project, I would feel whomever allocated them this task is being
very disrespectful to the project and its people.

Are you planning to reach out to the leader of that course to educate
them?
Greetings
Marc

Hi,

CC'ing to mentors list.

If a submitter is willing to give me a name and email, I would be happy to
reach out and hopefully have a discussion on the subject if this is agreeable
to other members of mentors; or would people prefer it be a DD who can send
from their debien.org address?

Regards

Phil
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[Soren Stoutner]

Phil,

Post by Phil Wyett

[private message]
Hi Phil,

Post by Phil Wyett
If there is no intention to maintain the packages beyond getting them into
Debian as a project, I would feel whomever allocated them this task is being
very disrespectful to the project and its people.

Are you planning to reach out to the leader of that course to educate
them?
Greetings
Marc

Hi,
CC'ing to mentors list.
If a submitter is willing to give me a name and email, I would be happy to
reach out and hopefully have a discussion on the subject if this is agreeable
to other members of mentors; or would people prefer it be a DD who can send
from their debien.org address?

Feel free to reach out to them yourself in your volunteer capacity as Debian
Mentors triage. If you get any push back, you can CC me and I will vouch for
this stance representing the feelings of the Debian community.

I think getting students involved in Debian is great, but ONLY if they have
the intention of sticking to it long term (which a class assignment will
almost never equate to).

[Sune Vuorela]

Post by Soren Stoutner
Feel free to reach out to them yourself in your volunteer capacity as Debian
Mentors triage. If you get any push back, you can CC me and I will vouch for
this stance representing the feelings of the Debian community.

Agreed. I will also fully support it
(***@do)

/Sune

[Marc Haber]

Post by Sune Vuorela

Post by Soren Stoutner
Feel free to reach out to them yourself in your volunteer capacity as Debian
Mentors triage. If you get any push back, you can CC me and I will vouch for
this stance representing the feelings of the Debian community.

Agreed. I will also fully support it

+1. ***@do.

Greetings
Marc

[Tobias Frost]

FWIIW I've sent a mail to the 6 RFS + one without RFS and asked for
clarifcation.

This is the text I've used:

First thanks for your interest in contributing to Debian! This is very
appreciated!

Regarding your RFS, unfortunatly this raises an eyebrow or two...
Can you please elaborate on the reasons you'd like to maintain broot in
Debian?

Asking, because there was another package on mentors from another
@northeastern.edu today, which might be coincidence, but as both
proposed have some kind of oddness (sorry, lacking better words...), for
example how both ITPs are filed and the overall impression of the
packages... Is there some connection between the two proposed packages
we should know about?

There was some discussion on Debian channels and one question was if
this could be some kind of univeristy assignment? Is it?
If so, can you explain the assignement?

What are your long term plans with this package?

Thanks for answering!

--
tobi

[Tobias Frost]

Post by Tobias Frost
FWIIW I've sent a mail to the 6 RFS + one without RFS and asked for
clarifcation.

I've got a response and the response confirms that this is an
university assignment.

The response was privately sent to me, so I cannot forward it here at
the moment; I've asked if I can post it here anonymized, so either that
will happen or I will summarize it (earliest) tomorrow evening.

[Marc Haber]

Post by Tobias Frost
I've got a response and the response confirms that this is an
university assignment.

So the next step would be reaching out to the person who gave out that
assignment and sensibilizing them that they're not doing Debian, the
university they work for, neither themselvs, a favor.

We could also reach out the students assigned and use this possibility
to improve our newcomer docs. There must be a reason why those packages
are so bad, this might be a documentation issue.

Greetings
Marc

[Leandro Cunha]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 7:47 AM Marc Haber

Post by Marc Haber

Post by Tobias Frost
I've got a response and the response confirms that this is an
university assignment.

So the next step would be reaching out to the person who gave out that
assignment and sensibilizing them that they're not doing Debian, the
university they work for, neither themselvs, a favor.
We could also reach out the students assigned and use this possibility
to improve our newcomer docs. There must be a reason why those packages
are so bad, this might be a documentation issue.

Don't start directly with packaging, but with the Debian Reference and
the Debian Handbook.
When a person learns what is in these materials, he/she can move on
and deal with packaging.
This way, she will have a more comprehensive knowledge before moving
on to an important step, which is packaging, and making contributions
in this part.

[Phil Wyett]

Post by Phil Wyett
Phil,

Post by Phil Wyett

[private message]
Hi Phil,

Post by Phil Wyett
If there is no intention to maintain the packages beyond getting them

into

Post by Phil Wyett

Post by Phil Wyett
Debian as a project, I would feel whomever allocated them this task is being
very disrespectful to the project and its people.

Are you planning to reach out to the leader of that course to educate
them?
Greetings
Marc

Hi,
CC'ing to mentors list.
If a submitter is willing to give me a name and email, I would be happy to
reach out and hopefully have a discussion on the subject if this is

agreeable

Post by Phil Wyett
to other members of mentors; or would people prefer it be a DD who can send
from their debien.org address?

Feel free to reach out to them yourself in your volunteer capacity as Debian
Mentors triage. If you get any push back, you can CC me and I will vouch for
this stance representing the feelings of the Debian community.
I think getting students involved in Debian is great, but ONLY if they have
the intention of sticking to it long term (which a class assignment will
almost never equate to).

Soren,

Many thanks for the support (also ***@do). Tobias Frost has asked the
questions of one of the submitters and as he is a DD, I will leave it to he
to gather information on what maybe or maybe an issue with these submissions
and we can moce forward then.

Regards

Phil
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[Leandro Cunha]

Hi,

University assignment? Wouldn't it be better to find a group of Debian
Developers interested in reviewing these packages instead of sending them
to mentors? Now if no one is interested, it's because the return on this
isn't worth it.
I've seen this happen and it worked.

Leandro

[Andrey Rakhmatullin]

Post by Leandro Cunha
University assignment? Wouldn't it be better to find a group of Debian
Developers interested in reviewing these packages instead of sending them
to mentors?

Not sure how to phrase this properly, but let's say this is not a question
that can be asked by those students.

In any case, "some people will spend their time writing detailed reviews
for low quality things" is not my main reason for writing this warning,
the main reason for that is, as I already said, people spending any time
at all on things that shouldn't be in Debian because nobody will maintain
them there after the initial upload even if it happens.

[tobi]

 
 

Post by Andrey Rakhmatullin

Post by Leandro Cunha
University assignment? Wouldn't it be better to find a group of Debian
Developers interested in reviewing these packages instead of sending them
to mentors?

 
Not sure how to phrase this properly, but let's say this is not a question
that can be asked by those students. 
 
In any case, "some people will spend their time writing detailed reviews
for low quality things" is not my main reason for writing this warning,
the main reason for that is, as I already said, people spending any time
at all on things that shouldn't be in Debian because nobody will maintain
them there after the initial upload even if it happens.

 
Yes, I think (how I understood the assignement), this assigment is not really suitable as a student assignment.
Said that, I recommend waiting until I find the time to summarize the mai I've got (or permission to publish it), because I have ideas how the assignment could be tweaked so that it is acutually helpful for the students and Debian. I've also asked for the professors contact, so that we can have a chat with them too.
 
(Sorry, I'm quite occupied until tomorrow evening, so I cant summarize it right now.)
 

[Leandro Cunha]

Post by Andrey Rakhmatullin

Post by Leandro Cunha
University assignment? Wouldn't it be better to find a group of Debian
Developers interested in reviewing these packages instead of sending them
to mentors?

Not sure how to phrase this properly, but let's say this is not a question
that can be asked by those students.
In any case, "some people will spend their time writing detailed reviews
for low quality things" is not my main reason for writing this warning,
the main reason for that is, as I already said, people spending any time
at all on things that shouldn't be in Debian because nobody will maintain
them there after the initial upload even if it happens.
--
WBR, wRAR

I've seen this done in a local group here, but they focused on
packages that already exist in Debian doing NMU, team uploads and QA.
This worked, but after it ends most of the students disappear and
that's why I agree with you.
They were college students and with guidance from professors, Debian
Developers and Debian Maintainers interested.

[Andrey Rakhmatullin]

Post by Leandro Cunha

Post by Andrey Rakhmatullin

Post by Leandro Cunha
University assignment? Wouldn't it be better to find a group of Debian
Developers interested in reviewing these packages instead of sending them
to mentors?

Not sure how to phrase this properly, but let's say this is not a question
that can be asked by those students.
In any case, "some people will spend their time writing detailed reviews
for low quality things" is not my main reason for writing this warning,
the main reason for that is, as I already said, people spending any time
at all on things that shouldn't be in Debian because nobody will maintain
them there after the initial upload even if it happens.

I've seen this done in a local group here, but they focused on
packages that already exist in Debian doing NMU, team uploads and QA.

That's a crucial difference that I tried to explain in both of my previous
emails :-/

Post by Leandro Cunha
This worked, but after it ends most of the students disappear and
that's why I agree with you.

Of course they disappear, that would hardly be surprising, but, again.

[Leandro Cunha]

Post by Andrey Rakhmatullin

Post by Leandro Cunha

Post by Andrey Rakhmatullin

Post by Leandro Cunha
University assignment? Wouldn't it be better to find a group of Debian
Developers interested in reviewing these packages instead of sending them
to mentors?

Not sure how to phrase this properly, but let's say this is not a question
that can be asked by those students.
In any case, "some people will spend their time writing detailed reviews
for low quality things" is not my main reason for writing this warning,
the main reason for that is, as I already said, people spending any time
at all on things that shouldn't be in Debian because nobody will maintain
them there after the initial upload even if it happens.

I've seen this done in a local group here, but they focused on
packages that already exist in Debian doing NMU, team uploads and QA.

That's a crucial difference that I tried to explain in both of my previous
emails :-/

Post by Leandro Cunha
This worked, but after it ends most of the students disappear and
that's why I agree with you.

Of course they disappear, that would hardly be surprising, but, again.
--
WBR, wRAR

But having another point, if you think about it, I wouldn't expect
quality from what comes from people who are learning to packaging and
I say this because I had to study a lot to learn what I learned over
the years.
And of course there were several people who helped me on this journey
and I am grateful to them.
My first few packages weren't the best quality and that got better
over time. But unlike many who give up over time, I continue to
contribute to the project to this day and I don't intend to give up.
The only bad part about this is what you mentioned about things that
shouldn't go into the archive and would then be abandoned. There's no
way I could disagree with you on that. ;)

[Andrey Rakhmatullin]

Post by Leandro Cunha
But having another point, if you think about it, I wouldn't expect
quality from what comes from people who are learning to packaging and
I say this because I had to study a lot to learn what I learned over
the years.

Of course it's expected that the quality will be low, but in these
spending efforts to teach prople how to improve them is not worth it
because the contributions themselves are not useful and the contributors
won't return. As I said, this is in contrast with random drive-by PRs that
try to reword docstrings or fix linter issues I'm getting as an upstream,
where at least the contributions themselves are sometimes useful.

[Leandro Cunha]

Post by Andrey Rakhmatullin

Post by Leandro Cunha
But having another point, if you think about it, I wouldn't expect
quality from what comes from people who are learning to packaging and
I say this because I had to study a lot to learn what I learned over
the years.

Of course it's expected that the quality will be low, but in these
spending efforts to teach prople how to improve them is not worth it
because the contributions themselves are not useful and the contributors
won't return. As I said, this is in contrast with random drive-by PRs that
try to reword docstrings or fix linter issues I'm getting as an upstream,
where at least the contributions themselves are sometimes useful.

Yes, indeed.

[Qianqian Fang]

hi everyone,

I apologize for the trouble caused by this influx of review requests - I am
a professor at Northeastern University (Boston, MA US) and am teaching a
coding class for my Department, named "Essential computing skills for
bioengineers". This is the first time I offer this class, and I have about
18 students this semester (mixture of undegrad, MS and PhD students). The
course covers software licenses, Linux, command line, regular expressions,
MATLAB/Python among other topics. I am not a DD, but packaged some of the
tools developed by my lab in the past.

As a midterm project, I asked every student to identify an open-source
software (1. DFSG compatible license, 2. being actively maintained, 3. show
reasonable user adoption) that has not been carried by Debian and create an
initial package for Debian. I was hoping, at least with my initial intent,
that some of my students would like to continue polishing the package
after taking the class, although I share the same concern that many of them
will lose the drive after the assignment is over.

I also have to admit that most students in my class - similarly in many
other universities, have extremely limited/low experience working with
Linux prior to taking my class - sadly, but this is the reality. This is
also a key reason I wanted to include lectures such as open-source licenses
and Linux in my class because I think there is an urgent need in higher
education to expose students to these topics. However, I did not have the
intent to add any unwanted burdens to the mentors if the submissions are of
low quality - I haven't started evaluating these submissions as the due
date was only two days ago.

I apologize for not giving a heads-up for this training exercise. I am
happy to reach out to my students, and get a list of packages that the
submitters are committed to finishing the work and potentially maintain
those in the future. For the rest, I agree that there is no need to spend
time reviewing if it obviously needs a lot of work.

In the future repetition of this class (not decided yet), I will limit
students to using local resources only, and do some screening before
allowing them to post in debian mailing lists. I would also be happy to
invite any debian developers who are willing to teach university students
on Debian culture/development/packaging/maintenance and guest lectures
(remotely) - I will reach out in the future.

Qianqian

Post by Andrey Rakhmatullin
Hello.
It looks like the phenomenon of obvious students mass-submitting open
source changes, because they were requested to, has come to Debian in the
form of ITP+RFS. While those changes are, in my experience, almost never
worth the time spent reviewing, they are sometimes good. But there can be
no good *one-time* ITP+RFS, and I don't think the assignment requires the
students to actually maintain the packages in Debian. So I suggest people
doing reviews to not spent extra time explaining why specifically packages
like https://mentors.debian.net/package/broot/ or
https://mentors.debian.net/package/stc/ are bad (but it's up to you, just
be aware).
Thanks.
--
WBR, wRAR

[Tobias Frost]

Hi Qianqian,

thanks for reaching out and explaining the background of the
assignement and also thanks for introducing your students to Open
Source!

When mailing the students in the RFS bugs I've got one response from a
student, as I've promissed in https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/***@sviech.de
I'm trying to make some suggestions how this assignment could become
more suitable for Debian.

Post by Qianqian Fang
hi everyone,
I apologize for the trouble caused by this influx of review requests - I am
a professor at Northeastern University (Boston, MA US) and am teaching a
coding class for my Department, named "Essential computing skills for
bioengineers". This is the first time I offer this class, and I have about
18 students this semester (mixture of undegrad, MS and PhD students). The
course covers software licenses, Linux, command line, regular expressions,
MATLAB/Python among other topics. I am not a DD, but packaged some of the
tools developed by my lab in the past.
As a midterm project, I asked every student to identify an open-source
software (1. DFSG compatible license, 2. being actively maintained, 3. show
reasonable user adoption) that has not been carried by Debian and create an
initial package for Debian. I was hoping, at least with my initial intent,
that some of my students would like to continue polishing the package
after taking the class, although I share the same concern that many of them
will lose the drive after the assignment is over.
I also have to admit that most students in my class - similarly in many
other universities, have extremely limited/low experience working with
Linux prior to taking my class - sadly, but this is the reality. This is
also a key reason I wanted to include lectures such as open-source licenses
and Linux in my class because I think there is an urgent need in higher
education to expose students to these topics. However, I did not have the
intent to add any unwanted burdens to the mentors if the submissions are of
low quality - I haven't started evaluating these submissions as the due
date was only two days ago.

Thanks for understand this. It does not help Debian if there is a
package introduced into the archive and the maintainer vanishes after
that.

Said that, I fear your assignement is additionally a very tough one,
(IMHO too tough [1]) especially for students not having some previous
experience how unix / distributions works. Creating a good package
*requires* found knowledge of Debian, this is especially true if the
package is to be done from scratch. Of course I do not know how you
intended to measure/grade the assignement, and how much time the
students should allocate to the task.

[1] it is quite easy to cobble a packgage together for local use, but it
is a very tough task to make it properly and suitable for inclusion to
Debian.

As a side, as Debian is a volunteer project, you should be aware that
deadlines on such an assignment won't work, as there is absolutley no
guarantee from Debian side that some will e.g review the submission *at
all*. For example, when you look at the sponsorship-requests BTS page
you can see that sometimes it can take many months until something is
sponsored, especially if the package in question is some nieche software
(for example, there are quite a few emacs packages in the RFS queue
since months, but for example /me won't sponsor them because I don't
speak emacs-packaging and therefore can't sensibly review them.)

Post by Qianqian Fang
I apologize for not giving a heads-up for this training exercise. I am
happy to reach out to my students, and get a list of packages that the
submitters are committed to finishing the work and potentially maintain
those in the future. For the rest, I agree that there is no need to spend
time reviewing if it obviously needs a lot of work.

Frankly, I don't think this will work to ask students for a long-term
committment. (Are they free to decide? Can they freely say "no" without
facing the slightest fear of consequences?) We have Debian Constitution
§2.1.1, and this is a very important aspect of Debian.

Post by Qianqian Fang
In the future repetition of this class (not decided yet), I will limit
students to using local resources only, and do some screening before
allowing them to post in debian mailing lists. I would also be happy to
invite any debian developers who are willing to teach university students
on Debian culture/development/packaging/maintenance and guest lectures
(remotely) - I will reach out in the future.

I think this only flies if Debian also benefits from this. For example
my "Debian time" is already limited and I won't spend time educating
people how to package for Debian if I know already with almost certainly
that this time will be wasted time. (note that this is my opinion, not
necessarily other DD's)

Said that, maybe the assignment can be modified/improved? The biggest
issue is that it is very unlikely that your students will stick to
Debian, so the tasks needs IMHO be some tasks were one-time contribution
is totally OK. I think package new software is not suitable, (except if
the student has already a history of Open Source contributions or in
best case is already a Debian contributor.)

But there are other ways to contribute to Debian, where one-time
contribution is totally ok:
- https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers/ has some general
information about what could be in scope for Debian.
- Generally, https://www.debian.org/intro/help has many points that
might be more suitable than new packages and if the assignment should
be packaging releated, it might make more sense to do bug squashing /
triaging - your students could triage open bugs filed against
packages and report their findings back to the BTS, and if the bugs
are still there trying to come up with a patch (e.g backported from
upstram) and they can file this patch to the bug. Upload/Sponsoring
is a possibity then, especially if the patch is for (RC) release
criticial (or severity important) bugs [RC]. (If the package is
orphaned, any bug can be fixed, but usually requires more work as a
RFS for a orphaned pacakge should try get the package into its best
shape, in contrast to RC/important where only the problem should be
fixed in a Non Maintainer Upload (NMU)

So I guess, when reaching out in future, probably you should take input
from us how the assignment should look like.

Some final words: Please ask your students to clean up after themselves,
so closing the ITP and RFS packages and also deleting the salsa git
repositories, especially if they are not committing to the maintaince of
the package in question. Thanks!


[RC] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/developer-duties.html#manage-release-critical-bugs
[NMU] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.html#non-maintainer-uploads-nmus

Cheer,
--
tobi

Post by Qianqian Fang
Qianqian

Post by Andrey Rakhmatullin
Hello.
It looks like the phenomenon of obvious students mass-submitting open
source changes, because they were requested to, has come to Debian in the
form of ITP+RFS. While those changes are, in my experience, almost never
worth the time spent reviewing, they are sometimes good. But there can be
no good *one-time* ITP+RFS, and I don't think the assignment requires the
students to actually maintain the packages in Debian. So I suggest people
doing reviews to not spent extra time explaining why specifically packages
like https://mentors.debian.net/package/broot/ or
https://mentors.debian.net/package/stc/ are bad (but it's up to you, just
be aware).
Thanks.
--
WBR, wRAR

[Salvo Tomaselli]

Post by Qianqian Fang
In the future repetition of this class (not decided yet), I will limit
students to using local resources only, and do some screening before
allowing them to post in debian mailing lists. I would also be happy to
invite any debian developers who are willing to teach university students
on Debian culture/development/packaging/maintenance and guest lectures
(remotely) - I will reach out in the future.

I've done some teaching at work on how to do debian packaging. My coworkers
are kinda forced to interact with the process because we use debian and
ubuntu, and I'd like them to become more independent.

Anyway I've told them that the crappy packages we do would never be accepted
in debian, and I tried to convince the more skilled ones to actually do
packaging for real that I could sponsor, but they didn't show long term
interest enough.

I'm likely going to do a guest lecture about debian packaging next spring
within the operating systems course in university of catania.

But there won't be any points given or not given in the course itself if one
decides to follow up and do a package for real or not.

I think it would be counter productive to try and force motivation where it
doesn't exist.

It's good to tell them about licenses I think
 at work there's plenty of
people who just use whatever and then are completely caught by surprise when
they find out you can't just do whatever you want with free software. I've been
repeatedly harassed for having used GPL license.

I am not sure how licenses and debian fit into bioinformatics? It should
possibly be more like sw engineering or operating systems


Best