It’s time for a long-overdue blogpost about the status of Tanglu. Tanglu is a Debian derivative, started in early 2013 when the systemd debate at Debian was still hot. It was formed by a few people wanting to create a Debian derivative for workstations with a time-based release schedule using and showcasing new technologies (which include systemd, but also bundling systems and other things) and built in the open with a community using the similar infrastructure to Debian. Tanglu is designed explicitly to complement Debian and not to compete with it on all devices.

Tanglu has achieved a lot of great things. We were the first Debian derivative to adopt systemd and with the help of our contributors we could kill a few nasty issues affecting it and Debian before it ended up becoming default in Debian Jessie. We also started to use the Calamares installer relatively early, bringing a modern installation experience additionally to the traditional debian-installer. We performed the usrmerge early, uncovering a few more issues which were fed back into Debian to be resolved (while workarounds were added to Tanglu). We also briefly explored switching from initramfs-tools to Dracut, but this release goal was dropped due to issues (but might be revived later). A lot of other less-impactful changes happened as well, borrowing a lot of useful ideas and code from Ubuntu (kudos to them!).

On the infrastructure side, we set up the Debian Archive Kit (dak), managing to find a couple of issues (mostly hardcoded assumptions about Debian) and reporting them back to make using dak for distributions which aren’t Debian easier. We explored using fedmsg for our infrastructure, went through a long and painful iteration of build systems (buildbot -> Jenkins -> Debile) before finally ending up with Debile, and added a set of own custom tools to collect archive QA information and present it to our developers in an easy to digest way. Except for wanna-build, Tanglu is hosting an almost-complete clone of basic Debian archive management tools.

During the past year however, the project’s progress slowed down significantly. For this, mostly I am to blame. One of the biggest challenges for a young project is to attract new developers and members and keep them engaged. A lot of the people coming to Tanglu and being interested in contributing were unfortunately no packagers and sometimes no developers, and we didn’t have the manpower to individually mentor these people and teach them the necessary skills. People asking for tasks were usually asked where their interests were and what they would like to do to give them a useful task. This sounds great in principle, but in practice it is actually not very helpful. A curated list of “junior jobs” is a much better starting point. We also invested almost zero time in making our project known and create the necessary “buzz” and excitement that’s actually needed to sustain a project like this. Doing more in the advertisement domain and “help newcomers” area is a high priority issue in the Tanglu bugtracker, which to the day is still open. Doing good alone isn’t enough, talking about it is of crucial importance and that is something I knew about, but didn’t realize the impact of for quite a while. As strange as it sounds, investing in the tech only isn’t enough, community building is of equal importance.

Regardless of that, Tanglu has members working on the project, but way too few to manage a project of this magnitude (getting package transitions migrated alone is a large task requiring quite some time while at the same time being incredibly boring :P). A lot of our current developers can only invest small amounts of time into the project because they have a lot of other projects as well.

The other issue why Tanglu has problems is too much stuff being centralized on myself. That is a problem I wanted to rectify for a long time, but as soon as a task wasn’t done in Tanglu because no people were available to do it, I completed it. This essentially increased the project’s dependency on me as single person, giving it a really low bus factor. It not only centralizes power in one person (which actually isn’t a problem as long as that person is available enough to perform tasks if asked for), it also centralizes knowledge on how to run services and how to do things. And if you want to give up power, people will need the knowledge on how to perform the specific task first (which they will never gain if there’s always that one guy doing it). I still haven’t found a great way to solve this – it’s a problem that essentially kills itself as soon as the project is big enough, but until then the only way to counter it slightly is to write lots of documentation.

Last year I had way less time to work on Tanglu than the project deserves. I also started to work for Purism on their PureOS Debian derivative (which is heavily influenced by some of the choices we made for Tanglu, but with different focus – that’s probably something for another blogpost). A lot of the stuff I do for Purism duplicates the work I do on Tanglu, and also takes away time I have for the project. Additionally I need to invest a lot more time into other projects such as AppStream and a lot of random other stuff that just needs continuous maintenance and discussion (especially AppStream eats up a lot of time since it became really popular in a lot of places). There is also my MSc thesis in neuroscience that requires attention (and is actually in focus most of the time). All in all, I can’t split myself and KDE’s cloning machine remains broken, so I can’t even use that ;-). In terms of projects there is also a personal hard limit of how much stuff I can handle, and exceeding it long-term is not very healthy, as in these cases I try to satisfy all projects and in the end do not focus enough on any of them, which makes me end up with a lot of half-baked stuff (which helps nobody, and most importantly makes me loose the fun, energy and interest to work on it).

Good news everyone! (sort of)

So, this sounded overly negative, so where does this leave Tanglu? Fact is, I can not commit the crazy amounts of time for it as I did in 2013. But, I love the project and I actually do have some time I can put into it. My work on Purism has an overlap with Tanglu, so Tanglu can actually benefit from the software I develop for them, maybe creating a synergy effect between PureOS and Tanglu. Tanglu is also important to me as a testing environment for future ideas (be it in infrastructure or in the “make bundling nice!” department).

So, what actually is the way forward? First, maybe I have the chance to find a few people willing to work on tasks in Tanglu. It’s a fun project, and I learned a lot while working on it. Tanglu also possesses some unique properties few other Debian derivatives have, like being built from source completely (allowing us things like swapping core components or compiling with more hardening flags, switching to newer KDE Plasma and GNOME faster, etc.). Second, if we do not have enough manpower, I think converting Tanglu into a rolling-release distribution might be the only viable way to keep the project running. A rolling release scheme creates much less effort for us than making releases (especially time-based ones!). That way, users will have a constantly updated and secure Tanglu system with machines doing most of the background work.

If it turns out that absolutely nothing works and we can’t attract new people to help with Tanglu, it would mean that there generally isn’t much interest from the developer or user side in a project like this, so shutting it down or scaling it down dramatically would be the only option. But I do not think that this is the case, and I believe that having Tanglu around is important. I also have some interesting plans for it which will be fun to implement for testing 🙂

The only thing that had to stop is leaving our users in the dark on what is happening.

Sorry for the long post, but there are some subjects which are worth writing more than 140 characters about 🙂

If you are interested in contributing to Tanglu, get in touch with us! We have an IRC channel #tanglu-devel on Freenode (go there for quicker responses!), forums and mailinglists,

It looks like I will be at Debconf this year as well, so you can also catch me there! I might even talk about PureOS/Tanglu infrastructure at the conference.