Please we're ready to begin our last talk for today is about Debian Release Management by Andreas Bart Okay, so I Will Doesn't work the microphone. No good So I will just start now for the first slide side for the first part I don't really need the slide urgently because actually everybody of you should know what I'm talking about At least if you manage to go through new maintainer, but well Still it's important that we all have shares the same information in Debian. We have more or less We have we have we have more or less different distributions Usual packages are uploaded directly to unstable from unstable They get after some rough test testing go into testing and from time to time We release this testing to stable the former stable becomes all stable And there's something else also that's called experimental The packages can be uploaded that shouldn't go to testing and shouldn't do harm and unstable So that's so one of the basic things What we do about um testing, okay, you need full screen and you need yes, it's the right slides It's a yeah, yeah, so okay now be just if okay. There's a comment line option for it. I learned on the other thing So Yeah, like this one. Um, so It was xpdf. I think with a full screen Okay, thank you very much for having the side of another laptop Full screen And it's mounted to where? Oh, great Okay, so now there are also slides at least on my laptop. You can't see them But that can be fixed. I think that's one of the very typical things with the lease. We are ready The others are not so but we have learned to cope with that Yeah, well is it something with the laptop? I'm just Function fff8 usually does it F5 oh, yeah Oh, yeah, I should I don't mind if I don't see anything here, but the people should see something Okay, so Just let me take a look at my at my next slides so that I can have some ideas This is just the function so that I can see okay, so okay So what's the target of this continue? What's the target of the lease management? The lease management means we must make sure that actual testing meets the lease targets We must make sure that anything that happens with testing doesn't break testing and that if tasting is broken. We unbreak it We have to keep those things together this testing And one of our most important tasks Actually is to collect and distribute information from from one team to the next team So, okay now it's starting to get to the parent of time. Well, I would like to see you able to see my slides So Okay, so I will tell you something about who is the release team who does the release that are five persons to release managers Steve uh and and Colin and three assistants And there are three release assistants Oh great Thank you very much for it. So now we can continue with this nice slide Three release assistants that the joy has who mainly focus on the deputy installer. You all know him That's Frank and that and that's myself Oh, there's something else. What did happen now? I don't touch it with somebody else I guess it's something with a I see this control mode just changes this array output. Something is happening there. Um, at least we have So the lease team has Okay, we'll just continue never mind. So the leases team has a common role account That's definitely released at least there being orc. Everybody could subscribe to it who is interested in it But please keep in mind. This is not a discussion list And I say I have multiple related places In the basic reason for it is that everybody if in the release team is supposed to read every major center of this list And if there's a discussion that's that's can get quite ugly for us. So please don't do it And there's a website for us released. They've been orc It's not as full blown as we hope it but there's still a lot of good information on it. And I hope that We will improve that website. So if you think there's anything missing This just ping up one of us on irc or send us mail or whatever And we'll add it to the website So what are our tools For testing migration, we have a famous script called britney Which is actually not a script but a combination of shell scripts pyson And some c back ends. I learned a lot of pyson, but okay, and It's an important tool for interacting with britney for us as the release team us is so-called hints With the hints, we can add packages. We can The move packages we can say, okay the package might be to young blood But please bring it in anyway. So that is the gateway to britney as a hint We have released good little bucks for most of you they see you consider them just say block release But actually they're very very very valuable tool for us because we know where we have to take Action and they have a most important management tool and for that reason we have two different websites With telling us how the seabuck status looks a bit different because the different looks have different advantages We have also now a page of security status Which is maintained by joy health as part of securing the testing distribution He will give another talk about it, but that is also one of the very valuable tools for us and beside these Major tools a lot of small script a tool that we use medicine Grip deconsole and a lot of all other small scripts that are very helpful for us to get the release done So how packages go into testing one thing I really want to emphasize for all of you is We prefer if it goes via unstable Even if you're in a deep freeze the basic reason for that is That in unstable the package gets some rough testing if it's got up to testing or post updates, which is also possible Well more or less nobody tests it and for that reason the patches needs to be very very very minimal And so even case we said oh it's a buck, but we won't fix this via testing or post updates Sorry because it's too risky for us The testing script britney is run shortly after the install the install is a script that most and more or less Just takes the packages that are in incoming. They'll be an org installs them into the pool and pushes the mirrors And shortly after set we run britney makes a testing transition, but you can see the results only after the next day We however directly publish the output and excuses of the britney run. So If somebody asks a question this the output says it's going in but it's not in well It is in you will see it on the next day. Don't ask us in the same day about this It's more or less the most frequently asked question I ever heard And what we can done But we don't really like is we can see run britney during the day if there's some urgent issue For times like now we just say oh wait if you run another time next tomorrow But if it's just something like oh half a day before release we do it So Now the question is what worked well, I think that's a very important question for all of us What worked very well is the devian installer It's from the manageability point of view much better than it was before At least as much as I heard because I've never done anything with poolploppers Except installing one potato system upgraded to hoodie But other people who have more experience that is much better We have and that's I can say from my own point of view also very decent management tools That we use during the freeze. We have very granular hints For example in previous times was just possible to say okay. This package is not ready, but this package goes into testing anyways That's of course is nice, but it's not all because You can by accident break some other packages now. I can say okay. This package is ready, but please ignore that It's so young It still checks that it doesn't break other packages that it said it has no sc bucks. So that's much better than it was before And just another small script called D and I can just say D space package name And it tells me what's the difference between unstable in a testing And also if I if I finish reviewing the differences, it just gives me the outer light hint to put in my hints file So that was very nice tool for coping with a few hundred unfreezing the request per day So also we have very decent bucks questioning tools the view of the least good bucks improved very much We have the sergeant nor now edge ignore hints of Text to the bug report which we can use to say, okay This is we don't consider that's the least good right now without having to play funny games with the With the buck status That's also something that really helps us because it avoids all these things avoids that we make mistakes Because we don't have we have to check less things and the rest is done by the computer and computers do only mistakes when You tell them something wrong But also worked very very well is the partial freeze we started with freezing some packages and intended it to more and more and more packages And in the end the full freeze was only a very short period of time and still the release is very stable So that was a great help for all of us and I think also a great help for the package maintenance because it's easier if they don't have to go an extra Around around the management as a release team to say oh, please push the package in And frankly speaking this is a large number that sarge has and that edge really also has probably It's almost impossible to have a longer full freeze than this very very limited time We had what also worked at least in our opinion quite well But in the end that's your call to make not ours There's a regular release updates via depth in development to keep all of you in the loop That's also of course helpful for the release team because we have to make a lot of difficult decisions And if you are in the loop and know why we do it, it's easier to just get them done. So it's I think good for all of us And Yeah, something else that we had to do but it worked out fairly well was this time planning where I said, okay We have some late n in the future where we don't know when it is But depending on the state n we will do some actions and that worked out Very well in the end a better as then we had hoped Also a very nice thing for us was that we had experimental for example the whole good gnome to a transition Was done experimental worked and then done an unstable And I've never ever seen such a smooth transition of such a large number of packages into from unstable to testing Um, I think the transition was complete something like 12 days after the first upload And if you remember that it's 10 days to minimum wait time. Well, there's nothing else can be said about it anymore It's really worked very very well Another thing that we had very long was an nmu policy with zero day nmu's allowed Actually, I think that helped keep uh debian as a whole in a very good shape and to say Oh, well packages are first of course a responsibility of the maintainer, but in the end Packages are the possibility of the whole package because a package is the percentage how the packages were good or bad And I think we should continue something like that And in the end all the management that are at least at large was very very successful Of course, there were a lot of glitches that I don't like and then we come to those glitches very soon Well, one of the things that Is that really could have been a bit better was Survey survey said some Only a very few maintenance work with us, but it's really important to remember Don't second guess how of these guidelines are we publish them and debian development now and so we do it for a very good reason Don't just stop on some on a random. I see trying to say can upload a breaking Upload to unstable right now and break a transition with it, but just happened in the past not only once i'm afraid Also, please don't upload a package So they say oh, yes, that's a new major of observation of the library That's not intended for sarge and then you upload it to unstable. That's not good So if you upload anything that's not meant for the next stable release upload it to experimental That's the place that meant to be not too unstable And please don't upload a package if you are right in the middle of a transition right now With the c++ or we were with tiff and if the least says please don't upload then please really mean it don't break the transition with it And something else Actually, everybody should read the well step in develop now and but if you upload a package for a lot of packages Depend on please make sure they really did it at least Especially if the message is more than one week old and we ask please don't do it And there's a lot of other small points, but I think the summary of all of them is if you're a good maintainer and just Doing what you should do communicate with other maintenance in a good way And just speak with the release team so that everything works well And if there's anything you can always ping any of us on irc on a mailing list, that's always okay So just do it if you're unsure and ask us and we will give you the right answers But of course there were also other things which were more on the management point of view which could have worked a bit better The first points that really hit us very bad versus a large number of Unfluous requests we had in the final stage. It was really impossible impossible to read the release at such a point of time And I just said okay at that time some days I just did that been that been released and nothing else anymore Usually read a large number of mailing lists because it was just too many requests to cope with We need to get better at that point definitely Also the base freeze was a bit long. We started with the base freeze in august last year At that time point of time we expected a little bit of help release about december And it was very sensible to make the base freeze because it was needed to get the installer Shaped up finally so it was not a long decision at that point of time But if we would have known what we know now, we probably would have done a bit later Also, there were perhaps a few packages too much in the base freeze I don't really see any reason why we need to base freeze mud for example Just to name one of the examples and we already discussed it. We will improve at that point also one of the questions is Which development packages should be frozen a bit earlier because it's we don't really consider it as fun if The cdbs maintainer makes an upload five days before the final freeze and breaks such a lot of packages building and such Yeah, that's not really funny. So you also probably feel this package Other packages like that paper were not frozen, but the maintainer was truthful enough to not do it Which made the reason because it's part of the of the release team but well their mind So what we also definitely want to have is a version second back step in org so that we can say, okay Which a cbox are actually open inside not to say, okay, which a cbox were either open any distribution Or are uploaded into the maintainer reopened it Actually the code for that is there and I really hope that show that calling managed to Commit it or to make a productive very soon And that will also help us with the very first point because now we had to say oh if you upload an a cbox fix You must send us mail or we won't get it into start for edge We can say if you upload an a cbox fix never mind We will find out by ourselves and that is very much easier for all involved partners to maintain and so the release team Also, we want perhaps a little a little more padding at the end so that it can happen We release too early because it's not really fun to write a mail and say oh actually want to release Day after tomorrow, but we will need another week But of course it's better than to say nothing so we send that mail but Yeah, we should do better Also, we had a really a madness on monday with the deal downloads where everybody tried to find out Where's a mirror so didn't so didn't prevent downloads of the cd images This half hour before we actually released it and that was really awful because the CDs Didn't really install because the mirrors were not pushed You need to do better than that and we definitely need to do better with a final quay of the release and the CDs And one of the things would be so well this time we just said we have the release more or less ready But didn't change the sim link then we Builds these from the spray release status One idea of that would be to say we make everything including changing the sim link on ftp master Builds the CDs and publish afterwards But that would mean for all of you that there will be no deal install about for one week Or so I think we can cope with it and it would be better than have another cd HLO a release but some people probably won't like it and we will have to discuss about that That's the least point of view. It's good from other points of view. We will see Also, we should use more of the code names when we speak about the release Because we could for example have committed to the installer two months ago that just Any case when it installs it just installs security with such updates So we wouldn't have never had such a problem. So we should have perhaps done it and also at other parts Yeah, but we also need we need a bit more console over how britney works because there are things that still don't work For example, if somebody says please update my script of my package. So well, it's fine But I want to say that it waits 20 days and unstable before it goes in So currently I really can't do it. There's only one way to do it So just write in my calendar do it as a hint on this day when I do it We should have a hint to say, okay, this package is okay, but the waiting time is 20 days now Just as an one example Something else What should definitely work a bit better than this time is the security our chef after the release I think one week is okay one month not and I'm better sure that we all are clear on that And so we really work on that. So that's not only the least possibility But as I said before one of the major tasks of the least team is just to Keep those things together speak with everyone involved and it's relevant for the release. So we have to speak with everyone involved Um, there are more things you want to do better than edge It's a very outstanding issues. We really want to make a time-based release. We want to release in december 2006 That's a goal that that we set for ourselves And we already started and making changes Allow us to make some meets the goal One of the most important changes is we don't we have don't have a large list of things that we said Oh that all are release targets. No, we said release targets are as few as possible Of course, we need a new toolchain xorg Well, doc's a main firmware main I don't want to say what's my opinion on it, but we didn't have a choice because the developers voted There were definitely no opinion on it So we have to trust they have to do it Pot stable and orcs. It is a that is the split of the of the mirror in two parts Is in my opinion very very important or well for our understanding is that the ftp must have support to get amt64 in And for us amt64 is literally a release blocker It was very bad. So the release starts us out and it's not possible to release edges out And something else you want to have a secure app But that's almost well uploaded to unstable and I hope the remaining issues are sorted out At least i'm very optimistic that we will Meet these things in time There's a bit larger list of things that we would like to see That so we called it pack release goals That doesn't mean they're unimportant. It just means We are probably it's a moment not holding our brief for them But if it happens that just one or two packages don't comply with them because they'll say two months before release Okay now say a blocker's because We're not holding this target up for one or two late packages Something else that was really very bad for us We have a lot of dependencies between package or the namings especially libraries Transitions if it comes with a built in it was really very bad for us So we must improve on that definitely And currently all packages have to wait to go to testing did all packages are ready and that's Just can be very ugly especially if some nice things come together like well something like tiff lip tiff kda is then related to this gnome and with some other packages It's really ugly and we decided to just keep the old libraries a bit longer in testing Because in this case we can just let the packages just throw in by themselves We don't need to take care of them at all anymore And ensign is actually started to work on the code for this Also something that needs to happen is just more quality assurance and that's a part that's really everybody can join So if you want to work on quality assurance, you're very invited and this is the most important thing because quality assurance Quality assurance qa So if you do it because that makes true in times that everything works And for example, one of the things you want is that every package is automatically tested if it really installs So that if installs and uninstalls that means as a as a as a scripts, okay That's all that they've been worked on But there are a lot of more things one can do and if one has a good idea Please feel free to work on and we'll definitely support it Also one thing we must make sure is we want to have less pain with some specific art Let me just tell you what i mean with that And for example, what has happened this time we had one architecture That from one day to the next all built email just dropped off the net Which is very very bad And then we started to hint at the machines and then I was informed that one machine was somewhere in europe Near a certain city and then I got on irc of Of the irc channel of that regional dibbian Language channel and said okay any of you living near that city. Yes you okay Please go to your car drive to that place pick upset box and install it somewhere with network access or that ammo can Install a build demon on it And frankly speaking that is not the task of the release team I don't want to say that I want less architectures I'm happy with this number of extractions we have and even with more if you have so yeah 50 minutes is that okay That's my last slide already so But so but it can't be the task of the release team to keep up all the architectures If supporters do a good job I'm very happy with it because I like to have more architectures than we have But if they were not so good job, perhaps we just have to say one day. Okay To two possibilities either the developers managed to get for example a second spark built demon up Or we need to add it to the architectures. We don't really care about anymore That's nothing. It's not meant bad But it's it's also even better than it was now because in previous times There was not really a discussion how it's changed and now we really want to say if it's bad We will tell in time so that it can be fixed Yeah spark is actually one of the architectures really very bad about currently So then I think the general impression which architectures are bad and so on which really hurt us are different If you don't mind too much Well, if it's a a question how a man something please say but otherwise I will throw questions after the talk and so there's just four more points on this slide. So okay So and please raise your hand so I can get up to you with the microphone Yeah, well, I think if there are many folks we just Start at this point and go on the other side. So we don't have too long ways So something else we want is a better interaction between the kernel and the installer actually the action was Much better than it was with bootflop is but there's something that can be improved because currently if we do a security update for the For the kernel We need more than I think currently three to four rounds of rebuilding packages and vaginal Still some are installed and the building again because there's a lot of many dependencies And actually what I really would like to have we have one source package You you change the code upload it and you get Ready packages for all architectures just falling out of the build demons because that's why we have build demons And also we need a bit better u-deb handling in britney because currently all packages that produce u-debs That are the packages for the installer are frozen for a similar for one simple technical reason That if we update such a package one one of us needs to to brought an ftp master say please update this package in the u-deb file also Because well should instead what should work automatically because that's not too hard Also we decided to make a checklist with dependencies to say okay If we go into full full freeze for example We need to make sure that we start now and working on the release nodes Because the release nodes are just necessary to be finished when the full freeze is finished And we don't want to have a full freeze much more than five weeks. And so the release really needs to kick off now Also, you want an absolute package for the release nodes right now Because if any manager maintainer makes a change in one of his packages that should be part of the release nodes You should be able to just file a bucket port right now and forget about them And we will be picked up again when the release nodes are prepared. We learned a lot about that A question of understanding what we can avoid we have one more point So then as a last thing we want to communicate better with all developers with other maintainers with other teams And for that reason we want to improve the information on the the least step in our website a bit For example, we won't have a list of current issues of current policies Where for example now it should list please don't upload any package Which is cheap as plus unless you speak with doko before for the So we don't like the transition that would help I think maintainers a lot But we are not at that point yet But to the general question that we were asked quite often are we there yet? Yes, we are with the average there yet We manage it quite well and we will be with with edge in time Okay, so thank you for your attention and now I expect some questions. So who all wants to ask a question now? Okay, I see a lot of questions. Yeah, I will try we can just Then has has already had the keynote question yesterday my other talk. So give it some someone else And I have another and one thing I really would like you as I guess I expect a lot of questions Please don't make co-statements just ask me your question And if there are more detailed questions, we can just continue to talk about them after the talk So that everyone has a fair chance to ask me a question. Thank you all Okay Well assumed can can you yeah assumed the release team would have a really nice dinner and the The food is contaminated by some salmonella and all the people of release team would be Sent to the hospital for fear four weeks Is there any documentation it would help to replace the release team completely? Well, actually I would say I can remember a car drive where all fdp masters was me sitting in the same car when cover No, you know, you don't know carcass in north america Well, actually there is a lot of documentation of course, but on the other hand Well, if Well, we have a lot of people who are not in the release team who know a lot how it works For example, france really helped us a lot and knows a lot how it works The same is true for sobel and for a lot of other people who are just around and help the release team So the best is the worst thing that can happen is some food contamination here, but thanks god the two release managers are not here Well, but a lot of things are documented on the other hand side a lot of things are You learn a lot of things if you do it and one thing is Nobody with good management skills grows on the trees We need actually we need more people who can do good management in debian And I think the release team is one of the teams that works better But of course there's a lot of things that can be improved And well, I think that's a major major answer on it on the other hand Please reconsider at the time where the last step come for the scheduled I was not even a developer. So that was the reason I was not there So it happens quite fast. You can say you can come in. Yes Next question, please It's a different topic as you probably know i'm peter and also from the school linux project We have been using Are still using woody for the schools in norway and one of the issues we have Been able to have been forced to face is the lack of hardware support in the stable release This is a major pain because Sarge will slowly be harder and harder to install on modern hardware. Do you have any ideas on how to address the Stable release hardware support Well, okay, if you just ask for ideas, that's very easy. I have a lot of ideas. Thank you. Thank god. You didn't ask for solutions So, okay, there are two a lot of different things So the one thing is a stable the decision means it is stable. There's a good reason for it And for example, if you say we are a support a new kernel Then we would have to we we need to do secure support also for the kernel There are good reasons to support a new kernel But my information at least is that this would would mean a rebuild of the installer And you can get a lot of fun with it on the other hand side. I don't think it's too bad to say after let's say Half of the time we expect this Release of edge. We add a new kernel set. I'm even coincided Vaguar is a vaguar is a coinciding to do that perhaps via a volatile But please don't side with that because it's not yeah, it's just I'm coincided if it's too to do and I think there's one thing that can be worse than No new kernels that is if we do it bad So but yes, that's as other ideas to go But for example, if you add new kernels you need to add a new you default for example So you need to place some packages around because the current kernel model is that you don't have a stable kernel But they're just well, I would say developments they have shots that you can take or leave whatever you prefer so Yeah Not too nice, but that's a lot way it is. Okay. So the next question Any more questions? So I think now we go over to overfand I had a couple of questions. The first one was You mentioned a pseudo package for the release notes. I'm wondering why don't we just make them a real package? Um, have them, you know, they wouldn't be base necessarily But the bootstrap could install them that way the users would would always have them But that's less important than just you know, unless you really need to be updating the package like Just answer Okay, the answer is please ask fans pop fans fans pop said to us He can size it better that way and so this team just lost the opinion of other people as always I'll repeat Even after the lease Okay Okay, I will I will say Okay, so the answer is I will repeat now. Oh, I was going to do that. Well, thank you. I'm giving the talk. Thank you very much Sorry So fans answer which which of course was the right one is um said The results are updated very late. So I uploaded Even after the archive was frozen because this time we frozen the archive a Saturday around I would say two o'clock you to see so the lease happened on monday Sometimes and the lease notes really were updated a lot of during the week And I can remember at least three calls or something later So if I remember correct, so you see and it would be bad if we have an installed package that has outdated information So that's one of the main of the basic issues other other packages are more Yeah, more time at developers likes the developers of friends are in there so okay, my other question was um One of the things I'd been kicking around was the idea to make uh didn't put in volatile I know you you haven't approved this was I wanted to make a stripped down version of xorg that just builds the xorg server to Put it in volatile because my ass got so burnt over all the complaining That we weren't moving from x86 4.3 even with patches to the drivers to support more hardware Um, and you know, therefore debion was you know fundamentally inferior to a bun two and we all just suck And I know I had the support of the release managers and staying with x for 86 and none of us expected the freeze to go as long Um, if we don't use volatile for this, what do you recommend because it's something I'd like to do I think it's something our users would appreciate um And if somebody's willing to do the work Can we maybe do it in volatile? Um, because it doesn't change external interfaces the way the kernel does Because the kernel guys screw with stuff and break all the all the modules Well, okay, so that would be of course an easy answer because I'm just currently just having my release team head on And volatile is an official service, but I don't think that would be a fair answer So I will now just switch on my or to take on my volatile team head and say, okay Actually, yes, I think it's possible to put it into volatile. We have a volatile two sections One is the section. We say, okay There are only very easy ones like currently glama for glam of data and the other section have a Okay, we can update we can publish packages there, but they're not installed by default So we make extra hint for up to say, okay, not selecting by default Only if the admin selects it you think for that section would be okay But we should perhaps talk about it not Right during the talk about details on that. Okay. Okay. Thank you So Jesus is the next one. I think uh, and then that's one. Yeah, okay Jesus So, uh, the question is is the job of the release team to drop an architecture I mean if the if the job of the release team is not to make phone calls to Place in Europe to to get one box Move it to 100 kilometers and reinstall Why not drop their architecture make the release not have to wait two months And then do a point release one month later when they're But it's okay now a set of different questions. I will cite our different answers So the first one is in my opinion is the task of the release team to make sure So that the release are as good as possible and of course different people have different markers for as good Uh, so some people with the marker to say, okay, um, we want a very Very good predictable as Peter said in his talk about hp for example That are very important thing also in our opinion because not only for companies unpredictable But it's also for our private life unpredictable So well, I will take this weekend off and this and this and this and this that has passed too much So we all need predictable releases. You want all to have as much good architectures as in as possible You want to have as few bucks as possible as fairly working as possible everything else And so in the end the lease team has to set priorities And to say, okay, we have now conflicting priorities and we decide which one wins a bit from losses And I really I really hope that it won't be as time where when I start texture loses But but but but let me just finish that but if that happens that would say there isn't architecture That can't keep up or that breaks us too much. We might say, okay This architecture will stay in testing, but we won't we won't Yeah, we will just ignore it for any purpose of testing migration So that well if it works it works if it doesn't work it doesn't work And if it stays too long in that state Then it will just from the some states and one day perhaps after two months or whatever We'll say, okay, now it's really broken. Nobody picked the task up to the pad. You really kick it out For example, that has even happened in the past facade, but just nobody noticed Because we drop say the support for 80c 86 processors before single reasons New lip see was uploaded with a patch such a device e 486 instructions That's necessary for speed and for compatibility with other distributions So there was no discussion about whether to handle the peck patch and then there was a kernel patch That worked to emulate these but this kernel patch is unfortunately a root hole So we said, okay, there are two ways. I see somebody fixes it or we drop the support And we said that on Debian develop announce I think for three times and nothing happened and we just dropped the support now It still works, but it's not officially supported anymore and that might happen with other architectures And about adding a package of support release. There's something very bad on that because I will tell you why because a great advantage is that Of Debian is with the different architectures. I can say, okay I have to have some broken of some certain version that works on this laptop very well Besides then I go to my arm box and works the same very same version works well on my arm box And if you say you edit it later that probably means there are some problems with the architecture like the toolchain was not ready or so But then you have different packages. So they behave different and we lost much of that I don't I don't say it's not possible to make a snapshot of another architecture But just believe that it's easy possible to add an To add in full architectures a point release is at least problematic. I would say at least problematic and but in the end that's even not so It's a call of the team that of the release team that I'm part We have actually in the release team two different targets. One is the stable release. That's a Martin Schultz. The other is a testing release team where I'm part of And in the end it's a call of joy and if all of you who know him We know that he will say in a much more definite way that this won't happen So I understand the reasons and I really think it's it's not so good to say Oh, we added it sometimes later, but if there's an issue we need to fix it and we need to fix it soon And for example, how should it work if there if you don't have a really a Porter team who keeps care of an architecture and we notice later on that there's a a root hole is a kernel Specific part of that architecture who should fix it if there's no porter team. So if it doesn't work It's very sad to say it but sometimes one of the release team manager has to say there's things that doesn't work Okay, next question please. Yes I might be a bit slow, but I didn't quite get the Explanation why you couldn't update the packet in the release just before you released it The release notes is a packet. I knew the release team can't update the packet in the release. What's happening? Okay, I can I can tell you how the leisurely worked in time with time slots about on This time was Saturday about I guess The 40 you to see you said, okay, you have two packages open Please push them to fdp master right now because the install will start after you did it I de-uploaded them and in And about 10 seconds after set an extra d install run was started to install the packages that we needed an extra Brittany and hold how the britney run was done and after set britney was put off the ground tab so that no more updates Are testing were done So usually the install was done about half an hour too late and then there were some rough checks And then the wallon said, okay city his teams start building your cities right now and from that moment on So the release team can't do anything except say it's so ugly. We un-solid and do the release one month later and we didn't do that That's all There's one point in history where we just say okay go and if I say we said go we can't do it back anymore Is that as the lease notes were updated after this point with the least three important updates That were called to the newsletter so please update the translation because there were Very stupid errors in it Yeah, that's it works And perhaps it might work a bit better if next time we really start This is pseudo package in time so that we have the updates in time But I really doubt it because a lot of issues just came up in the last second It's for example that a very nice debug on sent mail So that if you upgrade this upgraded sent mail with messages still being in the queue The message in the queue will ignore it from sent mail at that point on So first is a per-script to circumvent it We'd notice that I would say Friday evening that there was no chance to re-upload sent mail with a fix for it So we just say we documented the release notes and we had to fix it because it can't be that we say oh Yeah, you updated sent mail you lost just some well 2000 messages. Bad luck Okay, I think we'll have to end And there at least inside again, you can feel free to continue the conversations outside I just let me say some one final thing about that I will now just go back to the to the dorm and whoever wants to speak with me Of course is invited to do it now or at any time later I'm really happy even to discuss about some more technical or more deep into issues that are not possible to discuss here With so many people and thank you all for coming to this talk. Thank you All right, so we need to clear out pretty quickly If I can just make the announcement one more time There's a bag out there for your plastic bottles and cans only You know recyclable ones and we can use the money we get from that to build up our patent portfolio


Instructional design is essential to the development of quality, open and distance learning materials. But what exactly is instructional design? Well, it has a long history dating back to the Second World War and the development of training materials for American military personnel. Academics have spent careers theorizing about instructional design and developing a variety of different instructional design models. All of this has given instructional design a certain mystique that obscures the fact that at its core it really is largely common sense or at least common sense for educators. Instructional design is all about alignment, aligning learning objectives to learning activities and aligning those to the assessment. It means carefully crafting learning objectives at a level appropriate for the knowledge and skills that are being developed, then designing learning activities that help learners to develop their understanding of the content and to develop the skills that are being taught. Teaching is more than just transmitting content and learning is more than just memorizing facts. Learning is about developing one's own understanding of content and integrating it into one's own mental framework. Teaching man is about designing activities that will enable this. All of this activity is what I call instructional design. All too often when teachers or instructors sit down to plan a course they think solely in terms of content or what they want to teach the students. Instructional design forces us to move away from this content-centered perspective to a learning centered perspective. So instead of starting with a question what am I going to teach we start with what do I want my students to learn or what do I want my students to be able to do at the end of this course. Approaching teaching from this perspective helps ensure that everything we do as a teacher is in support of some learning outcome or objective. If we have a clear idea of what we want students to be able to do at the end of a course it guides our selection of content and the kinds of learning activities that we develop. This is what instructional design is all about. Now the key to good instructional design is formulating good learning outcomes. Again there has been a lot written on this topic and often people are overwhelmed with learning objectives to the point of paralysis. It really shouldn't be that way. Writing a good learning objective should be fairly straightforward. It's all about being clear, concise and specific and making sure you have stated the outcome in terms of what the learner will be able to do. It's also important to cover an appropriate range of levels of learning so that you aren't only dealing with basic knowledge acquisition but are covering higher levels of learning when it's appropriate. If the learning objectives are well developed then you will have a much clearer idea of what content needs to be covered and you should be able to think of the kinds of activities that you want the learners to engage in to help them achieve the learning outcomes. And of course doing all of this will help you ensure that your assessment activity is truly measuring the student's achievement of the learning outcomes. Using instructional design also helps us to make appropriate media and technology choices. It's tempting to use a variety of different technologies just to spice things up. But if the technology isn't chosen carefully it can distract, confuse and frustrate learners. By aligning your technology selection to your learning activities and learning objectives you help avoid that as the rationale for using a particular technology will be clear to the learner. Now this is obviously a simplified explanation of instructional design. The mechanics can get quite complex and there are a variety of different methods and tools but underlying all of them is the fundamental process. First specifying learning objectives then selecting content, developing learning activities and finally designing assessment activities that are all aligned and all contribute to the achievement of those learning objectives. It's important to remember too that this isn't a lockstep linear process. Often we will have to cycle back from developing content or activities to revise the objectives or we may find that once we start developing the assessment we realize we've left out something and need to go back and revise some of the content which in turn leads us back to revising the objectives. Instructional design is an iterative process. At its core though it's about moving from a teaching and a content perspective to a learning and a learner perspective.


Who said that Navarra Media was just the new statesman for people who do Keterman and read Mark Fisher? Sometimes we do culture and to prove that point I'm very pleased to be joined by a real-life stalwart of the creative arts, Frankie Boyle. Thank you for joining us. How are you doing? I do read a bit of Mark Fisher, you are. Well, of course you do. I always wouldn't let you on. So Frankie Boyle needs no introduction but I'm going to give him one anyway, the host of Frankie Boyle's New World Order and author of a new title which is out and unbound called The Future of British Politics. So I want to start with this book, this essay. It's called The Future of British Politics. My first thought reading it was that it was really optimistic for you to assume that there would be a future of British politics. I kind of feel sometimes that I'm locked in a car boot while baby boomers slam down the pedal on death drive. So I wanted to ask first, how did you get to this point of grappling with the future? And isn't it inherently optimistic to say that there is one? Oh, sure. I mean, I also sometimes think though that pessimism is a type of optimism. Because like if you didn't think there was hope, why would you be, you know, giving people a pessimistic spiel? It's just another kind of side of optimism. When I used to work in mental health, I worked with a lot of people who were catatonic. And in a way, I think that's like a much more defensible, defensible kind of philosophical position to have. I'm just not going to say anything. This is part. But I actually got into it. I was doing an interview with a guy called Don Parson, who's this really brilliant Scottish poet. He's like my favourite Scottish poet. And when I got to interview him for the show, Don Godlove was a very nervous guy on camera. He doesn't appear on camera a lot. So I was kind of thinking even at the time, we're not going to use this. And he was like, oh, could you write an essay for this thing I've got? And I was really relieved that there was just some quid pro quo where I could go, sure, because I know we're not going to use the thing. I was like, sure. And I saw this real look of relief and almost joy in his face. And I thought, man, this is going to be a long essay. He's got rid of a serious responsibility here. And it was like 15,000 words or whatever. It wasn't ended up in this little bit. I mean, so there's a lot in here.  And I kind of feel like I'm chucking a dart to start anywhere. But I mean, let's start with climate change. And one of the things that you talk about is there's this ambivalency feel towards the climate movement, which is on the one hand, it is the most worthy cause that's going. And on the other hand, it is very white, very middle class. And I was thinking about where that discomfort comes from. And I was wondering, is it essentially that climate activists are in a state of denial about what it will take to force decarbonisation? And that's not just the XR stuff of inviting cops to embrace their sacred yoni or whatever, but just the fundamental idea that our democracy is capable of delivering a break with the interest of capital. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a very good point. I mean, what I don't really get into in the book is I try and keep it optimistic, because we're getting into an end game here of maybe the next 10 years, certainly the next 15 years could be absolutely vital to whether life survives on Earth. And maybe it's, I mean, like you say, maybe it's too late a time in history for nihilism. I did a lot of nihilistic shows and stuff in my early days. And I kind of think now there just isn't time for that. So perhaps the climate movement has got to look at things like that of going, you know, these are these are big decisions and big principles that people might have to compromise on. For example, is it, is it too late to build up a proper left media that's going to challenge mainstream media ideas about decarbonisation? Do you need to enter into like mainstream media organisations? And, you know, the same as political parties, obviously. I mean, it better not be too late. Otherwise, we're fucked. But you know, there is that thing, isn't there? We're like, I was watching some of your videos today, and I'm quite excited to be doing this. By the same time, if I went into channel four and you were there ahead of factual, I would be like, Oh, fuck, we could really get something done here. We could really do something important. You know, I think people in the left have got to think about that when you make decisions about how they spend their time. You know, people who talk now about making new political movements or whatever, do you need to take over old ones? Do you need to try and take over or democratise existing institutions? But I suppose to take that point, I mean, I would obviously love to be channel four's head of factual because, you know, maybe I could afford a TV licence then. But it assumes that the left's lack of representation in these institutions is a product of disengagement rather than exclusion. Oh, no, no, I mean, there's exclusion is exactly the word. I mean, they used to talk about in terms of representation in television, and I think it's exclusion is a much better word to use. And there's no excuse for it. I mean, there should be quotas for all kinds of things imposed on Britain's media institutions, I think. I mean, I think that the one quota which would make a huge difference is in the highest echelons of public life. You should only have 7% of those jobs go to privately educated people. Yeah, okay. I mean, I think that's a good start.  And it's just not allowed for people who aren't white. I mean, and there's also that contradiction there because at the same time, people of colour and in particular working class people of colour are the engines of, you know, Anglophone pop culture, right, in Britain and America. What do you have left when you don't have people of colour? I mean, don't even have country music because we did that too. Yeah. I mean, David Graeber called Reston, he had a really interesting theory about all this, which was that culture originally comes from people trying to resist civilisation. So the warped culture comes from the early German societies under Friedrich the Great when they're trying to resist the French engines of civilisation. So civilisation starts off as this kind of like hegemonic idea and culture is the thing that resists that. So you can see that sometimes in our culture where you see like the reason it's difficult for me to get the atmosphere of a comedy club onto the BBC, for example, is that comedy clubs are to some extent set up to resist the ideology of the BBC and they're kind of two different competing things. I mean, I think you have an interesting element of co-option on the part of the BBC when it came to pirate radio. So on the one hand you had the BBC being the kind of defensive ball walk against pirate radio and then on the other hand you had them taking all their best DJs, particularly for so-called urban music because they were the only people who were in touch with that scene. Sure and then you have Lenny Henry at the time like being a completely mainstream comedy character in a sitcom as a pirate radio DJ. But then again, as David Mitchell said one time, you've got to think of the BBC more as a warring federation. People think of it as a monolith and if we talk about the things that left could do better in the media, sometimes it's maybe to understand institutions and some of the cross currents that are within them a little better.  I think I would be if I didn't think it was like a really late point in history. You know, this is where we are. I mean so one of the things that you start the book by saying is that in order to grapple with the future you've got to understand the past and that's something which Britain has never really done. And it seems to me that the collective common sense in this country is that Britain didn't have an empire but if it did it was a very good one and you should be grateful that it abolished slavery and so why do you think it is that unlike countries like Germany we've not been able to deal with the bloodiness of our recent history? I think to some extent it suited us not to. My parents are Irish, they're from Donegal, so I grew up in the whole suppression of Ireland by Britain and one of the things you grow up knowing is that the news isn't true, the news isn't literally true and most British people don't have that. Britain's quite a has a strong streak of conformity in it as a culture that's pushed on people and it has a lot of it's always had a kind of love of the knobs and a love of the elites deeply engraved, it's a culture and a lack of shame about that and even today like if you go that essay at the start where I talk about colonialism and stuff, it was originally an essay for an artist called Rachel McLean, she had a guidebook for her exhibition and I went to research it and get some books on British history and there's just this absolute wall of biographies of Churchill and Nile Fergus and all that kind of stuff and then I was looking for a Carla's book and eventually I found a Carla's book which is like one of the best books about British history in the last 10 years and I found it in the music section and there's a copy there and that's something that I would think of as a big book that's sold really well instead of big empire but compared to like the monoliths of culture that's pushed at people, it's hard to get past that sometimes I mean I think you're right that there's this whole culture industry propping up the sort of idealised version of empire and I was wondering if that's also itself a kind of product of trauma because Britain didn't really disengage from a hierarchy of race and of culture which placed Britain at the top of it and the trauma is that Britain got its arse handed to it by the people it defined as inherently inferior and then it also needed those people to run its welfare state and to provide it with a future after the end of empire. Yeah and I mean also perhaps the continuing situation in Ireland which was for various reasons including that the security services wanted to use it as a kind of training ground and playground really and perhaps that allowed British people to maintain some ideas of empire and then you know Falklands war in the early 80s allowed them to continue that so it's been a really long disengagement from the idea that we were a world power I mean I never learned about Ireland at school ever and most of the time I came to it I think was studying a Brian Frill play dancing at Lunar Sir but there was absolutely no integration of that bit of our history into my educational it's not as if I learnt about the other aspects of empire either it was sort of Tudors question mark question mark question mark Victoria question mark question mark question mark the internet happened and that was my historical education. Where I learnt about these things funnily enough was from my mum and from my grandmother who had a really keen sense of Irish history because there was a sense of that imperial history was our imperial history. Sure and also I mean I had a similar thing with my dad I learnt about American civil rights stuff and he was writing to Martin Luther King and I'd read like Malcolm X his autobiography when he did with Alex Haley I'd read that when I was like 12 or something because they saw that as part of the same imperial history as well although with Irish people it got quite confused and it's kind of like the civil rights movement leads up to John F Kennedy he's like the culmination of all that work to them sometimes I mean I sort of wonder about the extent to which here in the British left we rely on a distinctly American understanding of race at the expense of understanding our own empire and so one of those things is that we think of America's racial hierarchy as our racial hierarchy whereas ours is a lot more kaleidoscopic and a lot more weird and it depends on where your foot is in the empire at any given time to work out what's going to be the sort of salient hierarchy there I mean is that something which you find is perhaps a lack in the left is that we're still so different to America Yeah as you see particularly in the understanding of race there's no excuse for because like you know we're much less racially segregated here and have been historically do you know what I mean I remember being at uni and staying in Hansworth in Birmingham and it just being this pocket of white people who were the students who you know I'm an occasional Asian person who just didn't interact with like all these black people you met every day you know so it's taken an effort well really to not learn about race I mean I always found that that was something really annoying about the studies on residential segregation in this country is that it took really diverse areas like Hansworth or Tottenham and went oh that's a segregated neighbourhood except it's not because you've got West Africans living next door to Caribbean's living next door to Romanians living next door to Siletes it's pretty diverse it never takes to look at like Bath or Harrogate or any of these like very wealthy white mono cultures and goes that's a segregated population. Yeah and coming from Scotland it is pretty much a mono cult well when I was growing up it was a mono culture and it's changed about now I mean much for the better. Who would have believed conspiracy stuff would end up drifting like completely in sync with the alt-right like so when I you know I'm a lot older than you when I started getting into conspiracy stuff in the 90s that was where you first found like alternative information there were these things published the disinformation guides and they got right by like Howard Zinn and you know various kind of like alternative thinkers Noam Chomsky and it's the first place I encountered loads of stuff and it was just an alternative to you know what you've been fed by mainstream media and now it's turned into this they've completely bought into the far right Well I've been thinking about this a lot and one of the things is that alt-right have done very cannily is appropriated the language of minoritarian grievance and have applied it to what were the dominant identitarian signifiers of being white or of being male or being heterosexual and so on and so forth and so I think that's a part of that is that they looked at the way in which the left was able to tell a story of marginality and appropriated it yeah I mean I think there's there's other things going on there so there's an interesting talk James Baldwin does called a rap about race I was listening to again recently and I've forgotten that but he talks in it about Huey Newton has this thing where polarization isn't necessarily a bad thing for them at that point in the civil rights movement this may be 1970, 1969, 1970, polarization isn't necessarily bad because polarization brings people to your door and you know they enter the civil rights movement because you know society's getting very one side or the other whereas now I think for left-wing people polarization often drives them online where they can feel connected without really achieving very much or without making any genuine connection whereas the alt-right are still very focused on recruitment like they're still very focused on how do we get this person into the organization I mean I would agree with that and certainly Twitter provides me with an illusion of agency which probably has got a lot to do with self soothing as much as it does to do with me feeling I'm doing useful communicating but maybe also the reason why the left hasn't necessarily been able to use polarization to catapult itself into office the same way in which the right has is because the right are very clear at the moment they want to destroy liberal democratic institutions whereas the left is more ambivalent about that on the one hand they want to transform these institutions whether that's how parliamentary democracy works or the civil service or the BBC whereas the right just go no we want to destroy this the left sees that those are also homes and bastions of some values that they also share and so they don't know if they want to destroy it or not whereas there's a clarity of purpose of the right it's a very good position on the internet it's very short and very easy to understand you know it's not really about nuance of online communication I think like if I could say something practical I think the trap left when people fall into online is they forget that although they know that people are arguing with them in bad faith a lot of people who are observing the argument don't know that see that quite a lot where people are kind of lured into essentially platforming these people I mean it's that thing of if you wrestle a pig you both get covered in shit and the pig enjoys it yeah and I mean some of those people have to have to get interactions to exist and you see very quickly so I have people like what's he called Lawrence Fox 19th century he'll occasionally dangle his line in my water but if I don't react he's got to move on to the next one really quickly because they need the engagement to survive he sent me an email asking if I'd debate him on his show and my response was well the first response had was I've got coronavirus but I was thinking about it and I was like why don't I want to do this it's not because I think that he'll be hostile I actually think he'll probably be incredibly polite and courteous and all the rest of it because that self demonstrates the point about who's reasonable and who's unreasonable but the reason why I don't want to do it is because I just think I don't want to need you for my political existence I'm not the photo negative of the values that you hold it's actually completely different you know you want a debate in these very narrow identitarian terms and that's how you constitute political meaning but that's not what I want at all it's such a narrow focus that they have things that are in bad faith as well they're not particularly interested in free speech most of them they're not actually classical liberals unless you took a very absolute definition of that in the sense that they don't see anything wrong with the transatlantic slave trade yes classical liberals but if you took the sense that classical liberals didn't really believe in democracy they qualify but they're not really they're authoritarian ultimately I mean so one of the things that I wanted to ask you about the book specifically is that you identify quite a few things as British politics so you talk about you know Brexit you talk about Jeremy Clarkson and all these signifiers of this kind of reaction reimpulse which I think are the sort of dominant mobilizing effect in electoral politics at the moment but how much of that is British and how much of it is England specifically having a nervous breakdown? A lot of it is England and I try and sort of differentiate in the book by having there's kind of like a thousand words or so at the end about Scotland's role in colonialism and its complexity and all that kind of stuff and where that comes from but yeah a lot of it has to do with the kind of end of empire English psyche starting to finally get really pressure tested by reality and it manifests itself in a lot of different horrific cultural ways I mean because you talk about the S&P being like the political wing of the managerial class another way I've heard them described is Blair without the war but they pulled together the kind of electoral coalition that Labour can only dream of so Metropolitan centres you know former industrial heartlands they presented nationalism as a progressive cause and you know they're offering Scottish people way out of a toxic relationship with Westminster and do you think that they are showing the left what they've got to do which is embrace the death of unionism really? Well apparently I mean I would sort of dispute although I'm net pecking really that they've made nationalism progressive and that it's almost not nationalism like I'm not saying that because I'm an S&P voter and I'm not but they have managed to create some kind of brand some kind of civic nationalism that lacks almost any cultural element whatsoever and if you look at similar movements if you look at what happened in Ireland before 1916 or whatever all this stuff is preceded by cultural revival whereas the S&P is a managerial ultimately centrist group that has really no interest in culture it sort of gives them tremendous advantages sometimes so do you remember like there's all this trouble with you know Corbyn supporters online that managed to burst into not just anti-Semitism but a bunch of different scandals over the course of Corbyn's leadership. The S&P had that in the referendum campaign do you remember Cybernats front page news here for maybe three or four days and they just killed it because it was so I mean they just totally disassociated themselves from it and it was so obvious that actually they do dislike the demotic elements of their coalition like it's so obvious that they did want those people to shut up that it kind of killed it as a story so it has certain advantages but I think ultimately I mean their growth commission thing is incredibly right when and probably not going to work. Well I mean I suppose it's a reflection of Westminster politics that a kind of you know Blair right third wayism looks like a lifeline out of authoritarian nationalist populism. I don't think they would like to Blair or something like that really it's more that because of the way the Scottish state came into being and of course the British state came into being that they would see their role in running independent Scotland as being a kind of a version of the British state I think it's sort of more subtle than you know they would probably see themselves more in the line of like centrist European politicians. I mean so I want to move on just a little bit because I've always wanted to talk to you specifically about the politics of comedy and that's something I've wanted to talk to you about even before I've got involved with foreign media because my favourite thing to do is to pick at jokes until not only they're not funny anymore but even thinking about comedy is really unenjoyable and that's because I did literature at uni man I love that stuff. So like one of the things you talk about in the book is that British satire is in this kind of Horatian tradition it's kind of florid it's indirect it's pulling its punches so in a way it's playing by the rules of the courts and I would agree with that but I would also wonder if in saying or equating that more hard-edged juvenileian tradition with straight talking there's a danger in that because you kind of end up thinking that cruelty and crassness is in itself radical anti-establishment. Yeah I mean I don't see people writing in a Horatian style or an elliptical that you know that style which actually comes as much from PG Woodhouse as anything and I don't see them as pulling their punches necessarily you know I think Marina Hyde's very incisive satirist I think David Mitchell can be a very incisive guy who writes columns and you know so I don't think that necessarily means you need to pull stuff it's just that it sort of has ended up being phrased in that way because it feels more comfortable when they feel that only certain people are going to get things. I mean I was going to say really it's a reflection of a class register isn't it and I find myself doing it when I'm writing is that I start doing a kind of Marina Hyde thing because I want it to be recognised as legitimate witty political insight. I mean the rule of class in comedy is very rarely talked about but I think it's notable say like most of the big working class comedians who have like been in the alternative tradition in my tradition they kind of sell themselves as a kind of savant or natural and you know Billy Conley makes it all up, Johnny Vegas makes it all they don't like these are things they have learned. Billy Conley is actually improvising with structure you know which is a cerebral talent but for him to sell himself to Britain is someone with this incredibly intellectual talent really that nobody else has ever really improvised with structure as a stand-up in that way is a really difficult sell so instead it's just a natural gives this funny in the shipments or whatever. I mean so one of the things that I was thinking about in terms of the relationship between politics and comedy is that I think that your comedy has changed and I wonder if that's because the politics of the time has changed you know perhaps today all the material would be criticized for punching down rather than up and do you think that your material has changed because of upswing in you know the politics of racial presentment and a kind of you know men's rights activists you know backlash against feminism and stuff like that. Well various things there first of all I don't really think punching down is a very useful term. I think it's one of those things people say because you know it's caught on because it sounds good. If you think about how these things actually work see there's like a supermarket wants to build some terrible new building beside of your local primary school and you get involved in the campaign against it and all that stuff and all the trouble it's going to cause right. If you were coming to write a satire about that you know as a player and all or whatever you're as well writing about the people that are in the campaign as you are writing about the supermarket because the supermarket like any big corporation has systems of self-criticism you know it has ways of storing self-criticism and learning from it whereas famously most like local engagements most political movements all have to start from the first principles again don't they forget all the lessons that were learned the last time people tried to stop the supermarket from coming so to an extent like that's punching down isn't it you're writing about the people who don't have power I just don't think it's really a kind of serious possession but my stuff has changed partly because it's too late a point in history but it's also odd for me because now people say to me oh I can see what you were getting at I can see what all that nihilism was about and you know and some of the bigger comedians in the world now are doing stuff that was kind of of the tone of the things that I used to do I sort of think we're just far too far along the road for for you know nihilism I mean I might inclined to agree with you that the idea of punching up versus punching down is limited really really limited and I think that the left tries to resolve the contradictions in errant within comedy to try and make it simple not and you've got that really uncomfortable place where the politics of liberal solidarity breaks down and the thing that I always think of is Richard Pryor when he's at the Hollywood Bowl and first he's the only person who's brave enough to talk about what they're all there to talk about which is essentially the defense of gay rights and he's the only person he talks about gay sex and then because of his anger at being treated in a reprehensible way because he's black he sees the way other black artists are being treated he also then uses homophobic slurs and in his defense of himself he says I wanted to test you to your motherfucking soul and so I wonder do you see yourself within that space of you're within these contradictions and you're opening them up rather than closing them down this is like James Baldwin's thing where he says really I think we applied to Richard Pryor which he says the job of the artist is to complicate every battle I quite like but I wouldn't really see myself in that tradition anymore I think I thought I was doing that at the time but now like looking back what bothers me about it is like I had lots of really great anti-war stuff I had lots of really great anti-misogyny stuff I had lots of really great anti-racist stuff I was an anti-racist stuff up here since I was like a teenager and that kind of got buried in a wave of nihilism and kind of like grossed out stuff and it's a lot to ask audiences to unpack that and go oh he's been sincere here when he talks about the Iraq war and then probably this bit about wanting to kill a bunch of celebrities as he went around and you know that's a lot to ask of the crime I suppose that's also that thing of is everyone laughing for the same reason and I think Dave Chappelle talked about this when he was doing a bit for a sketch show which required him to be in blackface and he saw a white member of the crew laughing in a way that made him feel uncomfortable and so I always wonder about comedians and how they think about their own responsibility for the manner in which other people are laughing is that something which you can hold yourself to be responsible for? You can try to be as responsible as you can so I used to like workshop stuff I used to do this place called the Henin Checkings in Islington which I hope will reopen after all this but it's just above a pub where it was like kind of a workshop almost so it stopped and I go you realise there that I'm you know I'm against that character in the joke you realise this is a bit right and I would sort of try and figure out and some stuff would get dropped from there because you're like oh yeah that's working but for maybe the wrong reasons and so on so I mean you've got a responsibility to do that I think I mean I suppose one of the things that I found really interesting about this political moment we're in now is that comedy and the culture of comedy being litigated as a political terrain so you've got this whole thing of on the BBC there are too many left-wing comics and you've got this thing from right-wing comedians where it seems to me that they're constantly hectoring their audience to find them funny and so you've got this kind of culture around certain right-wing comedians where it's the same joke about I identify as a I don't know a fucking computer monitor or whatever and the sense of and if you don't laugh you're amongst this you know evil band of the woke which puts you outside of this audience do you think that there is a possibility for comedy to be a shared political terrain or is it always going to be contested is it always going to be a sort of politically antagonistic space in which you're essentially trying to punch the other side out of their place no I mean I think they do make like they do make shows for right-wing people but they're you know Mrs Brown's boys and you know McIntyre and stuff like that because literally a lot of right-wing people don't think that you should be making jokes about a lot of the subjects they talk about so even like COVID even if you do a joke about Boris Johnson getting COVID you think that be relevant in our society but people are like you shouldn't joke about things like that so the things that are made for right-wing viewers and there's lots of them but they're largely apolitical and I think a lot of those right-wing people are shit but a lot of them when you talk to them they don't want to be on TV so this is a bit of a pose and this is a bit of a kind of early salvo in the culture war because they know that their stuff TV's regulated you know there's an off-con like so some of those people I won't mention their names I don't want to give them the publicity but like if they went and did what they're putting up on their Facebook page or their YouTube channel on the BBC the BBC would get fined like the regulator would step in and an off-con would like find them and like an off-con can like withdraw your license I mean it's a proper regulator it's not like the press so those people aren't actually interested in being on television they're interested in being online and that's what they're really worried about they're worried about people withdrawing their YouTube page or taking their Twitter down or taking away from their ability to monetize incels that's what they're into I mean I want to sort of take this point about new media and what it drives in terms of political cultures and one of the things that you talk about in the book is that conspiracy thinking is an outgrowth of new media and I'd agree with you there in a very big way but I'd also put it down to the fact that there has been a debasement of the public sphere and it's due to and no small part of the behaviour of establishment media outlets themselves and I know you work for the BBC I'm not trying to get you to talk yourself into a redundancy but how do you deal with the fact that there has been a degradation of the public sphere and part of what that's meant is that people seek out more and more marginal outlets in order to deal with a breakdown of trust in legacy outlets First of all I don't know how much trust there should have been in legacy outlets so I can certainly remember growing up not thinking all this reporting is really fair and balanced, terrestrial channels which is what I grew up with. I think you've got to look at the broader degradation of culture which is like the education system being run down austerity running down lots of support systems for people from before that from people being utterly marginalized from mainstream culture from the lack of representation from everybody including the BBC there's a much broader more pervasive degradation of culture than simply news media bias which is there but I think has always been there I think for me my first big memory of the BBC was the run up to the Iraq war I was about 11 then and I remember watching this stuff and feeling that it wasn't true and my feeling of it not being true was probably because my mum was very staunchly anti-war and so the story that I was hearing was something else but do you think that that trust can be rebuilt through perhaps diversifying newsrooms you have people who are from working class backgrounds who are from communities of colour and are telling those stories or do you think it's too far gone? No absolutely I think you can democratize them as well like you can have news teams like the editor and so on you know why not there's all kinds of different things that you could do to try and save those situations but like that you've also got to face up to the fact that these things aren't monoliths and you're like well I don't like that better than news coverage but at the same time I'm not going to throw under the bass the person who did like we were looking through clips for Yemen for the show we're trying to do something about Britain's arms sales to Saudi Arabia and we're like there'll be nothing this isn't covered by the mainstream media but actually the BBC and ITV oddly enough had like three or four brilliant reports about it and that's someone really sticking the neck out and reporting on the ground you know from Yemen to get these things broadcast by these institutions so you know I don't know that it's first time to Saudi Arabia. There's also a sense that the complaints about coverage are sometimes really complaints about audience engagement so there is stuff that's being made about Yemen or there is stuff being made about Syria but there isn't enough audience engagement for there to be you know wall tall coverage of it in the same way that there would be about safe Brexit for instance. Sure and often there isn't enough audience engagement for me to get it on you all the order so when we do in front of a live crowd you've got to be really careful how you build those items to bring the audience along with you because if it really doesn't work it will just end up being you know a five minute bit instead of a 10 minute bit. I mean so how do you do that how do you create that buy-in with an audience with material that they're not necessarily familiar with or invested in. So like in that case for example we might start an item about tech and it might end up being about weapons and it might end up being about British weapons sales and so on and you can bring people on that journey from where they've seen a funny robot to where they've seen a sinister drone to where they're actually getting into some worthwhile politics. But part of part of the frustration of this job which is part of the job is that sometimes you can get two stages along that or you can get one stage along that and you've got the funny robot item and it ends up looking about now but you you know as long as you keep trying you will eventually get some of that stuff out. It's the Samuel Beckett thing with fail better, fail again. Yeah. So also in the book you talk about the Labour Party and what the Labour Party once took for granted the existence of class consciousness and that's been totally eroded and I would perhaps add to that that one of the greatest errors of Corbinism was that it behaved as though hopelessness hadn't already congealed into just outright cruelty amongst those voters that were switching from red to blue and this is a cultural question more than one of political strategy and it's a question of can the left succeed when it's appealing to values that aren't dominant within the electorate anymore. Can you appeal to solidarity when actually one of the motivating factors for people is I don't mind if life is worse as long as it's not a bit better for these people who I deem undeserving? Well I mean if I could answer that in a way that sounds like I'm trying to avoid the question. I think you need to update the concepts I think that's more what it's about. The idea of solidarity to me comes from all kinds of linguistic cues that I would have had so solidarity is when they brought round a box for the minor strike in our school and our teacher said you should give something to this and this is why it explains what's happening with the minors so that's practical solidarity. Now in the online age there's a committee called Joe Wells who said solidarity is now just left-wing thoughts and prayers and we have to reinvent it in some way that it actually practically means something to people in the way that that cup going round meant something. I think that's true of loads and loads of concepts in the left so people talk about virtual packet lines and stuff now and you're like we can't have a virtual packet line because a big point in the packet line was you saw who was crossing the packet and it was a way of knowing what was going on it was data essentially so maybe we need to think of ways of re-creating these concepts in some other way that they would appeal to people and so you see things like now in mutual aid and stuff like that that seem to me like a recreation of practical solidarity. I mean to sort of loop back round to the beginning where we were talking about pessimism and optimism do you think that this is essentially the source of your optimism and belief in the power of human sociality of existing within a network of obligations and responsibilities but also affections and that that's what you appeal to when everything is very shit and that's the seed of resistance. And also the capabilities of people and people are incredible some of the things that people can achieve are amazing and some of the things you know I've known addicts in my life are some of the things that they've achieved which seems surreal if I even stated them so there's all of that and why can't we do that as a society but I think we do have to do that with some message of optimism you do have to offer people particularly coming out COVID whenever that happens you have to offer them a completely different road map that has possibilities inherent in it you know and I think to an extent yes cynicism can undermine that maybe I'm a big part of that cynicism I mean last question then to end on a less cynical note is what's the last thing that made you feel hopeful I get quite regular hope from I used to do a lot of talking to people I mentioned this at the end of the book I used to do a lot of talking to people in my DMs who were like addicts usually alcoholics and referred them to various services but also just talking to them and there's actually something that's a real release in social media where you don't if this conversation goes wrong you don't really have to deal with anything there's no fallout to it you can actually just be honest to people there's no hour of dancing around I think you should go and seek therapy or you should go to an AA or something like that you can just do it and all of those interactions give me a lot of hope but I've noticed that under COVID people have stopped doing that I don't think there's a lot of people trying to give up substances or drink which is pretty sad so there you go I didn't actually have been caught off for after hours I mean you took me on such a journey there you like carried me up and just a drop for me at the end I tell you a good one I did have a guy wrote to me I guess you would call them men's rights activists but I don't think he would have seen himself like that it's like 2021 this guy and he's a student and he had a huge argument with a girl as he described her about feminism I don't think he would have even known to call it feminism but all this new woke rubbish and I did explain to him that he was a misogynist and that it was going to ruin his life I was able to explain to him in detail exactly the ways I'd seen that ruin people's lives and he went and sought help so even for something as abstract as that there are points where we can catch ourselves and go I'm on the wrong path here and maybe as a society we can do that as well but it's hopeful I think sometimes reminding yourself that communication has a point and you're not just screaming into the void it's possible to connect with people in a way which fulfills their emotional needs in quite a profound way that's hopeful so I reckon that's a good note to end it on before you say anything which drives me into despair ha ha ha