+
Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
+packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found. I use
+ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
+But I might be wrong.
+
+
According to
+the popcon
+results for spl-linux, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
+0.53% of the population, with the package installed. As far as I know
+the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
+on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
+installation on Linux in Debian. In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
+the ZFS feature is already available, and there
+the popcon
+results for zfsutils show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
+the population. So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.
+
+
But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
+announced
+in April 2015 that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
+cleared, the package is still not in Debian. The package is again in
+the NEW queue. Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
+debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
+to give up. The current status can be seen on
+the
+team status page, and
+the
+source code is available on Alioth.
+
+
As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
+my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
+packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
+accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
+to help out the team. This was the background for my blog post about
+creating,
+updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically, and I
+used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
+copyright file. It is not very easy to check every one of the around
+2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
+right. If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
+find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.
+
+