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Bdale Garbee elected Debian Project Leader

Posted by michael on from the hardly-any-hanging-chad dept.

Daniel Stone writes "In results released by Project Secretary Manoj Srivastava today, Bdale Garbee was elected Project Leader ahead of Raphael Hertzog and Branden Robinson. Congratulations Bdale! And no CmdrTaco, the debs are not (quite) yet ready, but they *are* very close." The elections page has more information.

21 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe Woody will be released soon... by NewbieSpaz · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm glad that the elections are over, maybe Woddy will be released as stable now, and I can get a nice new 'unstable' debian box going!

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    Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
    1. Re:Maybe Woody will be released soon... by Ed+Avis · · Score: 2, Offtopic

      As someone who knows nothing about Debian... perhaps they should use a different method for deciding their release schedule. OpenBSD has a regular release every six months, LaTeX every twelve months. Both of these have in common with Debian that they are a collection of packages from different sources. There's no way that Debian can plan and organize XFree86, Linux, gcc, Apache etc etc to all work to a single release cycle - they are completely out of phase with each other. Nothing wrong with that. But given this situation, the best release strategy is surely to pick an arbitrary date and go with whatever is available at that time. Debian does put a lot of effort into finishing each distribution once the deadline is known, but IMHO the release date should be known right from the start, as in 'it's always the fifteenth of August'.

      Or even every week - 'It's Friday, it's six o'clock, and it's Debian New Release Time!'. That might be taking it a bit far.

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      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    2. Re:Maybe Woody will be released soon... by dasunt · · Score: 2

      As far as I understand, Debian is based on stability and a free software mentality. Which means that it won't sacrifice stability for the latest release. This can be frustrating, especially to non-debian users, but, on the other hand, I will attest that their stable package is rock solid. Even their testing package is pretty good. Unstable isn't bad, but does have the habit of breaking every so often.

      There are other distros that cater to those who want shiny things, or the latest and greatest. Debian caters to those who want stability. Don't fault them for that.

    3. Re:Maybe Woody will be released soon... by tps12 · · Score: 2
      Maybe they should switch codenames...

      I wouldn't want to download anything related to "release woody".

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      Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
  2. Platform by rubinson · · Score: 5, Informative

    His platform makes a good read: http://www.debian.org/vote/2002/platforms/bdale

  3. Offtopic by awptic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But there are .deb's for kde3 ready (*very* beta though) at
    http://www.geniussystems.net/KDE3%20Experimental/
    Many thanks to WhizNDR from #debian-kde on opn for many hours of work getting these ready :)

    1. Re:Offtopic by 56ker · · Score: 2

      The files are also mirrored here.

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      Video Game cheats, hints a
    2. Re:Offtopic by damiam · · Score: 2, Informative

      KDE 3 will not be in Woody. This is in no way related to the lack of packages. Packages could have been released the day KDE3 came out and it still wouldn't be in Woody, because it's a brand-new .0 release without much testing and doesn't belong in the "stable" distribution.

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      It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  4. Bdale... by xcomputer_man · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...for the perplexed, is actually a short form of "Barksdale", and is pronounced as "Bee-Dale".

    I like interesting names like that.

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    Am I a hipster-doofus?
  5. Congratulations! by Enry · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I hope that your leadership takes a better stance on things like QA testing. Woody often has very simple bugs that would have been found had even the simplest of QA tests been done before submitting the package. One of the better examples was a permission problem that took three weeks (!) to solve!

    exim-tls bug

    Saying that woody is for testing purposes is one thing, since I can accept occasional severe bugs that don't show up for a while. But simple install problems should be found BEFORE the .debs are submitted.

    1. Re:Congratulations! by mal0rd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I believe the problem is that the unstable packages recieve too little testing before being thrown into woody. Since debian stable is very outdated typical desktop users probably all want to run at list testing. So packages with bugs that make them worse then their predecessors or have a simple problem like you pointed out should stay in unstable.
      Only when the project is considered fairly-stable should it go into testing. That's what unstable is for.

  6. And the Debian Planet article by evil_one · · Score: 2, Informative

    Even less informative than /. for a change, but hey. http://www.debianplanet.org/article.php?sid=650

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    Desperation is a stinky cologne
  7. Already? by Decimal · · Score: 3, Funny

    Shouldn't we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide who to elect?

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    Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
    1. Re:Already? by Shiny+Metal+S. · · Score: 2

      Erection, release woody... I sometimes wonder if Debian shouldn't be called Devian instead.

      But seriously, Debian is my OS of choice, I run it on all of my boxes and I can always depand on Debian. Hell, my Potatoes was up for years without a single crash! Soon Woody will power my mission critical boxes.

      (note to self: do not say "my potatoes was up for years" again)

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      ~shiny
      WILL HACK FOR $$$

  8. Re:Debian's too political by Hiro+Antagonist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Politics are a necessary evil for *any* group of people; after all, the political process is simply a means for resolving differences. In most technical organizations, the political structure is that of a theocracy (all worship Lord Ballmer, ohm...ohm...ohm...), an oligarchy (most companies, where the decisions are made by a select few at the top of the food chain), or a monarchy (where there is one chief who calls all the shots).

    Politics really are everywhere, even if you don't want to recognize them as such.

    I'm relieved to see that Debian is embracing a majoritarian democratic model, where the developers choose their leadership, instead of vice-versa, because it keeps Debian moving in the same direction as the community it serves. Furthermore, from what I've seen of the Debian political process, it really is quite civil compared to corporate infighting. After all, if you disagree with Debian, you're free to resign from the project; if you tick off your boss, you get to re-discover the joys of a college diet...

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    I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy .sig.
  9. Re:Uhhhhhh.... by Russ+Nelson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    *You* can call him Barksdale Garbee the Third if you wish, but the rest of us call him Bdale.
    -russ

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    Don't piss off The Angry Economist
  10. "Hello... by Lethyos · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...this is Barksdale Garbee and I pronounce 'Bdale' as 'Bee-Dale'."

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    Why bother.
  11. Re:Debian's too political by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...they used proportional representation, I always thought.

    Actually, they used Condorcet's method, which is superior to all other single-winner voting methods (trust the Debian project to get something like this right!). In any case, *no* voting method which yields a single-winner can be a form of proportional representation.

    For an explanation of Debian's excellent method of choosing Project Leaders, see:

    http://www.electionmethods.org/CondorcetEx.htm

    Alex Berkman

  12. Re:Well that's a relief by Wolfier · · Score: 2

    LOL Same here!!! I read "Barbie elected Debian Project Leader"...amen, looks like lack of sleep can lead to serious mental disorders...

  13. A TCP/IP veteran by isdnip · · Score: 2

    Bdale's election was a real blast from the past! In the mid-1980s, a bunch of us ham radio types were trying to get TCP/IP running on packet radio. Phil Karn (KA9Q) wrote a DOS program called "NET" which implemented the stack, a chat-style TELNET, FTP, SMTP and POP. Of course there were many variants and distros. The core maintainer of the code base was Bdale.

    It's quite analogous, I think, to what Linus (Phil's role) and the various distro-maintainers (Bdale's role) do today. So Bdale is in that sense uniquely qualified.

    And while Russ Nelson didn't say so (and he was another important player in the NOS/NET project), Bdale's real first name is Arthur. But I didn't tell you. ;-)

  14. Voting System by AmirS · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I am impressed by the way the voting system works in Debian, it appears to solve any obvious fraud problems associated with e-voting:

    Each developer's vote has to be signed by their gpg secret key (the key itself signed by other debian developers and on the public debian keyring), so votes cannot be faked by developers.

    Each developer is sent a secret token, which is hashed with their uid and a list of hashes against votes is publically posted - so each developer can check their vote has been counted correctly, without being able to determine whose the other votes were.

    Are there any other electronic voting systems that do as well as this?