Debian Project Leader Candidates' Platforms Online

An anonymous reader writes "The platforms for the Debian Project Leader candidates are now available here with more information about how votes are tallied. The candidates this year are the incumbent DPL Martin Michlmayr, and developers Branden Robinson, and Gergely Nagy (but if you vote for him, his tamagotchi will sit on you.)" Nagy's platform is interesting reading.

Comments

ballots

[Imperator]

Can I get a paper ballot? I don't trust their "electronic voting machine" thingy. What do these people know about reliable software?

Re:ballots

[hummassa]

If you have to ask, you don't have the right to vote... ;-)

Martin Michlmayr

[Anonymous Coward]

From Martin's page: "My name is Martin Michlmayr, and I hope that you will re-elect me as your Debian Project Leader" -- I had to double-check, thinking he might not be a native English speaker, and that he might have chosen the wrong word.

I'm on most of the Debian mailing lists, and I didn't know this. Branden's name sticks out, as he's contributed so much. Before double-checking, if you'd asked me which of the three candidates were running for reelection, I'd have thought it was Branden!

Good riddance to the do-nothing. A bunch of PhDs don't mount up to a hill of beans if you don't do anything!

Re:Martin Michlmayr

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's fair to say that Martin has done nothing. I think he's done a lot. You may still prefer Branden, and that's fine. I probably do too. But I wouldn't characterize Martin's work this past year as "nothing."

Re:Martin Michlmayr

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ.

Just because *you* haven't noticed him and can easily poke fun at him for the number of Masters he has (not PhDs) means that he's done nothing? Regardless of the debate between the two of them as candidates, give the Debian project some fucking credit, they wouldn't have voted him in if he'd done nothing.

Re:Martin Michlmayr

[reaper20]

It's tough to measure what the DPL does if you're not a Debian Developer. I've been using Debian since Potato and I still have no idea what the DPL really does. Should it matter to me? Not really, I don't vote, the DD's do.

We (as in users) depend on them to provide us with Debian the distribution, and as such they pick the DPL. The parent might see this effort as "nothing" but then again, why fix something that isn't broken? The only main problem with Debian is still the release process, which has been broken for years, some might even argue that it isn't broken at all, I guess it depends on your point of view.

All I know is that I've been using sid for years, and it has served me well, with over thirteen thousand packages working as well as they do, I hardly think anyone from the outside can call Debian anything other than a miraculous success.

Of course, those involved in the process can criticize all they wish, that's probably the reason it works so well in the first place.

Re:Martin Michlmayr

[Bronster]

"My name is Martin Michlmayr, and I hope that you will re-elect me as your Debian Project Leader" -- I had to double-check, thinking he might not be a native English speaker

Funnily enough - he isn't, though he did a good enough job when I met him.

I think it's interesting how democracies tend to change every so often as we dwell on the failures of those in leadership and forget to notice the quiet advances those same people have made. Interesting how the new one never seems that much better.

Branden would certainly have a different focus - and the question is which area of focus is better for Debian at the moment, Branden's strict constitutional interpretation and "from the ranks" approach as a very active package maintainer, or Martin's more relaxed interpretation of the constitution and behind the scenes / package process support approach.

If you read past the initial PhD section of Martin's bio, you'll notice that he has worked intensively in the Quality Assurance and New Maintainer areas. Ensuring that bugs get dealt with and that new people are coming on board to maintain packages is just as important as maintaining the packages yourself.

Branden does make some very good points however, that without a constitution a government is nothing.

I'm not a developer, just a very avid user who should have got off my arse ages ago and become a developer. Oh well. If I was voting, I would vote for Martin as project leader on the basis that I believe Debian has plenty of maintainers and not enough QA (check the release critical bug count some time), but I would ask him politely to respect the constition or start the process for it to be changed. I don't know the background for the disputed 'delegates' situation, and I don't know if the best solution is changing the constitution or delegating the specific people Branden names.

And, AC. Maybe you should be aware that being active on development mailing lists is not the only way of doing anything.

Re:Martin Michlmayr

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if Branden gets the position, then he sure as hell won't be working on XFree86 anymore. So to you he probably won't be doing anything! Boo hoo!

Re:Martin Michlmayr

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on most of the Debian mailing lists, and I didn't know this. Branden's name sticks out, as he's contributed so much. Before double-checking, if you'd asked me which of the three candidates were running for reelection, I'd have thought it was Branden!

Perhaps you're just not on the right lists. He's pretty active on the -qa list as well as a few others.

This is the typical perspective of a non-DD. They don't give just anyone access to the Debian machines, nor the power to head NM, and the authority to approach (and remove) inactive developers.

Just because someone can port X does not mean they'll make a great leader - Branden and Martin have entirely different approaches and personalities. I, personally, would rather have someone quiet who just does work rather than trying to entertain all of the Debian fanboys out there. But hey, what's amusing about that?

Re:Martin Michlmayr

[twilight30]

I have problems with this. But I'm not bitching on Slashdot about it, and hiding behind AC status to boot. A bit more information might be useful, such as:

• Are you a developer? If so, what specifically are your gripes? (I'm a user and will remain so for the foreseeable future)
  
• The Project Leader term is too short to make a considerable impact in that time -- one of the many reasons why this particular Project Leader hasn't made an impression on you, I'd say. What do you suggest to ameliorate this?
  
• Debian has no marketing department. I do wonder sometimes if it couldn't use a [very] modest one. (Disclaimer: I used to work in marketing and am very aware of how it is generally a negative thing)
  

Obligatory

[wan-fu]

I for one, welcome our soon-to-be new Debian overlord. Soon-to-be, meaning as soon as they tabulate the votes, which, (again, obligatory), by Debian standards, will be some time after we colonize the moon.

Re:Obligatory

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

That is a good thing, because the winner's tamagotchi is then going to be sitting on a lot of people and I am in no hurry to wear a pink dress while dancing in the streets.

Instant Runoff Voting

[waldoj]

I can't find out on the Debian site how the votes will be tallied, but I certainly hope that they've got the good sense to use instant runoff voting. Mathematically speaking, it's the best method of tallying votes. Practically speaking, it's the best method of ensuring that the person elected is the most widely-desired candidate.

-Waldo Jaquith

Re:Instant Runoff Voting

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't find out on the Debian site how the votes will be tallied, but I certainly hope that they've got the good sense to use instant runoff voting. Mathematically speaking, it's the best method of tallying votes. Practically speaking, it's the best method of ensuring that the person elected is the most widely-desired candidate.

Debian uses the Condorcet voting method, with Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping (SSD) as the tiebreaker method, and some modifications for supermajorities for use when voting on amendments to the Constitution, DFSG, and Social Contract. For people not familiar with Condorcet, the short explanation is that each ballot provides an ranking of the options, from most preferred to least preferred. The winner is the option that is preferred over every other option by a majority of people, meaning that a majority of people ranked that option over each other option.

Condorcet is far fairer than Instant Runoff. For example, Instant Runoff is non-monotonic, meaning that a vote for a candidate can make that candidate lose, and a vote against a candidate can make that candidate win. In addition, Instant Runoff generally eliminates "compromise" third-party candidates, even if they would have been preferable to the winning option. In fact, Instant Runoff Voting is the only option that is worse than the standard Plurality or "First Past the Post" system (one vote per person, most votes wins). This is primarily caused because Instant Runoff only looks at your top choice, and ignores the preferences below that, until your top choice is eliminated. This forces you to vote strategically, instead of honestly.

See electionmethods.org for more information on various voting methods (and some good criteria used to evaluate voting methods). In particular, read their article The Problems with Instant Runoff Voting. For more information on Debian's implementation of Condorcet, see the Debian Constitution.

Re:Instant Runoff Voting

[Clay_Culver]

Well that's interesting but does Instant Runoff Voting work when there are only two candidates? Of the three, one is a joke candidate. If a few Deb Devs vote for him as a joke (or maybe they don't like the other two), then you may have a situation where no one has more than 50% of the vote. I'm not an expert on elections (or the system you are talking about). Does this means there must be a runoff or time to use the Instant Runoff Voting? But there are only two real candidates, wouldn't the winner just be the one with the plurality anyway? Second question, in this situation, what if you have to sides that really didn't get along (this isn't the situation, just clarifying the system). Lets say everyone votes for EITHER candidate A or B, and marks candidate C as their second choice. Lets also say that A & B are equal in their votes (of the "First Choice" vote, A gets 50%, B gets 50%, and C gets 100% of "Second Choice" votes). Who would win this election?

Re:Instant Runoff Voting

[Anonymous Coward]

I have written an academic paper on that Condorcet method that is sometimes called "Schwartz Sequential Dropping" or "Beatpath Method" and that is used by SPI and DEBIAN. In this paper, I introduce this method, demonstrate that it satisfies e.g. Pareto, monotonicity, resolvability, independence of clones, reversal symmetry, Smith-IIA, and Schwartz, and present an O(N^3) algorithm to calculate the winner, where N is the number of candidates. If someone wants to get a copy of this paper he can send me (markus.schulze@alumni.tu-berlin.de) a short mail.

What is Branden going to do with XFree86?

[twilight30]

Looking over his platform, I noticed one omission:

What the hell is going to happen to XFree86? He's worked like an animal on it for the last four years or so. Is he planning on handing it off to someone else? Or is he going to juggle both?

Either way, one of the two sets of duties -- Project Leader or XFree86 -- will certainly suffer.

As much as I might want him in place as Project Leader, why hasn't he discussed this in his platform? (Not that what I say matters; /me user, non developer :)

Re:What is Branden going to do with XFree86?

[jit]

He already has. See the second paragraph of his Introduction:

Over the past year, the work I've been proudest of has been the transition of Debian XFree86 packaging effort from individual-based to team-based.

Re:What is Branden going to do with XFree86?

[alex_tibbles]

One of the members of the team, daniel stone is currently working on packaging all the FreeDesktop stuff. See his blog entry for an explanation.

just remembered

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/204780.html

The one I'll vote for is

[Anonymous Coward]

The one that will

• Provide a graphical installer
• Up to date packages in stable
• Dumps gnome, xfce, blackbox etc for a intergrated KDE soloution
• Will abolish the mailing lists and set up modern disucsssion forums
• Design a website that looks like it was made in 2004
• Makes it usable for my grandma
• Uses kernel 2.6

Out of all the candidates, it looks like This pereson can do it!

Yup

[waldoj]

Well that's interesting but does Instant Runoff Voting work when there are only two candidates?

It works just fine with two candidates, but no better and no worse than a "traditional" election.

-Waldo Jaquith