Debian Project Nominations Opened

robstah writes "The Debian project have announced the opening of nominations for this year's Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections. The first nomination, that of Matthew Garrett (of Dasher fame) has also been announced on Debian Planet."

Comments

Re:RMS?

[psamuels]

Guess that depends on what you mean by freedom. Richard Stallman disagrees quite publicly with the Debian Project in the matter of the GNU Free Documentation License the Project does not consider it sufficiently free.

Some of you will think it is heresy to regard a license from the Free Software Foundation as insufficiently free. Heresy or not, though, I agree with the Debian Project: the GFDL imposes some onerous restrictions on what users can do with the licensed work, and Stallman seems unwilling to drop some of these restrictions.

As it happens (bringing us back on topic), the first nominee for Debian Project Leader 2005, Matthew Garrett, features prominently in the above document detailing why RMS's documentation license is not free enough.

The question is:

[Living WTF]

Will "sarge" become "stable" under the new leader?
Or is this going to become some "Real Soon Now" / "When It's Done" thingie?

Re:The question is:

[Anonymous Coward]

Will "sarge" become "stable" under the new leader?

The DPL does not have near as much control as someone might imagine. The single most important power of the DPL is the power to appoint developers to admin positions. Debian is less of a democracy than it is a bureaucracy.

The Debian Constitution specifies how certain positions are appointed, and if you read carefully you'll see that many of these positions are completely immune to the DPL. The Project Secretary, for instance, has to agree with the DPL for a new Project Secretary to be appointed. OTOH, the Project Secretary can "delegated authority for a decision" without any outside review. They could, in fact, keep the title and appoint whoever they want to do the actual work.

The Technical Committe is another group with no meaningful outside review. The DPL can only appoint Developers to the Technical Committe when the Committe itself recommends them. If the DPL refuses to appoint the members they recommend for so long that the committe gets down to 5 members, the committe can appoint new members without any input from the DPL.

What about the other delegated positions? Technically the DPL appoints and removes these people without restrictions, but in reality his control over every single delegated position is limited. The Constitution states explicitly, "The Project Leader may not make the position as a Delegate conditional on particular decisions by the Delegate, nor may they override a decision made by a Delegate once made." Ok, so he can't fire someone because he disagrees with their decisions. But the constitution says delegates "may be replaced by the Leader at the Leader's discretion", so what does that mean? Quite simply it means that delegates are appointed for life. New DPL's don't get to appoint new delegates. To get rid os a delegate the DPL would have to come up with precise reasons for removing them that are unrelated to the technical decisions the delegate has made.

And where do you really see this in action? The single delegate most often complained about is the DAM. He has complete veto power over who gets to join the project and can kick any developer out of the project. For up to six months at a stretch the DAM will refuse to do any work related to the position he has been delegated. In fact, it got so bad recently that the DAM allowed another developer to take over all of the actual DAM work while still remaining in the DAM slot.

And where do the unacountable delegated positions fit into the organization of Debian? Everything that Debian does gets passed through a delegate at some point. The FTP-Masters have veto power over every package. The DAM has veto power over who gets to join the project. The Technical Committe has veto power over policy decisions. And even worse than that, many of the different delegate positions are held by the exact same people. Pick a few members out of the organizational list and look at all of the different positions they hold....now try to imagine any DPL attempting to oust one of these developer from one of their delegated positions.

So....will a new DPL be able to work harder and get Sarge out the door? Of course not. They can beg or whine about it, but Debian's bureaucracy holds all the real power to make things happen. The DPL title is a little perk that core members of the bureaucracy pass around from time to time.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to suggest that all of the delegates in Debian are evil people or anything like that. I'm simply pointing out that voting != democracy and DPL != control.

'unstable'

[DavidNWelton]

Look, it's called 'unstable'. What sort of impression do you think that gives people?

One of the reasons people use distributions is to get a stable set of packages that work with one another, instead of having to pick them all out by hand. Your method above is basically reverting to hand selection, and is not really something that is acceptable outside of a hobbyist setting. One of the reasons for Ubuntu's instant success is that they QA'd a bunch of recent packages, and released them as a distribution.

This situation has, from my observation of things, led to a lot of people abandoning Debian for things like Ubuntu and Fedora. I guess it doesn't matter all that much - we're not going to lose out on any revenue;-) - but it's a pity, as Debian use to have an excellent technical reputation.

I suppose marketing types might say that Debian has mismanaged its brand or something like that, becoming known for the "freeer than thou" political battles with the FSF, and having a very out of date distribution rather than technical excellence. Hopefully, we can get that back, but it will be tough.