Anthony Towns Elected New Debian Leader

daria42 writes "Australian developer Anthony Towns has just been elected Debian Project Leader starting 17 April. In his platform for election, Towns said the most important issue for Debian was 'increasing its tempo'. 'We've been slow in a lot of things, from releasing, to getting updates in, to processing applications from prospective developers, to fixing bugs, to making decisions on policy questions, and all sorts of other things,' he said."

Comments

Re:Brandon replaced after only 1 year?

[laptop006]

Annual term as DPL, Branden decided not to stand for a second term.

Re:Worst idea ever?

[croddy]

I would definitely agree. It is unusual (in the Linux world) that Sarge took two and a half years to release, but I think that the benefits of the Debian QA process are very apparent. Taking the time to sort out bugs as well as they do -- on a very large number of packages -- makes a Debian release worth waiting for.

The slower release cycle is offset by two things. If you know you need a fresher system, and are willing to sacrifice some stability for updated packages, you have as many choices as you can handle: adding a few packages from testing to your stable system, directly tracking testing or unstable, some mix of any of the three, or even adding packages from experimental if you really want to go out on a limb.

The power of Debian is not only in APT, but in Debconf, the configuration system. Configuration changes are pretty much a given on a system that's directly tracking sid, but are unheard-of (and perhaps even forbidden?) in the stable release. The ease of administration that comes with knowing that changes Debian stable will consist only of backported security patches makes it worth the wait.

Lastly, a system administrator does not want to have to go through a major operating system upgrade on numerous heterogenous servers every 9 months. Knowing that it will be somewhere around 18-36 months between Debian releases means spending a lot less time migrating and fiddling with systems just to keep up with supported releases.

Other distributions do release every 6-9 months. It's not for me... except when it is, and I use testing/unstable in those cases :-)

Re:Brandon replaced after only 1 year?

[joeytsai]

LWN has a pretty decent interview of Branden, but he's kinda vague about interesting details. Link here.