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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."
don't see no rush...
As the old saying goes, "Hell freezes faster than Debian Stable". Good to see that Towns intends to take action.
I guess things will heat up for debian now....
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
As a project, Debian is about the best example of bureaucracy going wrong that one can think of. Just go check out any of their mailing lists - they spend more time arguing about politics and philosophy than they do writing code. I thought this was a software project - shouldn't they be spending time, oh, I don't know... writing code? When you combine this with the fact that all of their programmers are volunteers and thus don't have tons of time to spend on the project, no wonder they never release.
Everyone here will agree, though, on one fact: there is nothing that Debian can do that Ubuntu can't do better.
What is this "Debian" you speak of? Is it more like Ubuntu, or Fedora?
(yes, it was a joke)
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
They should remove 99% of the packages from the core distribution and go with a simple small set of base packages for each release. Then switch to a 6 month release schedule like many other projects are using. All those other packages can go into an "extra" repository or something.
I think even Ubuntu tries to put too many packages in the base release. They should take a hint from the BSD distros which use this method with the base install and ports. Hell, Windows uses the same method. After installing Windows there isn't much functionality other than the OS, you can then install whatever applications you want. Note I'm not advocating a ports-like source "build it yourself" thing, I'm just saying that 99% of the packages that are currently in a Debian release don't need to be part of the core.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I'd have to agree with you. One of the main reasons Debian has been slow to update has been the range of architectures and applications they attempt to simultaneously support. Other distros update faster, but most of them take one of two paths: a) limit supported architecture (usually to the x86 and x86 64) or b) support only a small subset of applications.
Really, as much as I'd love to see Debian update faster, I'd hate to see them take one of those expediencies to get the job done.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
I can see I'm not the only one who read that as, "Anthony Debian Elected New Town Leader."
-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Why? I'm a Debian user, and I appreciate how well EVERYTHING works. I'd hate for them to sacrifice the quality of most of the software I use just so they can release twice as often.
I don't really trust distributions that guarantee a release every 6 months, because I get the impression they must be rushing things. I'd prefer something quality, even if it's usually "behind the pack".
I don't really follow Debian politics much. But, I remember seeing just last year that Brandon Robinson had been elected project lead (he too was planning to put Debian on a faster release cycle last year as I recall).
So, did Brandon resign the post, or did the Debian voters just decide that 1 year of Brandon was enough? I presume that Debian must elect a new leader annually? Are incumbents allowed to run for a second term? Did Brandon run again? Can anyone provide a post-mortem of Brandon's year - was it generally considered that he did a good job in the post?
...welcome but question the new Debian emperor.
There used to be a time when a new Debian leader election would not have been relegated to a sub headline on Slashdot. I agree with others on this thread that excess architectures need to be dumped, and a firm timeline needs to be put in place. I say putting out a new Stable release every 12 months is the way to go. Debian has an excellent reputation for it's performance and stability. Six months is too soon to keep up that reputation. A new Testing release would be available every six months. With security updates on Stable being current version minus one (i.e. Debian 3.2 comes out, Debian 3.1 will still be supported, but 3.0 no longer will be).
Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
They really are. I notice that is a major subdiscussion here, release "cycles" and whatnot. How about just eliminating that whole notion?? Why is this still happening? You should only have to install once, then upgrade the diffs as they happen, unless the entire application has been rewritten from scratch. If this "linux" thing adopted that, it would go a long ways to make universal acceptance and adoption happen and it would help to differentiate linux from the other mainstream OSes.
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.
I run Debian stable on about four dozen servers and have for almost six years, and I can tell you that you're dead wrong on the config file changes. Debian stable does change config files. The best example I can think of is /etc/mail/sendmail.cf. Like most admins I use a custom version of sendmail.cf. When Debian stable upgrades sendmail, it overwrites your sendmail.cf without asking! I only have about 250 lines or so that I've changed or added to sendmail.cf, unlike many people that have customized sendmail much more than me, but it's still annoying to have to restore the file from a backup. Diffs are hard to use with sendmail.cf since most of the lines look like line noise:
so it's just extra annoying.I really wish Debian Stable wouldn't erase important config files like you said it doesn't!
It's because the binary packages of Debian require you to install 500 packages just to get a window manager, and 150 more for the development packages if you want to *do* anything with them. They also have neutered support for things that less people use, so if you use something rare, like Kerberos with SSH, you're screwed.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.