Interview with Debian's New Project Leader

With the recent news that Anthony Towns will be taking over as the Debian Project Leader, Linux.com took a few minutes to sit down and feel out the new DPL-elect. From the interview: "The immediate plan is to organize the various ideas I've had so that I can work out which ones are actually worth working on, and what order to do them in; and to make sure that all the people who volunteered to be DPL during the campaign, or offered their help don't go away without some good ideas about extra things they can do. "

Comments

Good luck

[upside]

Firstly, congrats and good luck to Anthony from an avid Debian user.

Having read the article and AT's campaign platform I got the sense that the project really needs not only direction, but also a leader who can steer the project while keeping people onboard and happy. This means leading the people as well as managing the project.

It seems that bickering and infighting are open source projects' achilles' heel due to strong personalities and oversensitive or overinflated egos. I hope Anthony does a good job at making the Debian team as strong as their product is already.

Re:First suggestion for the new chap:

[jZnat]

You have included contrib and non-free in your sources.list, haven't you? Example:

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian sid main contrib non-free

Re:That's a pretty fabricated example.

[kbmccarty]

Go download mod_security and look at the license, it is GPL.

That's actually the reason it was removed from Debian; from what I gather, it uses Apache headers that are licensed under the Apache License, which is apparently incompatible with the GPL. Here's the relevant bug: #313615

Disclaimer: I haven't done enough research to have an opinion on whether this removal was justified or not.

Re:First suggestion for the new chap:

[discord5]

I can't apt-get install mod_security because of their licencing issues.

Don't choose a distro that has that as one of their guidelines then. Debian is a great distribution if you're willing to abide by the principles on which it's built, unfortunatly sooner or later you'll find something that is missing because of it. In all honesty, the easiest thing to do is to build the package for yourself then, if you really want to use debian.

Again, this isn't a solution that works for everyone. There are time-issues, costs asociated with building those packages, and you have to keep them up to date yourself, but if you've got a couple of machines that need that package, building it once and running "dpkg -i" on several machines is a small price to pay

Now, here come all the posts telling me "You just need to do this", or "Point your apt at this server", or x, y, z. Why not just have a setup flag or a config file - perhaps if /etc/allow-other-packages exists, it works.

Really, what did you expect, this is slashdot after all. Nobody is forcing you to use debian, you know, and you can always get involved. But again, many people (like myself) simply don't have the time to get involved and build a package they can install themselves, apt it from someplace, or whatever seems like the best solution at the time.

If this is unacceptable, debian is not the distribution for you. You're better off with Redhat perhaps, or any other distro that doesn't make such an issue out of licensing. This isn't an elitist argument here, saying debian isn't for you in this case, it's simply pointing out that perhaps there are more time- and cost-effective solutions for you.

Re:First suggestion for the new chap:

[asuffield]

Obviously, it's very unlikely that he would sue Debian for distributing mod_security, and even if he did, I don't think he would be likely to win, considering it does seem like his intensions are for mod_security to be used with apache.

Since copyright violations are now a crime in many countries, Debian could be prosecuted by the government. That's either the DA or DHS in the US. The author would have little or no control over this; it would be a political decision.

That makes these things a lot trickier than they ought to be.

Re:The "best" distro right now...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should watch to see if it is hanging on any part of the bootup. Likely candidates would be:

- wireless lan searching for an access point, delays bringing up the network.
- trouble contacting ntp.ubuntulinux.org to sync the clock (big delay)
- any sort of fsck

That's just off the top of my head. But I run a machine with similar specs and have nowhere near the Ubuntu boot time that you are reporting, even when I'm starting up X.

Re:It's not that easy

[Anonymous Coward]

The debian project officially tells me to *not* run debian unstable and to expect it to break.

I have experienced debian unstable breakages such as Xfree86 being broken and unusable for days.

Unstable is *not* the answer. In spite of all the fanboy anecdotal evidence to the contrary.