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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. "
In my opinion, the combination of Debian+Ubuntu is simply "the best" right now. I went from Debian to Ubuntu on my laptop about a year ago, and recently installed Ubuntu on my new AMD64 box.
:-/) on my new AMD64 box, and best of all it's based on Debian. Also, they take a principled stand (IMHO) against closed-source software, but are more pragmatic in terms of offering closed-source packages while alternatives are developed.
Ubuntu is very stable, installed *almost* flawlessly (NVidia
Plus, Ubuntu and Debian devs interact a lot as far as I can tell, so Ubuntu is contributing to the improvement of Debian to a significant degree.
The way I see it:
* Debian is a super-stable FLOSS-only server OS
* Ubuntu is its almost-as-stable up-to-the-minute desktop OS
Neither of them is "the best" alone, but the combined strengths of the two are a knockout in my opinion.
My bicyles
Do you have any publicly available info to back that up, I've only seen refrences to an unnamed personal tragedy as to the reason of Brandens demise.
I don't know anything about Brandon Robinson but Martin Schulze (Debians Stable Release Manager) also resigned because of the ftpmaster (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/70616, german).
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
I am not happy with an ftpmaster as new project leader. They were the cause why the last one gave up.
It's an interesting paradox. A member of "the Debian cabal" was elected DPL. Personally I voted for none of the above since all of the candidates this year seemed resigned to the idea that the DPL has no power. The DPL does have power under the Debian constitution to appoint and replace delegates, but past DPLs have given in to the idea that there are no delegates...that the ftp-masters, DAM, etc are unaccountable to the DPL and by extension the Debian project as a whole.
In some ways it's a good thing that the DPL can't assert any real authority over other members of the project, but it also makes the DPL election a silly waste of time and energy and runs counter to a plain reading of the Debian constitution. If the DPL is a powerless and symbolic title we might as well make Ian Murdock, Bruce Perens or some other recognizable individual DPL for life and stop with the silly elections.
Anthony's platform was more active than the other potential DPL's, but it included plenty of caviats to indicate that ultimately he'll follow the tradition of doing very little with the position. For instance:
Another issue was that of "supporting delegates". As it turns out, that's perhaps an overly limited description, since a number of roles, including the security team and ftpmaster, might be better thought of as "infrastructure maintainers" instead, which implies a different relationship to the DPL.
And:
Some of the goals I hope to work towards in the coming year include getting updates accepted into the archive more frequently than once a day, having frequent beta releases of etch/testing that we can legitimately call a release (benefiting from the ongoing work of the installer and testing-security teams), and having reliably quick resolution of RC bugs in unstable. None of those require, or even necessarily benefit from magical DPL powers; but I think the project will benefit if whoever is elected DPL takes that idea on board, and sets a good example at making frequent and improvements to Debian.
For me, these simply aren't compelling reasons to elect a DPL. OTOH, Anthony's platform was better than what the other candidates offered.
1. Get AMD64 release into the main pool, enough already. Don't wait until December or whatever for Etch - just get it done!
afaict amd64 is almost totally built in the official sid archive now and should be making its way into etch gradually atm
the amd64 sarge is an unoffical rebuild and won't ever be part of the official archives.
3. Try and trim the releases down to every 12 months (or less!) and drop the "when it's ready" attitude because that just drives people away.
i think 12 months is a bit too fast given that the security team don't belive they have the rescources to support 3 versions of debian at once. 18 months or so is probablly about right allowing a year of security support for oldstable followed by a few months of secuirty support for testing in the run up to its release (when people will be doing test migrations etc).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
All secure-testing did is try to get security updates to those on the testing treadmill faster. you still have to either stay on the upgrade treadmill to make use of them (mixing bits from testing a few months apart can be a very bad idea).
Noone is going to provide security updates targeted at where testing was a couple of months ago.
the ONLY ways to get timely security support are
1: stay on the upgrade treadmill for testing or unstable (which is a lot of work and has fairly high risk of breaking something at any time)
2: use a stable release
3: make your own stable branch and backport fixes to it (which will be a massive ammount of work especially if you plan to do serious testing of every fix).
4: use the results of someone else who did 3 (e.g. use ubuntu)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I wouldn't know about that. I switched to Debian somewhere in 2002 (during the potato/woody crossover), and it definitely was a fringe distribution at that time. The big players were Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake.
Since that day, I have seen both Debian itself and Debian derivatives like Linspire and Ubuntu making lots of headway. Debian is very popular as a base distro to start from because:
I don't think the Debian project being very careful stops it from being popular. It might drive some people away, but I don't think that people that measure software quality by the amount of official release deadlines really are the kind of people the Debian project should care about.
If you look at those that advocate Debian the loudest, I see three distinct groups:
Debian succesfully meets the needs of those people, and that is all it should care about. The fanboys who want to brag about living on the bleeding edge can either try unstable, or they should move to Fedora Core or Gentoo, which specifically pander to their needs anyway.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?