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

ftpmaster

[th173]

I am not happy with an ftpmaster as new project leader. They were the cause why the last one gave up.

But on the other hand, there is finally a chance for some movement and some chances; both are needed by this brilliant and outstanding project which is completely stuck by politics now; just like "the real life"(tm) *sigh*.

Re:ftpmaster

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

If Debian is run by the DPL

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

then is Gentoo ruled by the GPL?

Re:If Debian is run by the DPL

[iabervon]

Yes, but you can change that with a USE flag.

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.

The "best" distro right now...

[MoxFulder]

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.

Ubuntu is very stable, installed *almost* flawlessly (NVidia :-/) 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.

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.

Re:It's not that easy

[jZnat]

Debian doesn't really move slow at all; the only perceived slowness is in the stable distribution. If you keep up to date with unstable (which will literally always have something to update for you every day), you'd notice that they keep up to date with the majority of its software. For instance, KOffice 1.5 just came out, and it's available in Debian Sid (unstable) and thusly also available in Ubuntu Dapper (they keep their developmental releases in sync with Sid until a release-freeze starts every six months).

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:

[Jorgensen]

"I'm really glad they have principles."...

"Debian aren't going to change the world with this system, and they're just going to make it hard for people to have a complete system as they want."

Sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Either it's OK for Debian to have principles (and thus Debian is doing the "right thing") or Debian should forego the principles to make it easier for you to not abide them?

Logic Error. Parsing abandoned.