Debian Delayed by Disenchanted Developers

Torus Kas writes "Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 was supposed to be due by December 4 and development is currently frozen. Apparently the saga was triggered by disenchantment towards funding of $6,000 for each of the 2 release managers to work full-time in order to speed up the development. Many unpaid developers simply put off Debian work to work on something else."

Comments

Dumb Editor

[Alphager]

The development is NOT frozen. The Packages going into Etch are frozen, meaning that the current versions will get into etch with all the necessary bugfixes. development is on full steam.

Re:Dumb Editor

[Cocoronixx]

Understanding (or not) the behind the scenes nomenclature of a development environment has no bearing on your ability to use the final product.

Re:Dumb Editor

[walt-sjc]

This is why Linux will never catch on. "Packages going into Etch"?? WTF does that mean?

Genuine Advantage in Vista? WTF does that mean? This is why Windows will never catch on.

iSight on a Mac? WTF is that?

If a well-educated slashdot reader has no clue what you're talking about, how is the general public, let alone my grandma, supposed to use Linux?

I would bet that most Linux using and a large portion of non-Linux using slashdot readers knew exactly what that meant. By your trollish and poorly thought-out comment, I would assume that you are not in the majority here. Terminology in technology always requires some domain knowledge. This article is NOT aimed at your grandma (doubt your grandma reads /., "news for nerds",) and would have no bearing on her use or non-use of Linux. It is an article about internal politics of a particular distribution of Linux that she probably wouldn't be using anyway.

Re:Dumb Editor

[TheLetterPsy]

PC Load Letter, what the fuck does that mean?

Update and modest suggestions

[HighOrbit]

There is an update on Andreas Barth's Blog that says "Update: There are media rumours floating around that "[Etch has] been delayed because some developers have deliberately slowed down their work". This doesn't reflect what I said."

The article did not say what packages were delayed specifically, but Debian is known to have an insane number of packages. Perhaps some culling is in order. I'm not part of the project, just an appreciative user, but here are my two cents.

1. Cut the distro down to what will fit on one CD (two max). That will reduce a lot of Debian's headaches. Less for them to maintain and less to test between releases. Everything else can be put into contributed non-official repositories
2. Don't be so anal and patch-happy with mainstream packages. Big projects like Gnome and KDE already do extensive testing upstream. Those packages should be able to move more quickly through the unstable-testing-stable cycle without sacrificing stability or extensive patching. How much of the debian patching on these type of big projects is *really* functionally necessary versus "I 'm the debian package mantainer and I want to put my mark on it".

About the project being "frozen", I don't know about that. I have a laptop running etch-testing. I did an apt-get dist-upgrade in mid-Nov , put it away for a few weeks and ran it again in early-Dec (don't remember exact dates). Something like 70 packages needed upgrades.

Re:Update and modest suggestions

[inigo_jones]

>> "Cut the distro down to what will fit on one CD (two max)...."

dont do it Debian... its great to be able to apt-cache search and apt-get install almost anything. such a huge collection of available software that JUST WORKS is great. a little (or lot) longer release cycle doesnt really effect the bulk of users who just use "testing" anyway.

my 2 cents. Debian's base of huge packages, and apt are great assets. apt-get into it :-)

Re:Update and modest suggestions

[und0]

Don't be so anal and patch-happy with mainstream packages. Big projects like Gnome and KDE already do extensive testing upstream.

You sure about that? I've read recently from an upstream Gnome developer that GTK lacks maintainers ( http://blogs.gnome.org/view/timj/2006/12/20/0 ), Etch will ship Gnome 2.14 because of unresolved GTK bugs, so what you're saying seems quite wrong...

Re:Update and modest suggestions

[nine-times]

Cut the distro down to what will fit on one CD (two max). That will reduce a lot of Debian's headaches. Less for them to maintain and less to test between releases. Everything else can be put into contributed non-official repositories

I think that what's really great about Debian is that it has such wide support for everything. If there's a distro capable of being anything to anyone, and still doing everything pretty well, it's probably Debian. There are plenty of other projects that do just what you're talking about. They take Debian, reduce the number of packages to what makes sense for a particular purpose, and that allows more work to be done on fewer packages in less time, creating a distro that's more specialized. Why would you want Debian to do that, too?

Re:Update and modest suggestions

[arivanov]

You have just described RedHat. No thanks.

I would rather have Debian release schedules, but have all the packages that are in it. Most of the sysadmins out there who deploy debian do it exactly because "Resistance is futile, you shall be packaged" and because "apt-get install light" works 99.99% of the time.

As a result there is a working platform on which to build services and commercial software regardless of what insane libraries your developers have chosen this time. Whatever it is, it can be apt-get installed. In the very rare cases you sometimes have to backport a version from testing, but someone has already solved most of the dependencies for you.

Trying something similar with RedHat quickly brings you into the land of RPM hell. I always love watching sysadmins suffering while trying to support development in a RedHat shop (especially where developers have su/sudo access). It is immensely entertaining to watch the network fall apart and be reduced to a random collection of machines all different from each other and each in its own circle of the RPM hell none being able to produce a release build.

So from the perspective of someone who has been running Debian driven networks for 6+ years and with 5+ years of supporting Debian as a base for commercial development I can say - no thank you, you misunderstood what brings most sysadmins to Debian. It is the best *nix development platform out there.

Re:Update and modest suggestions

[srvivn21]

First off, I have nothing against Debian, and I don't advocate any changes to it's development model. I just can't abide baseless slander such as what you have posted.

You have just described RedHat. No thanks.

Yikes. This is so wrong. First, RHEL 4 comes on 4 CDs, not one or two. Second, many packages supplied by RH are patched so far that the original developers won't provide support on the mailing lists (Squid, OpenLDAP for concrete examples). Others are maintained by RedHat, which either makes them massively patched, or not patched at all. Neither of the points given really apply to RedHat.

I would rather have Debian release schedules, but have all the packages that are in it. Most of the sysadmins out there who deploy debian do it exactly because "Resistance is futile, you shall be packaged" and because "apt-get install light" works 99.99% of the time.

I'd bet that most of the sysadmins who prefer Debian do so because it's what they are familiar and comfortable with it...such as yourself.

As a result there is a working platform on which to build services and commercial software regardless of what insane libraries your developers have chosen this time. Whatever it is, it can be apt-get installed. In the very rare cases you sometimes have to backport a version from testing, but someone has already solved most of the dependencies for you.

Trying something similar with RedHat quickly brings you into the land of RPM hell. I always love watching sysadmins suffering while trying to support development in a RedHat shop (especially where developers have su/sudo access). It is immensely entertaining to watch the network fall apart and be reduced to a random collection of machines all different from each other and each in its own circle of the RPM hell none being able to produce a release build.

Am I to take it that you are saying Debian based systems are immune to this? Not so much the RPM hell (duh, Debian doesn't use RPMs), but the random collection of machines all different from each other even though the developers have root access? How, pray tell, do you manage that? Block access to the apt repositories?

So from the perspective of someone who has been running Debian driven networks for 6+ years and with 5+ years of supporting Debian as a base for commercial development I can say - no thank you, you misunderstood what brings most sysadmins to Debian. It is the best *nix development platform out there.

First, what does System Administration have to do with developing software? A Sysadmin's job is keeping the boxes running, not crafting applications to run on them. If a system admin WERE to develop software, perhaps he wouldn't use libraries that require such acrobatics his box is endangered? Second, big commercial software developers seem to disagree with you. For example, BEA, BMC Software, Hyperion, IBM, Sybase and Symantec, Lyris, VMWare, Oracle, and Elluminate. These are just software products that either I deal with on a regular basis or came up with in a quick search.

Why, if Debian is the best development platform in existance, would that be the case? Debian Stable changes at least as infrequently as RHEL, so it shouldn't be a matter of code stability.

Perhaps your dealings with RedHat based distributions have been less than plesant, but if you want commercial application support, it's either RH or SUSE. Tools for dealing with RPMs have advanced quite a bit in the last 5 years, and FWIW, I have no problems getting a bo

Interesting...

[Otter]

My first reaction to the headline was to wonder why this is news. If anything, it's "Debian developers pause mailing list flamewar, release software" that would be newsworthy.

But it's actually a fascinating case of unintended consequences -- hiring some full-time workers seems to have had precisely the opposite effective of the intended. It's a lesson worth considering before deciding that, say, what some third world country really, really needs is millions of laptops dumped on their children.

Pffft

[phrostie]

i've been running debian/etch(testing) for ages. the whole freeze thing doesn't matter to me.
i don't know what everyone else has their apt sources pointed at, but the rate of updates haven't changed any that i can see.

take your time, make it stable.
then i'll switch to what ever the next one is.

Re:Pffft

[croddy]

I'm not even sure who's clamoring for Etch to release. Anyone who needs the latest toys can run it already, and anyone who really needs the stability of Debian Stable knows that it will be released when it's ready.

It's the other distros that seem to be in a huge hurry. To each his own; that's why we have more than one distro.

Should be "Disenchanted Developers Delay Debian"

[ishmalius]

Now -that- is how to write an irritating alliterative headline! ^^

Heirarchy and human nature

[heroine]

Funny isn't it, how no matter how many times humans start over with a utopian system, they end up concentrating their wealth into a small number of strong leaders and leaving a large number of impoverished citizens. We really are programmed to institutionalize.

Re:Heirarchy and human nature

[suv4x4]

If is funny. The question now is where do we go from here? Continue to be ashamed of our intrinsic natures and stick to faulty societal models (socialism) or accept ourselves as the selfish beings that we are and finally become comfortable with capitalism?

You see, both models are actually part of our intrinsic nature. As separate beings, capitalism makes sense. As cogs in a large system (or cells in an organism if you will), socialism makes sense.

Since we're currently on the borderline between separate beings, and part of one "uber-being" (society), such conflicts will always arise again and again.

Re:Heirarchy and human nature

[the phantom]

Honestly, I question the sanity and/or sincerity of anyone who claims to believe that any pure system is "the answer," be it capitalism, socialism, communism, Christianity, Buddhism, atheism, or anything else.

Re:You work for free, or...

[rubycodez]

open source is often made by paid developers, including major chunks of the Linux kernel. Open source just means you get the source code to modify or inspect, nothing to do with compensation or lack thereof.

Dumb editor, but there is an issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that dunk-tanc.org really is splitting the community. What they're providing is valuable to some - and does indeed help some problems - but unfortunately it's counterproductive to others people's needs and wants.

You've now got a subset of Debian guys motivated by money, and the rest of them still motivated by making a quality Linux distribution. Sometimes those interests are aligned (as the guys who set up dunc-tank observed) but sometimes those interests are NOT (as the guys who started Caldera and Novell now see when Microsoft can easily use the motivated-by-money lever to change the course of the projects).

IMHO, Debian should stay Debian - and stay as far away from money and paid work as possible -- and let organziations like Ubuntu build the corporate bureacracy stuff like release schedules, support contracts, etc. I hope Ubuntu buys dunc-tank.org and takes those employees with them -- because they and their work are useful for corporate marketing -- but do more harm than good to Debian development.

Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that Debian is for fucked-up smelly hippies who just can't handle the idea that people need money to live? Debian is too "pure" for anyone to get a pittance for their contribution? If you want your work accepted in Debian you'd better be independently wealthy? Oh fine. Sure sounds like the GNU ideal to me.

Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue.

[RLiegh]

>So what you're saying is that Debian is for fucked-up smelly hippies who just can't handle the idea that people need money to live?

No. He's saying that he'd prefer that the people contributing to Debian are motivated by the desire to solve problems, and to make a good product better; as opposed to having debian be contributed by programmers whose attitude is "whatever, fuck it, it's good enough; where's my ten bucks?".

And he's not alone in that sentiment...not alone at all.

Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue.

[fm6]

That's one of the most self-righteous, idiotic statements I've ever heard. You're saying that anybody who gets paid to do something does it for the money and doesn't care about the quality of what they do. That's bullshit, of the smelliest variety. I get paid for most of what I do, but I take pride in my work. I've walked away from jobs — jobs were I was getting paid huge amounts of money — because there were other factors that made the job professionally or ethically unacceptable. And I'm not alone.

I'm guessing you've never had to worry about paying the bills or having a place to live. If you had, you'd know that sometimes people have to say, "God, I'd love to work on that, but I need to be doing something that brings in some money."

Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue.

[dubl-u]

You're saying that anybody who gets paid to do something does it for the money and doesn't care about the quality of what they do.

There is a vast array of evidence that giving extrinsic rewards (like money) can reduce the quality and creativity of work when compared with intrinsic motivation. That's not to say that all people taking a paycheck will do shitty work. But I can list case after case in my professional life where I've seen reward schemes harm software projects.

For example, I recently charged some people a lot of money to clean up a mostly functional but hugely messy code base. The thing was almost impossible to debug, and completely impossible to improve. There were large amounts of what turned out to be dead code, a bunch of mismatched abstractions, and make-it-work hacks galore. What kind of idiot would build something like that?

It turned out that the programmer was perfectly smart, but the people who had hired him wanted the product really soon, so they structured it as a fixed-price deal with the price dropping every day. Naturally, he rushed, and by the time he pushed it over the line it was a terrible mess.

Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue.

[dubl-u]

You're assuming that "bounty hunters", so to speak, would write worse code than people doing it for fun. That's an unproven assumption, and it's almost certainly wrong (as evidenced by the number of companies in the world writing software). Indeed, if someone stakes their livelihood on the quality of their code (i.e., they get paid for it), I'd say they're much more likely to be worried about quality.

I'm going to be charitable and assume that you have not actually spent a lot of time programming for a living.

As a consultant, I get to stick my nose in a lot of development shops, and I can pretty much guarantee that the number one cause of shitty software is people trying to do it on the cheap, by which I mean get the most apparent output for their dollars. New, quality-focused methods like Extreme Programming get a fair bit of their boost by making it much harder for the people with the checkbooks to exert time pressure on the programmers. (Instead, the time pressure is redirected into keeping scope as small as possible.)

That's not to say that open-source software is guaranteed to be of high quality. Some of it sucks. But you can be sure that you have removed a major cause of low quality, which is programmers giving up and saying with a sigh: "Well, that's not how I'd do it, but it's your money..."

Re:Should be "Disenchanted Developers Delay Debian

[akpoff]

An annoyingly alliterative announcement.

Straight From Debian Lists

[mpapet]

This email from October 26 is pretty darn informative when it comes to dunc-tank. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/10/msg 00260.html

This email from November 16 will pretty much bring everyone up to date on Etch status: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006 /11/msg00004.html
Since its publication, Etch has gone into bug-fixing only.

Nice little bonus for debian users on the end if you read it all the way through.

Please, please /.ers just go straight to http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/ and get the news. I certainly wish the editors at /. would.

Re:You work for free, or...

[DrDitto]

There comes a point where working on open-source software can no longer be a hobby done in spare time. I would think that lots of open-source coders reach this point. Then either you find a company to pay you (e.g., Redhat), or you stop doing it. Software is getting more and more complex requiring more lines of code and more development. Unless one is rich and is doing it for a hobby, people need to get paid for their 8+ hours of work a day. Can complex software really be done in your spare time?

Ideologically, I support Microsoft rather than Linux because Microsoft allows people like myself to make a living. Granted lots of people do get paid to work all day on an open-source project...companies wouldn't do this unless it gave them a competitive advantage (i.e., Redhat can sell an OS by leveraging the work of others).

12,000$ to kill Linux?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

OMG! wait till M$ hears this. All they have to do is to donate some 1000$ to a few developers in each Open Source to project, and all other devlopers will quit because they are jelaous and these few will retire happily using those 1000$ or 2000$ handout. All Open Source projects will grind to a halt! Wow! That is Steve Ballmer's dream. He might actually sit on a chair or two now.

Re:You work for free, or...

[drinkypoo]

"Many unpaid developers simply put off Debian work to work on something else."

Please, correct me if I'm wrong... but isn't the whole point of Open Source to contribute code for the betterment of the community? Which, as it happens, means not getting paid to write code.

Open Source is a development methodology. Free Software is a moral standpoint. Neither one says that you can't get paid. Neither one, in fact, says that you must do anything for the betterment of the community - once the appropriate license is used, EVERYTHING you do with the program that is legal contributes to the betterment of the community.

In fact what you and many other people miss is that no one does something for nothing. Sometimes they do it just because they are addicted to the good feeling that they get when they do something altruistic, but at the base level, they are feeding a stimulus-response pattern in their brain that causes them to want to do that. They are being paid in good feelings.

If I am contributing work for which many people get paid, and then I see that someone else is being paid for work which many others contribute, I may come to the realization that I need to pay my bills and they cannot be paid with good feelings which are unfortunately non-transferable and not considered legal tender for any but the most private of debts, if you know what I mean. Or maybe I'll just turn into a stingy bitch who wants some of that or y'all can fuck off. Either way, the contributions don't get made.

Ultimately, if you're going to have a release schedule and you plan to stick to it, you're going to either have to pay some people, or make sure some people don't need to get paid, which boils down to supporting those people, which is a form of pay even if you don't give them actual money. Otherwise you will have problems because people will have other motivations. This will continue until the cost of living drops so far through technology that people no longer have to work. Then we will have new problems.

Re:You work for free, or...

[davek]

Can complex software really be done in your spare time? That really is the question, isn't it? If the answer is "no," then it seems like open source software is what the critics say it is: an anomaly created by the birth of the internet, and it will die out like any other fad; leaving established, commercial software as the primary source of usable software technology.

Let me be crystal clear: THIS IS NOT TRUE!!

What is happening is the value of software is shifting. In the future, you won't have to work on open source software "in your spare time." You will be paid to work on open source software by the company you work for, because they have a stake in the software's success. Software is a living thing and must be maintained. If my business directly depends on... say... Asterisk running correctly, then I'd better have at least one OSS hacker who knows the Asterisk source code... get it?

Remember the old mantra: Free Software was never intended to be free-as-in-beer. You still have to pay for it if you want any real commercial use out of it. Companies will slowly realize they don't have to pay a monopolistic empire for all their software needs, but rather can hire their local blue-collar OSS hacker. Only then will the economy make some progress...

-dave

WIR

[Digana]

Debian ships When It's Ready.

But for those of us who are holding our breath for release time, a good and rough indicator of when it will ship is the number of release critical bugs. When the number hits zero, Debian is (almost?) ready. Since the etch freeze was announced about a week ago, the number of release bugs has wavered around 130, with a slight downward trend. This is the stock market of the free software world. :-) The etch freeze means that no packages can move down from unstable (sid) to the current testing (etch) automatically anymore (normally, packages in unstable are automatically moved down to testing by a script if no bugs are filed against them for some time, several days, iirc). Packages can still be moved from unstable to testing, but only manually if it's clear that they are stable enough for the next release.

The dunk-tank drama in the Debian mailing lists is old news. Yes, some developers expressed concerns about the dunc-tank project, but I would hardly call this "frozen development". Developers are working hard to get the Debian release. I estimate January or February at the latest will be beer and pizza party time for all the Debian developers that have produced the largest binary free GNU/Linux distribution amongst which so many other distros depend.

Personally, I'm very excited. I'm not sure how much truth there is in this, but Ubuntu has probably put pressure in Debian to more timely releases, and this release will be much more in time than the previous sarge release was. I've been given permission to install Debian in 20 workstations of our local network, and I'm waiting for the stable release and the renowned Debian quality and security to do so. I'll probably be tracking the next testing release after I install them, though, since testing works well for desktop use and workstations.

Re:apt-get install almost anything

[nurb432]

They can just remove all the packages i dont care about. That should reduce it to a manageable level.

Re:Nice inflammatory troll

[murdocj]

Sure, and while you're at it, fuck feeding the poor -- if I'm going to feed the poor, shouldn't I get paid for it? And fuck shelters for battered women -- what am I, a hippie? Obviously, anybody who believes anyone could actually afford to volunteer their time for a worthwhile cause must be an independently wealthy, elitist snob. Out here in the real world it's all about the money, baby. You want code? Fuck you, pay me.

Well, actually, shelters that feed the poor and help battered women DO take donations to support the staff and the facility. Pretty much exactly what the folks paying the Debian guys were doing... put a little money in the pot so the facility can be open. So I'm afraid you came up with an example for the other side.

Bad article, full of misinformation

[Respect_my_Authority]

IMO, this is a bad article. It's full of misinformation and factual errors, and it paints a very inaccurate picture of the current state of Debian.

From the article:

Debian has a long history of being late, ever since its first version in 1997. This is one of the reasons why entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth launched alternative Linux distribution Ubuntu two years ago.

The date of Debian's first release given in this article is only one of the many factual errors that it contains. The Wikipedia article on Debian ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian ) tells that "The Debian distribution was first announced on August 16, 1993 by Ian Murdock" and "The Debian Project grew slowly at first and released its first 0.9x versions in 1994 and 1995." Debian version 1.1 was released in June 1996, version 1.2 in December 1996, and version 1.3 in June 1997.

Of course, the article also fails to mention that the Ubuntu distribution is based on Debian and Ubuntu's each new release relies heavily on the work that is constantly being done in Debian, and the article also fails to tell that Ubuntu takes most of the code it releases from Debian's development branch.

http://mako.cc/writing/to_fork_or_not_to_fork.html

From the article:

The upcoming release of Debian is being delayed because of a slowdown by key developers.

Actually, there's no factual evidence at all that the delay in Debian's release schedule is caused by developers doing their work slower than usual. It is not easy to grasp how large and complex the Debian project has grown and many journalists also obviously fail to understand the not-for-profit and volunteer nature of the work that is done in Debian. The huge size of the project and the volunteer nature of its work are sufficient reasons alone to explain why the release has been delayed for a month or two. Such delays can happen for purely organizational reasons even if every developer is working as hard as they can.

Debian is a non-profit volunteer organization where all the important decisions are made democratically. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy ) This means that all important issues in the project management are openly discussed over a period of time and every developer has a chance to get their voice heard. From time to time there are disagreements among the developers and these disagreements are settled by voting where the opinion of the majority wins.

There was recently some disagreement among the Debian Developers about the experimental idea to fund two release managers' full-time work for a short period of time just before the upcoming Debian release. The Debian Developers voted about this issue and the majority of them decided to support the experiment. ( http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006 /10/msg00019.html ) Most of the developers accepted this result but 17 of them have been protesting even after the results of the voting were published. It is perhaps worth mentioning here that Debian has over one thousand officially accepted developers and many more who contribute to the project without having the official developer status. 17 developers out of 1000 is a small minority but they can still make a lot of noise. Those other developers concentrate on coding instead of public arguing, so it is only too easy for the scandal-hungry journalists to ignore all these hard-working silent developers and concentrate on the loud complainers.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006 /10/msg00026.html