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Joey Hess Resigns From Debian

Posted by Soulskill on from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-patience dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Long-time Debian developer Joey Hess has posted a resignation letter to the Debian mailing list. Hess was a big part of the development of the Debian installer, debhelper, Alien, and other systems. He says, "It's become abundantly clear that this is no longer the project I originally joined in 1996. We've made some good things, and I wish everyone well, but I'm out. ... If I have one regret from my 18 years in Debian, it's that when the Debian constitution was originally proposed, despite seeing it as dubious, I neglected to speak out against it. It's clear to me now that it's a toxic document, that has slowly but surely led Debian in very unhealthy directions."

4 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. DebianNoob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What directions is he referring to? What's seen as wrong with the constitution? Toxic?

  2. Gnome3, systemd etc. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    After all of the rhetoric regarding "community" you can see how Debian has fallen short. While I still like and use Debian currently I am seriously looking at other options. When Debian pushed Gnome3 and the community didn't like it they moved forward with it as the default desktop anyway. Now there is the systemd debacle. A large number of people have voiced their disapproval, but No, Debian is going to go down that route anyway. Perhaps this could be a real gain for the BSDs?

    1. Re:Gnome3, systemd etc. by mvdwege · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In fact, someone on the Phoronix forums posted a bunch of links to Joey's debian-devel posts which seems to bear this out.

      Especially the first one is a clanger. If you can't support systemd on technical grounds without getting threats, something is very toxic indeed.

      And no, that first post is not directly related to the Debian Constitution. That the idiotic GR trying to override the Technical Committee decision two weeks before the Jessie freeze is inspired by this kind of drivel, and that the Constitution makes these kind of purely political overrides of the technical decisions possible is rather evident though.

      --
      "I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
    2. Re:Gnome3, systemd etc. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I was kind of neutral about systemd until I realized that the only way to get centralized logging out of systemd boxes is to turn on syslog mode (journald has no concept of network transport).

      At that point, I realized that the systemd developers aren't actually server admins.