Hi people, #include <std_apology.h> I've been too quiet about what's been going on lately, and it's time I fixed that. We've all been busy, and I should update you on DPL-type things. In memoriam: Thiemo Seufer -------------------------- Unfortunately, I start this missive with some sad news. On December 26th, our good friend and fellow developer Thiemo Seufer was tragically killed in a car accident in Germany. Many of us were privileged to work with him in his various roles in the Free Software community, and he will be sorely missed [1]. He took responsibility for much of the work needed to support the mips ports in Debian, showing long-term commitment to that cause. He had also just volunteered to be the primary admin for their buildds in the new team setup, as mentioned below. On top of all his technical work, Thiemo was also a really great guy to work with, and I was always happy to see him at Debian meetings. Thiemo's passing was a great shock to us all, and I pass along our deepest condolences to his family. Press ----- Some more press contacts from the last few weeks: * I spoke with the Linux Outlaws folks on a variety of topics[2]. They're big Debian fans, and it was good fun to talk with them. * Quite a number of people have been asking me "When will Lenny release?"; Sam Varghese [3] was one of the first. At the time in October I highlighted the RC bugs and I hoped for a release very soon. Maybe, maybe not... There's another stack of people asking for information about Lenny and hoping for more quotes and interviews as we release. I'll highlight them as they're published. Teams ----- As you may have noticed already, there are a *lot* of updates to mention here. I've been working with several of our core teams to help bring in new blood and ease the burden that some developers have been carrying alone for far too long. Here's a quick summary of recent changes; follow the links for more details. The FTP team keeps on growing. Frank Lichtenheld joined in December [4], and since then a couple more assistants have started work too and I expect they'll be making their efforts known quite soon. :-) The big task of build daemon care and feeding has been spread out [5]. After a long time with Ryan Murray and James Troup taking the vast majority of this important work, they have helped transition things to a larger team. The new team are working on improving the buildd software itself, with help from Roger Leigh who has been maintaining and improving the associated packages inside the Debian archive. DSA have been busy too: James Troup has stepped down, handing over to new people who have already been involved for a while: Luca Filipozzi and Stephen Gran are on the team as of today. The NM Front Desk has seen rotation of staff: Bernd Zeimetz has joined the team, taking over from Marc Brockschmidt. [6] Anthony Towns has decided to leave the Technical Committee after 3 years [7]. Several developers offered their services as new TC members, and two have been invited to join and have accepted positions within the group: Don Armstrong and Russ Allbery [8]. Finally, Manoj Srivastava resigned his post as Project Secretary [9]. As specified in the constitution, the chair of the TC (Bdale Garbee) is standing in until we appoint a new Secretary. I asked for volunteers [10] and have had several people contact me to talk about taking the job. The deadline has just(!) passed for the call for volunteers, and Bdale and I will be reviewing the candidates very shortly. That's quite a list of changes! I want to offer our gratitude to all of the people involved: both to the people stepping down and handing over for all of the work they have done in their roles in the past, and of course to the new vic^H^H^Hvolunteers for the work they'll do for us in the future. Thanks! There are still more teams I'd like to work with on finding new people and improving work-flow yet, but I'm trying to not be too disruptive at this point shortly before the Lenny release... DPL on the road --------------- I had a busy finish to last year, travelling about a lot. I went to the Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit in California in October, meeting up with a lot of the great Free Software people from the projects who were mentoring students last summer. I may be imagining things, but it seems to me that Debian is infiltrating more and more of the other projects. *grin* We officially only had two Debian mentors present, but looking around at the other people there, it felt more like twenty. We shared reviews of how the programme worked for us last year, and also some ideas on how the various FLOSS projects can work together in general. I met up with some of the other prominent distro folks and we had a good conversation about how we should work together better. More details on that soon when I can find my notes. :-) As an aside, the latest news on the GSoC front is that it has just been approved again for 2009; we should start thinking about ideas for students again for this summer. Next, I went to Valencia to present a talk about Debian at their Open Source Software Congress [11]. It's clear that Valencia, like many of the Spanish regions, are very responsive to the ideas of Free Software right now. It was inspiring to see so many educators involved too, and I hope they'll be passing their enthusiasm on to the children they're working with. Back to California for a work-related trip next, where I was expecting to be stuck on my own without friends for a week while providing on-site support to one of our largest customers. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the customer, a large telco/ISP, use Debian a huge amount in their data centres and are making their own packages locally to help with installations and support. I met up with several of the engineers there, and swapped key signatures and stories with them. Hopefully there'll be some more people in the new queue soon. :-) Finally, on to the Netherlands, where I was invited to speak at HP Dutchworld to a group of HP's customers and salespeople. The talk itself went down quite well, and I was happy to speak to a number of the audience members afterwards and give them more details about Debian and what we do. And it was great to meet up with more of the Dutch Debian folks for dinner and drinks in the two evenings I was there. Recent votes ------------ We have had votes on a couple of contentious issues recently. The first was related to a proposal [12] from Joerg Jaspert (as part of DAM) to reform how we recognise the various contributions that people make to Debian, and what rights and powers should be given to these people. This proposal started a large debate: there is a large range of views on this topic and it's clearly something that we'll need to come back to. The eventual result of the associated vote [13] was to ask the DAM and other people to delay making the suggested changes until after some further discussion and refinement could happen. Discussions at the time suggested that waiting until after the Lenny release would help. The second vote was the latest edition of a recurring issue: deciding on the fate of remaining items in the main archive that we don't consider to meet our requirements for Free Software. In the lead-up to the releases of both Sarge and Etch we had similar discussions and votes that led to releasing with acknowledged places where we did not quite meet our goal of 100% freedom as laid out in our Social Contract. This time, we had a very long debate about what to do followed by a vote. Unfortunately, the vote itself [14] was felt to be confusing by a number of developers and hence the results of the GR were nowhere near as clear as could be hoped. What *can* be deduced is that the majority of developers want to release Lenny without necessarily fixing *all* the issues that had been identified. Lenny will be closer to our ideal than Etch, just as Etch was better than Sarge, and gradual improvement over time looks to be a more popular choice than delaying releases indefinitely. Both of these issues will come back for further discussion, but we seem to have consensus that this discussion should happen after Lenny's release. More discussions for after Lenny -------------------------------- The topics of the two recent votes are not the only things that people want to raise again once we're clear of our next release. There are several others that have already been similarly proposed, and a page has been created in the Debian wiki [15] to help track them. Thanks to Miriam for starting the page; it makes sense to create this page so we don't forget things while people work on the important task of releasing Lenny. Please add more things there if you think they should be tracked too. Declassification of debian-private archives ------------------------------------------- Back in December 2005, we agreed in a GR [16] that we should start declassifying (at least some of) the contents of the debian-private mailing list once three years had passed. Well, that's now... If we're going to follow through on that resolution, we will need volunteers to start working on this. If you're interested in joining a team to do that, please let me know. There's probably a lot of boring work to be done here, but I'm hoping we can find some way to automate much of it. :-) And finally: LENNY! ------------------- By my count, I've mentioned releasing Lenny eight times so far in this mail. Damn, I think that makes nine... :-) We're clearly very close to release; we've had the now-traditional argument about the state of non-free and people are pestering developers on a daily basis to find out when it will be ready. Well, the exact date is up to the Release Team but here's hoping for something very soon. There is still work that you can do to help: RC bugs that can be fixed yet, translations to be completed and installation tests to be performed when the second release candidate for the Debian Installer lands. Lenny will be our biggest release ever; let's help finish off the last few tasks and make it our best too! Phew, that got much longer than I expected. That's it for now, and I hope to see many of you at FOSDEM next month. If we can manage a Lenny release by then, I'll be buying beer. :-) [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/313092/ [2] http://linuxoutlaws.com/podcast/57 [3] http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21034/1090/ [4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00003.html [5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/11/msg00006.html [6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00010.html [7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2009/01/msg00006.html [8] http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2009/01/msg00053.html [9] http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2008/12/msg00275.html [10] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00011.html [11] http://blog.einval.com/2008/11/09#Valencia2008 [12] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/10/msg00005.html [13] http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_002 [14] http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_003 [15] http://wiki.debian.org/DiscussionsAfterLenny [16] http://www.debian.org/vote/2005/vote_002 -- Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Leader <leader@debian.org>
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature