Hi! It's been a while since my last bits post, rather longer than it should have been. Sorry. :-( I blame the idiot who suggested a big survey of the teams in Debian. Oh, wait... So, what's been happening? The teams survey ---------------- I won't bore people with all the details again - I've already announced them once [1]. Most of our teams seem to be working OK, but many could do with more help and some have real problems. I'm going to be working through my list of actions in the coming weeks and months. Chief amongst them will be to help identify the places where new people can help; many people have been asking already. There was a followup to the survey - a brief piece in the Register[2] unfortunately focussed a great deal on just one part of my write-up, but I suppose that's probably to be expected sometimes. I'm waiting on a few more press interviews (about the survey and other topics) to happen in the upcoming weeks; I'll pass on pointers to them as they happen. Upcoming events and talks ------------------------- I've been invited to a couple of conferences to talk about Debian. First, the region of Valencia in Spain are holding their 3rd Open Source Software Congress [3] in the first week of November. I'm hoping to meet up with lots of enthusiasts there who are pushing hard to promote the use of Free Software in education and government. Then, later in November I'll be visiting HP Dutchworld [4]. Hewlett Packard have long been supporters of Debian, and this should be a good opportunity to speak with some of their people and some of their customers and tell them all about Debian. Between now and then, I'm going to be helping to man the Debian stand at two events closer to home in the UK. This coming weekend, we'll be at LugRadio Live UK [5] in Wolverhampton and then in October we're going to be exhibiting as part of the .ORG village at LinuxLive[6] in London. Team updates and delegations ---------------------------- As Christoph Berg moved on from the NM Front Desk to join DAM, he left a gap behind him. Wouter Verhelst and Michael Koch have volunteered to fill that gap, so hopefully the FD team should be able to cope without him now. [7] As always, we'd still like more people to work as AMs - please contact the FD folks if you want to help out [8]. As the constitution requires [9], I've spoken to Manoj and re-delegated him as Project Secretary for this year. He and I have also had further discussions about the secretary job and we agreed that it would be useful to appoint an assistant to help in times where he might be busy or unavailable. We have asked Neil McGovern to be the assistant, and he has accepted the post. Collaborating with Debian derivatives ------------------------------------- I've spoken with Mark Shuttleworth a couple of times recently about how we can improve collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu. I've also started similar conversations with folks at Xandros and Linspire, although I'll admit that I've not progressed those very far at all yet due to lack of time on my part. Recent events may have changed the landscape here a little [10], but I'm still convinced that there's a lot to be gained if we can work together more closely with the developers who use Debian as a base for their own distributions. I want to talk about this more at Debconf, and I'd love to hear your ideas on this front. Debconf! -------- Talking of which... We're less than 4 weeks from the start of this year's Debconf in Mar del Plata, Argentina [11]. The organising team have been working incredibly hard to get things done in time, and I can't wait to head south and meet up with friends old and new. I've also got the dubious honour of the opening talk when we're there, but I'm more interested in hearing what others have to say. Oh, and maybe the dancing and beer! I'll be wearing my Debian kilt with pride, and I hope to see others too. Does anybody know if we can find sauna in Argentina? :-) Lenny ----- Coming Real Soon Now. The freeze is in progress as I write this, and we should be making the last push to get the RC bugs list [12] reduced and prepare for the release. There's still a lot of work to be done, and I'm told there's another release update coming from the Release Team very shortly. Let's come together and help make Lenny our best release yet! [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/06/msg00009.html [2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/03/debian_death_threats/ [3] http://www.edu.gva.es/congreso [4] http://www.hp.nl/dutchworld/ [5] http://lugradio.org/live/UK2008/ [6] http://www.linuxexpo.org.uk/ [7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/06/msg00007.html [8] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/06/msg00005.html [9] http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#7 [10] http://www.xandros.com/news/press_releases/xandros_acquires_linspire.html [11] http://debconf8.debconf.org/ Cheers, -- Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Leader <leader@debian.org>
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