One or two of you have asked me for the list of questions I had gathered
pre-debate from you all. After consulting with Don, I can see no reason
not to post the list now. Here it is, for whom it interests.
So little time remains before the campaign's close, it would be
unreasonable to address these pre-debate questions to the candidates
now. The questions are declassified for information only, because I
have been asked for them. Candidates naturally remain free to respond
to these as to anything else on debian-vote, but no response is
expected.
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PART I
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Why are you running for DPL this year?
Do you feel that being DPL would drastically alter the work you already
do for Debian? How?
A current Debian user poses the question: "I've been a Debian User for
around 5 years now. I've contributed to Debian in terms of Bug Fixing,
Bug Reporting, Mailing Lists et cetera. I too am committed to
contributing to Debian more. I want to be a Debian Developer but the NM
process looks too time consuming; and given the long time the motivation
gets lost. Yes, this has happened to me multiple times. So, are we
going to have changes in the NM process to help wanna-be developers
contribute more to Debian? Maybe a mentoring process should be a good
one. A process which would be `fast result oriented' so that wanna-be
developers keep getting motivated to contribute to Debian?"
If you are happy to tell us: what is your religion and how will it
influence your behaviour as DPL, if at all?
Please defend your vote in the recent GFDL election, and how you think
it represents your ideas for freedom in Debian. For reference, the
candidates' votes follow:
V: 1141 jeroen Jeroen van Wolffelaar
V: 1243 ari Ari Pollak
V: 2134 93sam Steve McIntyre
V: 1144 ajt Anthony Towns
V: 212- andreas Andreas Schuldei
V: 4213 krooger Jonathan Walther
V: 1342 ballombe Bill Allombert
Will you put more emphasis on documentation, especially of
Debian-specific software?
How easy is it for young people (age < 18) to get involved in Debian?
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PART II
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Over the years, we have seen a sad trend: Whoever gets elected as
a DPL is a prominent, active member of the community. The new DPL then
acts as he is expected for a couple of months, but soon thereafter the
interest seems to wear down, and we end up losing a valuable
contributor. Why do you think this happens? We know you don't have a
crystal ball, but do you think this will happen to you? How will you
avoid it?
What do you see as the primary responsibilities of the DPL? Do you feel
that you'd like to change this at all?
The messages about the most recent developer death caused some
controversy. How would you handle the next death if it occurs during
your term?
[ed.: In the form originally submitted, this question was very lengthy.
Have greatly condensed it, hopefully without significantly altering its
meaning.] Some feel that Debian, although one of the best server OSs,
remains unsuited for mission-critical applications because it adds
nothing but security updates between releases. Debian neither upgrades
kernels nor refreshes perishable data (for spamassassin, gtk-gnutella,
gaim, etc.) There is "volatile", but is not clear that volatile can
really be regarded as part of official Debian stable: volatile appears
to lie outside Debian's usual security regime; and in any case it
upgrades no kernels, even when kernels add important new features. RHEL
updates between releases, and it supports its updates. Can't we? If we
can, then shouldn't we? Please comment.
How do you intend to keep a positive, enthusiastic attitude (i.e.,
productive) during your tenure as DPL, and how do you intend to project
that attitude inwards to the Debian Developers and outwards to the outer
community? How do you plan to avoid the soul-crushing
productivity-sapping effects of the nay-sayers inside and outside the
project?
Last year transparency was a hot-button issue. Do you feel that the
project as a whole has improved on this, or has the furor simply died
down? What do you think we can do better in this area, and what are your
specific plans for dealing with it?
What are your thoughts on the proposed code of conduct?
What concrete and definite goals have you set that you realistically
believe you can achieve as DPL?
Earlier, both RedHat and Suse were controlled by specific organizations.
Their development was entirely based on the body that funded it. Only
Debian was the most widely used, unique, community driven OS. And so is
it now. The development model of Debian is what made it unique and
superior. Now since RedHat (Fedora) and Suse (OpenSuse) are following
the same path of Open Development Model (at least for name sake), what
new model are we going to bring into Debian to make it more committed to
a Free OS and as a superior distribution? One good thing one finds is
that Debian is not just another Linux distribution, it is a community.
We have other ports, Hurd, FreeBSD and more. What more is planned or is
supposed to be planned for Debian looking forward?
Most other distributions (Ubuntu) are kicking Debian off by capturing
its weak points like late releases---"Debian releases when it's ready".
Are we going to stick to such ideologies or are we going to evolve with
the time and demand?
Are we ever going to have a "Working" Debian Enterprise sub-project? At
the moment one doesn't see Debian anywhere near to RHEL or SLES in the
enterprise market. Are we going to address the matter or is it that
we'll leave this to our derived projects? It appears that to have a
Enterprise Grade Debian Distribution, we need a SPOC [ed.: Single Point
of Contact?] team which can address Enterprise demands quickly. One
doesn't see this at the moment. Do we have plans to increase Debian's
usage more?
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