Anthony Towns Elected New Debian Leader

daria42 writes "Australian developer Anthony Towns has just been elected Debian Project Leader starting 17 April. In his platform for election, Towns said the most important issue for Debian was 'increasing its tempo'. 'We've been slow in a lot of things, from releasing, to getting updates in, to processing applications from prospective developers, to fixing bugs, to making decisions on policy questions, and all sorts of other things,' he said."

Re:Worst idea ever?

[Bogtha]

Why? I'm a Debian user, and I appreciate how well EVERYTHING works. I'd hate for them to sacrifice the quality of most of the software I use just so they can release twice as often.

The idea isn't to skip testing, the idea is to decouple the release schedule of the OS from the release schedule of the applications. So long as the base Debian system maintains compatibility between releases (and I was under the impression it did), it shouldn't matter to the applications when new versions of the OS is released, and it shouldn't matter to the OS when new versions of the applications are released.

By tying the two release schedules together, you essentially make the OS wait for the applications to catch up in stability and make the applications wait for the OS to catch up in stability. If one or other can be made stable independently, there's no need to slow things down by synchronising their schedules.

Re:Brandon replaced after only 1 year?

[laptop006]

Annual term as DPL, Branden decided not to stand for a second term.

Re:Brandon replaced after only 1 year?

[Anonymous Coward]

Brandon did not run again this year - he did not resign, he choose not to run for re-election (Debian DPL elections are indeed held annually).

Re:Worst idea ever?

[croddy]

I would definitely agree. It is unusual (in the Linux world) that Sarge took two and a half years to release, but I think that the benefits of the Debian QA process are very apparent. Taking the time to sort out bugs as well as they do -- on a very large number of packages -- makes a Debian release worth waiting for.

The slower release cycle is offset by two things. If you know you need a fresher system, and are willing to sacrifice some stability for updated packages, you have as many choices as you can handle: adding a few packages from testing to your stable system, directly tracking testing or unstable, some mix of any of the three, or even adding packages from experimental if you really want to go out on a limb.

The power of Debian is not only in APT, but in Debconf, the configuration system. Configuration changes are pretty much a given on a system that's directly tracking sid, but are unheard-of (and perhaps even forbidden?) in the stable release. The ease of administration that comes with knowing that changes Debian stable will consist only of backported security patches makes it worth the wait.

Lastly, a system administrator does not want to have to go through a major operating system upgrade on numerous heterogenous servers every 9 months. Knowing that it will be somewhere around 18-36 months between Debian releases means spending a lot less time migrating and fiddling with systems just to keep up with supported releases.

Other distributions do release every 6-9 months. It's not for me... except when it is, and I use testing/unstable in those cases :-)

Re:Brandon replaced after only 1 year?

[joeytsai]

LWN has a pretty decent interview of Branden, but he's kinda vague about interesting details. Link here [lwn.net].

Re:Slowness

[Homology]

The only one I have any experience with is FreeBSD, and I can say for a fact that I would never dream of using an X.0 release of FreeBSD. Since I've started following their progress, it's always taken till at least X.4 before a major version was stable enough to consider for serious use.

OpenBSD has a different release policy (i.e. a release every six months) that works very well. The 3.9 release is coming 1th of May, but the release in November will have version 4.0. Of course, someone had to ask if 4.0 will be stable. Theo de Raadt answered thus:

>Yep, the developers magically do more in the 6 months preceding 4.0
>than the 6 months preceding any other release. That's definately how
>it works.

We've been holding back about 50% of our work for each of the previous
4 releases, and now we are going to throw all those very large things
into what will become 4.0. It is going to be a fantastic catastrophy,
exactly like what all of you ".0 release" people expect.

Right... Get a grip.

Re:Slowness

[Homology]

So for OpenBSD this means that they have working installer, you can compile your own kernel on your own box and most of the basic tools exist (emphasis mine.)

It's requirement for a supported arch that not only the kernel, but userland (including thirdparty applications like perl, Apache httpd, BIND, Sendmail, gcc toolchain and more) must also be built natively: cross-compiling is not sufficient to claim support, unlike some other OS that shall be unnamed. Some archs, like vax, is limited by hardware, while others are not fully supported due to lack of documentation/hardware/resources.

In general, if an arch is supported, it is supported well.

All the ports are there in source, and they may work for you, but really, who knows?

Ports are tested on all platforms, but some ports are not supported on some platforms either due to hardware limitations or bugs in the application.

A supported arch in Debian parlance, on the other hand, means that there is a working installer, you can coompile your own kernel on your own box..

OpenBSD has higher standards than just to be able to compile a kernel natively: Userland must also be built natively and it must be a useable OS.

... and virtually every debian package can be auto-built and available in binary form.

Now, this is silly. Of course OpenBSD offers pre-compiled ports (ie packages) for every arch where it makes sense. Obviously, on vax, for instance, there will be a limited supply of applications that may run on such a platform. However, there are quite a few packages available (not cross-compiled): ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.8/packages/vax [openbsd.org]