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:Good Move

[babbling]

What makes you think that? I mean, sure, he stated that he wants to get releases out quicker, but that doesn't necessarily mean he will be able to. I imagine that has more to do with the independent, unpaid Debian developers rather than the project leader. It's rather likely that the previous Debian project leader also wanted a shorter release cycle.

This is one of the problems with free software. If developers are less accountable, fixed release dates are more difficult to achieve. On the other hand, almost all proprietary software seems to be facing the same problem, and sometimes to a greater degree...

Re:Debian

[lpcustom]

I have to disagree totally. Ubuntu does have newer software for it's main distro. Debian Testing has just as new software cept it works better. For example, Ubuntu is still using firefox 1.0.7. Debian testing is at 1.5. Ubuntu's latest dapper flights are basically Debian Testing with new artwork that says Ubuntu.
I like a ton of distros but I seem to always come back to Debian. For a bunch of guys that can't get their act together, they still make the others looks bad.

Re:Slowness

[Anonymous Coward]

The three main BSD projects are comparable to Debian, yet they manage to get their releases out on a (fairly) regular basis.

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.

This is in no way comparable to Debian, which prefers to wait six months longer and then get things right the first time.

Maybe the other BSDs are better.

Best intentions...

[QuaintRealist]

I'd have to agree with you. One of the main reasons Debian has been slow to update has been the range of architectures and applications they attempt to simultaneously support. Other distros update faster, but most of them take one of two paths: a) limit supported architecture (usually to the x86 and x86 64) or b) support only a small subset of applications.

Really, as much as I'd love to see Debian update faster, I'd hate to see them take one of those expediencies to get the job done.

Worst idea ever?

[babbling]

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.

I don't really trust distributions that guarantee a release every 6 months, because I get the impression they must be rushing things. I'd prefer something quality, even if it's usually "behind the pack".

Re:Worst idea ever?

[Spazmania]

More to the point, I'd hate for them to release twice as often period. I maintain more than 60 machines; frequent release upgrades would be a serious drain on my time.

If you want a distro that does significant upgrades to core packages every few weeks, get Fedora. Its great for that. Sucks for stability, but it has a really fast upgrade cycle.

Re:Best intentions...

[Dan Ost]

The reason why Gentoo can release predictably and why Debian can't is that Gentoo allows
different profiles for different architectures (Gentoo 2006.0 may have different stable versions for an app for different architectures, assuming the app is available for both
arches in the first place) while Debian requires that the stable profile for each arch is
synchronized.