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."

Debian bites off too much

[Cthefuture]

They should remove 99% of the packages from the core distribution and go with a simple small set of base packages for each release. Then switch to a 6 month release schedule like many other projects are using. All those other packages can go into an "extra" repository or something.

I think even Ubuntu tries to put too many packages in the base release. They should take a hint from the BSD distros which use this method with the base install and ports. Hell, Windows uses the same method. After installing Windows there isn't much functionality other than the OS, you can then install whatever applications you want. Note I'm not advocating a ports-like source "build it yourself" thing, I'm just saying that 99% of the packages that are currently in a Debian release don't need to be part of the core.

Brandon replaced after only 1 year?

[JSBiff]

I don't really follow Debian politics much. But, I remember seeing just last year that Brandon Robinson had been elected project lead (he too was planning to put Debian on a faster release cycle last year as I recall).

So, did Brandon resign the post, or did the Debian voters just decide that 1 year of Brandon was enough? I presume that Debian must elect a new leader annually? Are incumbents allowed to run for a second term? Did Brandon run again? Can anyone provide a post-mortem of Brandon's year - was it generally considered that he did a good job in the post?

Changes

[Hellboy0101]

There used to be a time when a new Debian leader election would not have been relegated to a sub headline on Slashdot. I agree with others on this thread that excess architectures need to be dumped, and a firm timeline needs to be put in place. I say putting out a new Stable release every 12 months is the way to go. Debian has an excellent reputation for it's performance and stability. Six months is too soon to keep up that reputation. A new Testing release would be available every six months. With security updates on Stable being current version minus one (i.e. Debian 3.2 comes out, Debian 3.1 will still be supported, but 3.0 no longer will be).

Re:Debian

[Arkaein]

I disagree that Debian Testing's packages work better than Ubuntu (or at least Kubuntu, in my case). I used Debian Testing for nearly two years, but late last year I decided to give Kubuntu a shot and haven't looked back. The final straw was a large set of KDE updates. I had a version of Amarok that I believe was either broken or had some key bug that was fixed in more current versions, but due to some kind of broken dependency chain in Debian Testing there was no way to upgrade anything KDE related. It was like this for a couple of months when I finally left.

There's also the issue that once Debian Testing updates a core package, updating dependencies of that package all require the new core package. Again, this was an issue with many KDE apps. I might want to update Kate, but if the KDE core went under some minor bug fix version change then I have to upgrade EVERYTHING in KDE just to upgrade or install one app. Even the small chance of serious breakage made this a serious risk.

With Kubuntu I know that my software might be as much as 6 months out of date, but I've never had a problem installing or upgrading software, including from the Universe and Multiverse repositories. I can wait 6 months for most things.

It's all about tradeoffs. For me K/Ubuntu strikes the right balance between freshness and stability. Neither Debian Stable nor Testing are as good a fit. YMMV.