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Debian

Bdale Garbee elected Debian Project Leader 136

Posted by michael from the hardly-any-hanging-chad dept.
Daniel Stone writes "In results released by Project Secretary Manoj Srivastava today, Bdale Garbee was elected Project Leader ahead of Raphael Hertzog and Branden Robinson. Congratulations Bdale! And no CmdrTaco, the debs are not (quite) yet ready, but they *are* very close." The elections page has more information.
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Bdale Garbee elected Debian Project Leader More

Bdale Garbee elected Debian Project Leader

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  • I'm glad that the elections are over, maybe Woddy will be released as stable now, and I can get a nice new 'unstable' debian box going!
    • As someone who knows nothing about Debian... perhaps they should use a different method for deciding their release schedule. OpenBSD has a regular release every six months, LaTeX every twelve months. Both of these have in common with Debian that they are a collection of packages from different sources. There's no way that Debian can plan and organize XFree86, Linux, gcc, Apache etc etc to all work to a single release cycle - they are completely out of phase with each other. Nothing wrong with that. But given this situation, the best release strategy is surely to pick an arbitrary date and go with whatever is available at that time. Debian does put a lot of effort into finishing each distribution once the deadline is known, but IMHO the release date should be known right from the start, as in 'it's always the fifteenth of August'.

      Or even every week - 'It's Friday, it's six o'clock, and it's Debian New Release Time!'. That might be taking it a bit far.
      • The problem with that is having something that is released before it's actually ready. Debian thrives on it's stability and to force a release date may comprimise this. I for one would rather have the new Debian release when it's ready, and not any sooner.
      • As far as I understand, Debian is based on stability and a free software mentality. Which means that it won't sacrifice stability for the latest release. This can be frustrating, especially to non-debian users, but, on the other hand, I will attest that their stable package is rock solid. Even their testing package is pretty good. Unstable isn't bad, but does have the habit of breaking every so often.

        There are other distros that cater to those who want shiny things, or the latest and greatest. Debian caters to those who want stability. Don't fault them for that.
      • Maybe they should switch codenames...

        I wouldn't want to download anything related to "release woody".

    • Sounds like a fortune cookie.. "Woody will soon be released after Viagra."

  • Platform (Score:5, Informative)

    by rubinson ( 207525 ) <rubinson @ e m a i l.arizona.edu> on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @04:14PM (#3360905) Homepage
    His platform makes a good read: http://www.debian.org/vote/2002/platforms/bdale [debian.org]

  • Offtopic (Score:4, Interesting)

    by awptic ( 211411 ) <infiniteNO@SPAMcomplex.com> on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @04:15PM (#3360913)
    But there are .deb's for kde3 ready (*very* beta though) at
    http://www.geniussystems.net/KDE3%20Experimental/ [geniussystems.net]
    Many thanks to WhizNDR from #debian-kde on opn for many hours of work getting these ready :)
    • The files are also mirrored here [unc.edu].

  • Bdale... (Score:4, Informative)

    by xcomputer_man ( 513295 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @04:23PM (#3360983) Homepage
    ...for the perplexed, is actually a short form of "Barksdale", and is pronounced as "Bee-Dale".

    I like interesting names like that.

    --

  • Congratulations! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Enry ( 630 ) <enry@@@wayga...net> on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @04:37PM (#3361108) Journal
    I hope that your leadership takes a better stance on things like QA testing. Woody often has very simple bugs that would have been found had even the simplest of QA tests been done before submitting the package. One of the better examples was a permission problem that took three weeks (!) to solve!

    exim-tls bug [debian.org]

    Saying that woody is for testing purposes is one thing, since I can accept occasional severe bugs that don't show up for a while. But simple install problems should be found BEFORE the .debs are submitted.

    • Re:Congratulations! (Score:1, Redundant)

      by victim ( 30647 )
      Perhaps you should be using the testing release instead of the unstable release?

      Unstable has whatever packages the developer built and uploaded. Odds are they have only been checked on one or two machines of a single architecture by a single person. It is being uploaded to be more widely tested.

      After a period of time without horrible bugs the package will be moved to testing for wider testing. You are relatively safe from show stopping problems with this release.

      You can read a bit about the testing release philosophy [debian.org].

    • Re:Congratulations! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mal0rd ( 323126 )
      I believe the problem is that the unstable packages recieve too little testing before being thrown into woody. Since debian stable is very outdated typical desktop users probably all want to run at list testing. So packages with bugs that make them worse then their predecessors or have a simple problem like you pointed out should stay in unstable.
      Only when the project is considered fairly-stable should it go into testing. That's what unstable is for.
    • The real problem with this particular bug (which I was bitten by too) is that the bug was marked as normal severity when instead it should have been release critical, since the packages could not be installed. If the maintainer wasn't going to fix it in the 2 week time period before packages move to woody from sid, he should have atleast marked it release critical so it wouldn't be moved.
  • Even less informative than /. for a change, but hey. http://www.debianplanet.org/article.php?sid=650 [debianplanet.org]

  • Already? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Decimal ( 154606 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @04:41PM (#3361135) Homepage Journal
    Shouldn't we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide who to elect?

    • Re:Already? (Score:1, Troll)

      by glwtta ( 532858 )
      whom. whom to elect.

    • Erection, release woody... I sometimes wonder if Debian shouldn't be called Devian instead.

      But seriously, Debian is my OS of choice, I run it on all of my boxes and I can always depand on Debian. Hell, my Potatoes was up for years without a single crash! Soon Woody will power my mission critical boxes.

      (note to self: do not say "my potatoes was up for years" again)

  • "Hello... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lethyos ( 408045 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @05:11PM (#3361322) Journal
    ...this is Barksdale Garbee and I pronounce 'Bdale' as 'Bee-Dale'."
  • Almost thought that Barbee had been elected as Debian Project Leader...
  • Bdale's election was a real blast from the past! In the mid-1980s, a bunch of us ham radio types were trying to get TCP/IP running on packet radio. Phil Karn (KA9Q) wrote a DOS program called "NET" which implemented the stack, a chat-style TELNET, FTP, SMTP and POP. Of course there were many variants and distros. The core maintainer of the code base was Bdale.

    It's quite analogous, I think, to what Linus (Phil's role) and the various distro-maintainers (Bdale's role) do today. So Bdale is in that sense uniquely qualified.

    And while Russ Nelson didn't say so (and he was another important player in the NOS/NET project), Bdale's real first name is Arthur. But I didn't tell you. ;-)

  • Voting System (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AmirS ( 15116 )
    I am impressed by the way the voting system works in Debian, it appears to solve any obvious fraud problems associated with e-voting:

    Each developer's vote has to be signed by their gpg secret key (the key itself signed by other debian developers and on the public debian keyring), so votes cannot be faked by developers.

    Each developer is sent a secret token, which is hashed with their uid and a list of hashes against votes is publically posted - so each developer can check their vote has been counted correctly, without being able to determine whose the other votes were.

    Are there any other electronic voting systems that do as well as this?
  • Before Bdale went back to work for Hewlett-Packard, he worked with their spin off, Agilent Technologies. While he was there, he was my boss. Bdale impressed me from the minute I met him with his knowledge and experience. It was a great personal loss for me when he went to HP, but it has been a great thing for Debian. Expect great things from him!

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