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Debian

Interview with Debian Project Leader 29

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
An anonymous reader sent us a link to a Linux Power interview with Wichert Akkerman, the Debian GNU/Linux project leader. Talks about the future of Debian, his role, and more.
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Interview with Debian Project Leader More

Interview with Debian Project Leader

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  • huh? Well i'm gonna go demand that redhat lets me work for them, then im gonna sabotage them. See my point? Debian is not a political party, its a group of developers that share a common goal, if you dont share our goal why would you want to be a developer anyway?

  • Uhh, where have you been? Debian dropped kde quite a while ago, as for qt it is in the non-free section. It is not officially part of debian, they are provided for the convienence of the users.
  • Correction about enlightenment cvs packages.
    add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list

    deb http://www.debian.org/~bma/e-cvs/debs/ ./

    The package name is enlightenment-cvs

    And our gnome packages do lag behind a little, 0.99.3 is in potato and 0.99.8 will be uploaded very soon. Packages do exist, they just aren't menioned on gnome.org like the rpms.

  • Oh, yeah, you are right, I just got back from beating some people into submission because they didn't define their concepts of free software the way I thought they should.

    If you dont agree with debian then dont join, or better yet start your own distribution based on it.



  • Uhm, hello?

    http://www.debian.org/~bma/e-cvs/debs [debian.org]

    Granted, I don't update them as often as I should. There was a point in time where I made new ones every major commit. That was when I had to hand-hack the source each time to get it to work with the FHS. Has _anyone_ noticed that the debian stuff is IN THE E SRC TREE?! I sent raster that patch for two reasons...a) to make my life easier in making the packages (I just have to do a cvs update, and a dch -i), and b) so people can BUILD THEIR OWN if they want more up to date ones. All I do when I build a package is 'fakeroot debian/rules binary', wait about 15 minutes, upload them to the aforementioned URL, and run dpkg-scanpackages on them so they are accessible via APT.
    On a related note, I probably won't be doing the E CVS debs much longer. Jules Bean, another Debian developer, will probably be taking over shortly.

    You also may wonder why the E CVS debs are not in the main distribution - easy - CVS is for _developers_, not the end user. I don't want to be flooded with bug reports for the latest CVS snap not working, because of an upstream source glitch that was fixed 2 minutes after I built the .debs. E15 is almost ready for release, and when it's released, it'll go into Debian. Simple as that.

    bma
    Uber-E maintainer for Debian
    --
    Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/

  • I can't dispute that there are certian parties in the debian community who want to require maintainers to agree with the DFSG. However, this group is not currently anywhere near a majority of the debian developers. When this thread appeared on the debian lists, I summarized it as follows for Debian Weekly News [debian.org]:

    Should all Debian developers be required to agree with the DFSG? A thread about this started in debian-private and later escaped to the debian-devel mailing list. Everyone agrees developers must understand and abide by the DFSG when working on Debian, but there is no consensus that they must also agree with it. One commonly held opinion is that developers should at least believe in the spirit of the DFSG, but may disagree with specific points of it. Another common opinion is that it doesn't matter what developer's private opinions of the document are.

    These people who think everyone in the Debian project must agree with the DFSG are a subgroup of the project as a whole. As you yourself say, Debian has always had an "enormous number of dissenting opinions" -- well the opinion of this group is just such a dissenting opinion.

    Joey Hess, debian developer and editor of Debian Weekly News.

  • Here's a hint. Just because one is a debian developer does not mean their every private action should be taken as reflecting on debian as a whole.
  • Everyone who applies for maintainership gets a short interview, where we also ask the applier if he understands the Debian Free Software Guidelines. This filters out most people who don't support the FSF philosophy.

    This, in combination with some discussion I've seen on the Debian lists about requiring maintainers to agree with DFSG (and/or FSF?) as well as abide by them makes me very nervous. Free software in general, and Linux and Debian in particular, have gotten where they are because everybody is able to contribute. Allowing input only from people who agree with you is fine if you are never wrong; in the real world, it is a sure path to disaster. This is completely apart from the irony of a "free as in speech" software distribution requiring that you think a certain way in order to participate.

    Realize that I don't think this is a problem at present; but things are definitely showing signs of heading that way.

    I really like Debian; I don't want to see it go away. That a distribution put together and maintained entirely by volunteers is so successful is an amazing accomplishment. A quick look at Debian's history will show that this is because of the enormous number of dissenting opinions that have been dealt with, not because there weren't any.

    Debian has certain ways it wants things done. This is fine. The maintainers should be made aware of this and expected to comply. However, doing the equivalent of requiring membership in a specific political party as a price of admission, IMNSHO, is a huge mistake.

  • Letting people with different viewpoints participate is a far cry from letting people subvert your goals.

    As to why, it would seem self evident. Free software improves and grows in an evolutionary process. By locking people into one mindset, you've just eliminated one of the major sources of change. I agree with you that Debian is the best distribution. I think it got there by expressly not doing this.

    And again, I have a real problem with holding so tightly to the free software mantle then basically saying "yes, it's free as in speech, as long as you don't say it here."

  • A very coherent, well-spoken interview. I'm glad to see that he mentioned user-friendliness several times, I've been concerned about Debian's installation/initial setup problems for a while now. If they do gnome-apt right and resolve the UI issues, the futue will be very good...

    Daniel
  • Great summary! This week, prodded by the latest /. survey results, I installed Debian for the first time (2.1 prerelease) and I'm very impressed. As someone else pointed out, the hardware detection is non-existent, unlike RH, so you have to know what's going on in order to configure your network and soundcard. Without much better hardware detection, Debian will definitely remain "too techie and hard to install." Fortunately, they appear to have the right infrastructure (dpackage, etc.) to add better hardware detection in the future, it's just that nobody's written it yet.

    Also, there are a lot of bugs, but because there's so much more functionality than RH, and so many more people working on fixing the bugs, I feel like pitching in to help fix the bugs myself, rather than complaining. As soon as I become a little more familiar with the system, and learn how to make packages, I'm definitely going to sign up as a maintainer. I'm pretty good at writing documentation, so maybe I can start with that, as well as fixing the few installation bugs I noticed with slink.

    One other nice thing is that the bleeding edge (unstable branch) is much easier to download than the RH equivalent (Rawhide), which AFAIK is only available for FTP from rawhide.redhat.com, which is completely overloaded all the time.

    Finally, regarding the new GLIBC 2.1, I have much more confidence that Debian will survive that transition relatively unscathed (in particular, Debian uses a library naming scheme which will allow C++ programs linked with GLIBC 2.0 to coexist with those linked with GLIBC 2.1). My experience with Rawhide on this matter has not been very pleasant, and if you've installed EGCS 1.1.x on Redhat, you'll probably find all of your C++ binaries break when RedHat 6 comes out (in a nutshell, Redhat uses libstdc++.so.2.9.0 for both the GLIBC 2.0 and 2.1 version of libstdc++, which are incompatible with each other). Bad luck for people who compiled KDE or other C++ apps themselves using EGCS 1.1.1 (luckily, the KDE binary RPMs are built with an older version of EGCS which uses libstdc++.so.2.8.0, and so won't conflict with the new libstdc++ for GLIBC 2.1).

    -Jake
  • and I love it! LSL shipped it priority mail and it did not take me long to get it going.

    The distribution has the packages that match my personality. It was a nice surprise to have a great selection of scientific applications that are conviently installed. Other things caught my eye too, like the OJ screen saver.

    For me, this is the ultimate distribution. I hope they enjoy the little donation from me in return.
  • The whole point of Debian is to produce a 100% free distribution. It would be a bit silly to allow people to join who intended to subvert the fundimental purpose of the distribution.

    Having the maintainers agree to contribute code using licenses that meet thier criteria for "free" software in has nothing to do with technical issues. Debian is not saying, "all programs must be single threaded" or "GUIs are for wimps, end of discussion." They are saying that they will only build a their distribution using licenses that meet specified requirements. That doesn't stiffle the discussions and arguments about technical issues, usability concerns or any other tangible aspect of the distribution. It just guarantees the consumers of the distribution that they can do anything they want with the distribution, except make the code secret.


  • I think that Wichert is not
    talking about anything like swearing an oath on
    some document. The interview is just to see
    if the developer-to-be understands what Debian is,
    and that it is 100% free software. The developer
    can still upload non-free packages to the non-free
    section (if their licenses allow this). Understandably, the developer must agree that everything in the main part of the distribution consists of free software and that binary only software and shareware and warez and whatnot cannot be included in a free distribution. The interview is meant to
    try to avoid possible misunderstandings.

    John Lapeyre
  • A friend of mine spent quite a bit of time getting a mirror script that grabs an i386 slink/potato Debian distribution minus some of the "unnecessary" stuff. If you have provided your email address, I could have sent it to you.
  • I have debian on my home machine, and this line suprised me as well. I use debian because it is well-built, not because it adheres to some political platform. This is one of the reasons I'm running FreeBSD at work instead of Linux-- the licensing. And don't give me that crap about selling support. Yeah, right.

    To summarize, this makes me question how "open" Debian and the rest of linux really are. Your speech is free as long as it is our speech, eh?

  • AIUI, Debian's commitment to free software is about choice. Therefore, non-free packages are simply made available in a different category outside the core distribution.

    "Caring about 100% free software" is a misleading approximation of Debian's philosophy.

    ~ Casper Boden-Cummins
    Debian user since 0.93r6

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