LCA2005: The state of Debian

Bdale Garbee led off the linux.conf.au 2005 Debian "miniconf" with a discussion of the state of the Debian project as he sees it. He covered several topics of interest to the Debian community - and beyond.

With regard to the recently-concluded project leader election: Bdale was clearly not entirely comfortable with Branden Robinson as a project leader candidate. He did say, however, that Branden clearly wants to do the right thing with Debian, and that the community should work with him to make that happen. It will, he says, be interesting.

In general, there are difficulties with the whole concept of the Debian project leader. The Debian community prizes cooperation and working together to create the best distribution possible, but the project leader process focuses, instead, on singling out an individual. The job is too much for one person to handle, and, in any case, that one person can only do so much to affect the development of Debian. And the election process, which extends over a nine-week period, takes far too long relative to a one-year term.

The Debian technical committee is not working as well as it could be either. Its current composition needs to be reviewed; some of the committee's members have not been active participants for some time. The committee could take a more active role in directing Debian's development. At the same time, the people who complain that the committee is insufficiently active could also step forward and try to influence things on their own.

Project Scud is an initiative to create a sort of advisory committee to help the Debian project leader in his work. This project was endorsed by Branden Robinson, so one assumes that it will be implemented in some form. Bdale noted that not everybody is comfortable with this idea. The committee's role, as it relates to the project's constitution, is not particularly clear. The committee is self-selected, and is not necessarily representative of the entire project. Some people feel left out. Bdale feels that Scud might improve the situation. But, he says, it's a hack, and the project can do better.

Bdale's proposal for doing better is to amend the constitution to bring about a significant change in the project's governance. The Debian project leader would be replaced with an elected board. A board could divide up the work, and, hopefully, give more attention to what needs to be done. Board candidates could emphasize how well they can work with a team. Running for a board seat is less intimidating than going for a single position. The result of all this could be that more qualified people run for (and are elected to) board seats.

Bdale hopes to get some discussion of this idea at Debconf5, to be held in Helsinki this July. If some sort of consensus emerges, a general resolution could be proposed to the community as a whole. The idea could change a lot in the process, but, Bdale says, there is a pressing need to think creatively about how to evolve Debian, or it will eventually cease to be interesting.

With regard to the sarge release: Bdale noted (jokingly) that he was the last Debian project leader to have overseen a Debian stable release. There comes a point where you have to simply list the remaining hurdles and summon up the will to deal with them. Debian is, he says, getting to the point where it is ready to do this and get sarge out the door. After that, he would like to see Debian go to a more predictable (and shorter) release schedule.

A question was asked about shipping XFree86 4.3 in sarge, long after most other distributions have moved over to the X.Org release. It is, of course, simply a question of getting the sarge release out the door. Now is not the time to replace such a large and fundamental component of the system. It would have been better if sarge had shipped some time ago so that this sort of issue would not come up, but there is little to be done about that now.

Meanwhile, Bdale's plots of the number of Debian maintainers and the number of packages continue to show a linear increase over many years. Debian continues to grow, and is showing no sign of stopping. The project must, it seems, be doing something right.

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