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Verbal bits from the Debian Project Leader

LinuxTag 2010 is the host of a Debian miniconf; that, in turn, was where relatively new Debian leader Stefano Zacchiroli delivered a relatively high-energy "state of Debian" talk. According to Stefano, Debian is doing great, but can do better yet; he has some ideas for how to make the project better.

Debian has grown a lot since its origin back in 1993. At this point, it holds around 29,000 packages and is the base for some 120 derivative distributions. There have been eleven major releases over the life of the project, with the twelfth getting closer. The project has about 900 developers, plus about 120 "Debian maintainers" working on it. It would seem that Debian is going strong.

Still, Stefano says that there is a certain amount of FUD going around the project, often voiced by Debian's developers themselves. Those developers worry that other distributions release more often, innovate more, and have more users than Debian does. Also, somehow, those distributions seem to get more credit. In this context, Stefano asked: is Debian still better, and is it still relevant? His answer was "yes" on both counts.

So why is Debian better? Freedom and independence were at the top of Stefano's list. Debian, he says, has pushed the concept of free software more strongly than most other distributions, and certainly more than the company-backed distributions have. As a result, Debian's users are more aware of freedom-related issues. Debian is free software from the bottom to the top - even down to the firmware anymore. There are no non-free web services either, for users or for developers.

Most high-profile alternatives to Debian are tied to companies, which means that, to some extent, they are answerable to those companies. Debian is not, which gives the distribution the freedom to make its own decisions. And, in fact, project governance is, according to Stefano, one of Debian's strengths. It is, at its core, a "do-ocracy," where any developer is entitled to make all decisions related to his or her own work. For group decisions, reputations are tightly tied to the work that each developer has done. So those who do the work make the decisions; Debian's decisions are not imposed by any outside entity.

Finally, Stefano asserts that Debian is better because of the quality of the distribution. The "release when it is ready" policy may lead to slow and unpredictable releases, but it also enables stable releases. And, in Debian, most package maintainers are experts on the software they deal with.

That said, Debian can be better yet. To that end, Stefano is trying to encourage Debian developers to take more responsibility for the quality of the distribution as a whole and to step up to get the work done. At the top of his list is helping to get releases out the door; that responsibility, he says, does not just lie with the release team. Debian developers should "be bold" and, once they have dealt with their own release-critical (RC) bugs, they should go off and fix RC bugs in other packages as well.

In other words, Stefano is pushing Debian developers to use the non-maintainer update (NMU) process to push fixes into other developers' packages. Traditionally, Debian has given its developers a high level of control over their packages; an NMU is seen as an action to be taken only when there is a dire need to do so. Stefano thinks that NMUs should be done much more frequently; the "delayed" mechanism should be used to give the package maintainer a chance to respond to the changes.

The use of NMUs is at the core of Stefano's RC bug of the week initiative. He has performed some 180 NMUs fixing RC bugs without hearing a single complaint from the maintainers involved. Instead, he often gets thanks. On occasion, the maintainer has overridden the NMU with a different fix, but that's good too: it still means that the bug gets fixed. All told, Stefano thinks it has been a successful initiative which should be adopted by others.

With regard to the perception that Debian lacks the manpower to get jobs done, Stefano says: be that manpower. In particular, he would like to see more developers joining core teams which are having a hard time getting their work done. It is, he says, harder than ranting on the mailing lists, but it is also more productive and satisfying. There is also, he says, a feeling that Debian has reached a point where there is too much inertia to make large changes. But it shouldn't be that way if developers jump in and simply make those changes happen. Along the way, developers shouldn't always try to seek consensus on the mailing lists; there will always be vocal, dissatisfied minorities but they shouldn't be able to keep things from getting done.

Speaking of the mailing lists, Stefano would like to see Debian become a more attractive community to be a part of. Things have improved a lot over the years, but they can improve further yet. The project cannot afford to lose people who are unable to develop a thick-enough skin to work within the community. So he would like to see more active discouragement of bad behavior, both privately and publicly.

Finally, it would be good, he says, to reduce the barriers to participation in Debian. One of the best things that could happen there would be to improve the documentation of Debian's processes and procedures. A posting to debian-devel-announce is not, he says, documentation; there is no central organization and it is hard for newcomers to find later on.

With Stefano, the Debian project seems to have picked a more energetic and more communicative leader than in the recent past. He seems determined to make use of the soapbox the project has loaned him to push the project toward improving itself. Time will tell how much Debian's famously independent-minded developers are willing to follow Stefano's lead, but his goals - better releases and a more pleasant, more engaged community - seem uncontroversial.

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New Releases

openSUSE Build Service 1.8 and 2.0 Announced

The openSUSE Build Service has released versions 1.8 and 2.0. The 2.0 version comes with a newly designed web UI, anonymous access, and enhanced request system, while the 1.8 version adds an access control feature required by MeeGo. "The public server http://build.opensuse.org is available for all open source developers to build packages for the most popular distributions including Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu. It is also used to build the openSUSE and MeeGo distributions." Click below for the full announcement.

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Sugar Labs Announces New Version of Sugar on a Stick

Sugar Labs has released Mirabelle, the third version of Sugar on a Stick, a collaborative learning environment that can be loaded onto any ordinary USB thumbdrive. "Sebastian Dziallas, Project Lead for Sugar on a Stick and a recent high school graduate based in Germany, said, "Teachers have told us how important reliability is in the classroom while engaging students, so we decided to create a release that has a stable core and can be customized to fit every deployment's needs. Mirabelle is a solid baseline which teachers can customize with Activities interesting to young learners. Part of our strategy is to achieve sustainable development while inviting new contributors. We achieved this by integrating Sugar on a Stick more closely with Fedora, the underlying GNU/Linux distribution; Mirabelle is now an official Fedora Spin.""

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

Bits from the Release Team: current status; where next; scheduling

The Debian release team has a status report on the Squeeze release. "Since the previous update, changes to allow init scripts to run in parallel at startup, thus making the boot process faster for many people, have been enabled in unstable[PB] and we have finished the directfb, evince, netcdf, totem, unixodbc and vtk transitions. We have just completed the ptlib / opal and evolution / gtkhtml transitions. The latter means that Squeeze will release with GNOME 2.30 along with the already transitioned KDE 4.4.3."

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Distribution newsletters

This week's newsletters:

• Debian Project News (June 14)
• DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 358 (June 14).
• Fedora Weekly News (June 9)
• openSUSE Weekly News 127 (June 12)
• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter 197 (June 12)

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The Ubuntu Advantage? Canonical Takes On Red Hat (Linux Magazine)

Linux Magazine takes a look at Canonical's new Advantage support program. The program is available in several levels for both desktops and servers and includes many of the expected features, but one that's a bit surprising: indemnification in case of patent (or other) claims. "One interesting new development is the offer of protection from litigation. Yes, although Canonical (unlike Novell) told Microsoft to go jump, it is selling protection from 'intellectual property' risks which might arise through the use of Linux. Hmm, that's curious, isn't it? In one way, it’s sort of playing into the whole racket. 'Ubuntu Linux could be at risk, so just pay us some money and we'll make sure that you’re covered.'"

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Eric Hameleers: Slackware does exactly what I want it to do. (The Slack World)

The Slack World has an interview with Eric Hameleers about the release of Slackware 13.1. "Looking back at the the months before the release of Slackware 13.1, I would say that we wanted to improve 13.0 in a number of aspects and make 13.1 a fairly short development cycle-make it a "bug fix release" as it were. Obviously things went a bit different. There are several exciting updates in Slackware 13.1 which could have justified a 14.0 release instead of the 13.1 point release. A big and visible change is of course the update to KDE Software Compilation 4.4.3 which uses ConsoleKit and PolicyKit. The combination with a very recent kernel and X.Org allow many people to have a pleasant out-of-the-box experience with modern hardware."

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Seven Reasons to Upgrade to openSUSE 11.3 (Linux.com)

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier takes a look at the upcoming release of openSUSE 11.3. "Lizard lovers, get ready. The next openSUSE release is heading your way very soon. After eight months of development, the green team will launch 11.3 in mid-July. Let's take a look at the new and improved openSUSE. The last openSUSE release came out in November of 2009. It was the last openSUSE release before the project went onto a fixed eight-month release cycle. It's a bit slower than the Ubuntu and Fedora projects but gives a bit more time to work on the release. Lots of good stuff has been developed since 11.2."

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Sundaram: Kyle needs more alcohol

Rahul Sundaram looks at three new features in Fedora 14. "One of the features that I am most excited about for Fedora 14 is systemd. If you have been living under a rock and haven't heard about systemd yet, you can read Lennart's late night novel . When you finish reading all of that, you will have a very through understanding of systemd and you will be only be a couple of years older."

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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