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Our Blogs Open Sauce New Debian leader aims for better communication | New Debian leader aims for better communication |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 18 April 2008 | |
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Page 4 of 5 In a few months, it will be time to freeze Lenny if you are going to release by the year-end. Do you see that happening? And do you think it is possible to keep to something like an 18-month schedule for releases? We've already started freezing some of the archive, in fact. Core essential packages are already stabilised, with changes now needing approval from the Release Team. As we go further into the year, we'll be progressively freezing larger parts of the system: core toolchains and libraries, non-core toolchains and so on up to the full freeze leading to the release itself. We're still aiming to release some time in the second half of the year, and at this point that's looking entirely possible. It'll be hard work (as always!) and there will be some hard decisions to be made. In my opinion, a key thing that has changed over the last couple of release cycles (Etch and Lenny) is that we have a very strong Release Team who concentrate on release issues for the entire period, trying to ensure that Testing is always in a reasonable and consistent state. We used to let things essentially run wild for long periods and only try and stabilise very late. The very long Woody and Sarge cycles showed that could not work any longer. At the moment, we're aiming for 18-month release cycles. If we can aim for 18 months and deliver within a few months of that each time, we'll be happy. Etch showed it was possible once, and I believe Lenny will show we can manage it again. How do you plan to go about making it easier and less intimidating for prospective developers to join? We're always looking for new developers - they're important to keep the project going and growing. Our existing New Maintainer process is infamous for being demanding, both in terms of the technical challenges and the time and patience required to complete it. However, more and more potential developers are working with us on the debian-mentors list (a great place for training) and getting their packages sponsored into the archive. We also have the newly-created DM (Debian Maintainer) scheme whereby new people can be granted limited upload rights once they have shown a reasonable level of ability. These two together make a much easier level of entry into Debian than previously; more effort is still underway to streamline the process even further. |
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