Making Debian sexy again: Sam Hocevar speaks

Sam Varghese
Sunday, 29 April 2007 09:15

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft Office 365

In your platform for election as Debian project leader, you had outlined what you see as the major problems with the project. What is your first priority now that you have been elected?

My priority is to gather information about internal communication issues, conflicts, the reasons for them, and both past and current attempts at addressing them. Of course most of it is already public, but you need to know both sides of the mirror. I have only been officially in charge for a day or so, but I have had access to far more information since the end of the elections.

I will clearly focus on the social part of my platform, not only because I find it more urgent, but also because many of the other, more technical projects in my platform already started: we have a Google Summer of Code project for a web interface to our bug tracking system, at least one tool is under development for the debugging infrastructure, and quite a few proposals about improving the web site have popped up.

There is a lot of outside pressure - at least published sources indicate this - for Debian to mimic commercial distributions and have a fixed release schedule. What do you think about this?

Although the release of Etch has already shown that Debian was by no ways doomed to releasing every three years, I would be all for an even shorter, fixed release schedule.

I also know that many won't agree, be it with the "shorter" part (for instance those accustomed to upgrading every two years and not willing to work twice as often on upgrade plans) or with the "fixed schedule" part (those who believe more in the "out when it's ready" part).

Whether anything of the sort is possible or will happen highly depends on the available manpower (both in terms of release management and security support), and is ultimately not my decision but mainly the release team's and the security team's.

You have mentioned the need for bigger teams in your election platform. Is it then to be inferred that you think power within the project is concentrated in the hands of a few?

Yes. The power is concentrated in the hands of a few, and I do not think anyone really disagrees with this. The disagreement lies in whether this is really a problem. I have no reason to believe that these powerful people do not have Debian's best interests in mind, I also do not question their competence, but I still think the situation is problematic.

The major problem with this is time. Time is the scarcest resource, and a single person can only have so much of it. People with power and control have a lot to do, and eventually have to delay or ignore tasks of lower priority, and it should be news to no one that there have been complaints within Debian that tasks could get done faster, that requests were seemingly ignored or dismissed.

The Debian server administrators recently set up a request tracker which I think will greatly improve the team's efficiency when they all start using it (there is still reluctance to switching to it within the team). But this is not enough, because even when you reach 100% efficiency there is still a limit to what a human being can do in 24 hours. The teams are too small and they are not renewed enough.

We're also seldom mentioning the "What if Joe Random Developer gets hit by a car" argument. A few Debian developers have already passed away and as we grow older and more numerous, we should expect even more unfortunate events. And speaking of growing older, this is exactly the same as the "What if Joe Random Developer becomes uninterested, gets a job, gets married, has a kid" argument. I am 28 now and I can no longer afford to sleep 3 hours a night and spend all my time hacking and programming. No one can do that forever. This is why I think we need fresh blood not only to maintain packages but also to work in our core teams, or we'll wonder what to do when it's already too late.