Sam Varghese
Thursday, 17 April 2008 21:56
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 5
He was quick off the blocks when approached for an interview; his prose was clear and concise, his reactions swift.
iTWire: Congratulations on being elected leader of one of the world's larger software projects. Has the fact that you now head a team which is much bigger and much more fractious than the average company sunk in?
Steve McIntyre: Thanks! It's slowly dawning on me. I've met a lot of the people in Debian over the years and made many friends; that helps me to not to be too intimidated. I'm expecting to have an interesting time "in charge" of the herd of cats, though.
The turnout for the election was comparatively low this time. I've seen comments indicating that this was because there were no "controversial" candidates in the running. Your comment?
That's a reasonable justification, I think. All of us (
me,
Marc and
Raphael) are quite well-known and well-respected within the project already, and we had broadly similar ideas on things to do. I can understand that that may have led to reduced interest in the election itself. We also reduced the length of the election process this year, which will have further contributed to the reduced numbers.
When Anthony Towns was leader, there was a great deal of coverage (mostly negative) about the project. During Sam Hocevar's time, there has been very little written about the project. Which do you think is better? Can you think of any reason why this is so?
Anthony was one of our most active DPLs in recent years, and he wasn't afraid of trying controversial things (for example
Dunc Tank). In a project like Debian with over 1000 strong-minded developers, you can probably expect more than 2000 different opinions on any given topic. Given that, a project leader trying wild new ideas is guaranteed to cause a lot of publicity.
In contrast, Sam has been much quieter in the last year. He has been working much more on issues that are less visible externally. That means that the press coverage has been much more subdued.
As to which I think is better, I'd have to say "it depends". Obviously, I'd love us to get lots and lots of positive exposure this year, if at all possible. But something of a happy medium is most useful in my opinion: if we're too quiet then people start stories saying "Debian is dying because we've not heard anything", but alternatively it's also too easy to go to the other extreme with stories of "Debian is killing itself with internal arguments". Somewhere in the middle is nice... :-)
