Senior Debian developer quits core teams

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 08 May 2008 22:30

Opinion and Analysis

One has to go back a few years to trace the events that appear to have led to Towns' decision. In 2005, the Debian stable release Sarge had come out in July after nearly 36 months of development. It had resulted in a lot of bad publicity for the project and everyone seemed determined to release Etch, the next stable version, by December 2006. The rough schedule which was aimed for was 18 months, a reasonable period by the standards of any project which is as large as Debian and which is so committed to quality releases.

In August 2006, Towns, who was then project leader, started a project called Dunc-Tank, to pay some Debian developers to put in more work on the project in the hope that the release schedule would be kept. Release managers Andreas Barth and Steve Langasek were two who were paid from this mini-project.

The media release about Dunc-Tank said, in part: "The experiment's initial goal is to be able to raise enough funds to pay both release managers enough to work exclusively on the release of etch for a month each, having Steve Langasek available full-time during October and Andreas Barth available full-time during November, with the release expected to follow soon after in the first week of December."

But this did not find favour with many other developers. They began to slow down their work on Debian so that Etch would miss the scheduled release date. Barth made mention of this in his blog, saying: "On the other hand, there was a large disadvantage of the whole experiment: Some people who used to do good work reduced their involvement drastically. There was nothing I could do about, (sic) and that happened way before I started full-time on release, but on the global picture that still counts. So, as a first summary, I am happy with my own involvement, but that doesn't necessarily apply to the full experiment."

Some other developers who opposed the Dunc-Tank idea even went to the extent of demanding that Towns step down. When it came to a vote, however, the Dunc-Tank idea won approval in October that year.

Hocevar was open in his opposition to the Dunc-Tank idea. On a page titled "welcome to the Dunc-Bank" Hocevar wrote: "The Dunc-Bank is an experiment to see how aggressive bug reporting can delay the release of Debian Etch."