Senior Debian developer quits core teams

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 08 May 2008 22:30

Opinion and Analysis

The vote to continue the Dunc-Tank experiment did not end the debate. Jaspert, in a posting on October 18, raised a number of questions about the experiment and asked for further discussion. "It has demotivated a lot of people who now either resigned, simply stopped doing (parts of their) Debian work or are doing a lot less than they did before DT was started. The freeze got delayed and getting the release out on schedule has become nearly impossible. We are unable to see any good virtue in this 'experiment'," was his conclusion.

Etch was finally released on April 8, 2007, after 21 months of development.

The animosity which arose as a result of differences over the Dunc-Tank experiment appears to linger. Hocevar's announcement of Jaspert's appointment was made on his last day as project leader for 2007-08. The delegations he made are "effective until revoked by the DPL or by a resolution."

According to Jaspert, the current Debian leader, Steve McIntyre, has expressed support for his (Jaspert's) appointment.

The day after Hocevar's announement, Towns made the blog entry referred to earlier.

A couple of days later fellow Debian developer Russell Coker made reference to Towns' move without naming him. Coker discussed it in a post he titled "Planets and resignations", a general discussion about what should, and should not, appear on a Planet site, which is an aggregation of blogs from people involved in some similar activity or organisation.

Towns is listed as a member of the technical committee and the Debian maintainer keyring team as of May 6.