Sam Varghese
Thursday, 12 February 2009 21:23
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
McIntyre said former DPL, Australian Anthony Towns, who withdrew from some important roles in the project a few months back, did not appear to be interested in a central role right now.
"He's still carrying on with bits and pieces of development, but so far as I can tell he's not interested in a central role at the moment. I'd be delighted to be proven wrong on that, of course; as you say, he's a great developer," he said. (I had commented on the excellence of the debootstrap application, which Towns wrote; it is used to bootstrap a basic Debian system.)
"It's a part of the natural cycle for people to come and go from time to time, and it's common for them to get more involved again when their personal 'itches' start to attack again. Hopefully, he'll be back soon."
Asked whether it was a good idea to promote the idea of having people use the testing stream on their desktops/laptops rather than waiting for the stable release, McIntyre said it depended on each person's personal priorities.
"I know a lot of developers who run a mix of unstable and experimental on their own working machines, and equally I know a number who will only run stable. For my own laptop, I tend to have a stable base (along with a full set of chroots for development and testing) for quite a long time, as I'm used to Murphy's Law biting me otherwise.
"The last thing I want on my laptop is to find a blocking bug when I'm on a flight to a conference where I need to use it for a presentation! But then as we get closer to a release I typically move over to a testing base as I see all the exciting new features that I'm missing out on. Of course, it's very helpful for Debian to have more users running the newer distributions, so that they can find and report bugs for us."
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