A touch of sadness as Lenny emerges

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 12 February 2009 20:23

Opinion and Analysis

Asked about the absence of the latest KDE in Lenny, he said the choice not to ship KDE4 in Lenny was taken by the KDE packaging team themselves. "They have already mentioned that they will drop KDE 4.2 into unstable and testing (and hence backports) as soon as possible after Lenny is released."

"It depends on what you want and what you use," was McIntyre's response when asked about the presence of annoying software like NetworkManager in the default Lenny install. "The packages that some people find critically important might be seen as mere bug-ridden trifles to others, but we deliberately want to provide a broad church here. Personally, I also don't have much time for NetworkManager.

"But I'm a bit of a stick-in-the-mud at times: I don't use any of the recognised desktops and I have an old FVWM config that I can trace back to its roots from 15 years ago. The fact that we can provide a single operating system with all the choices wanted by people from almost every camp is a major plus, in my opinion. I'll still go around and turn off the pieces I don't want on my machines."

He said there was no official policy on mono, the attempt by GNOME co-founder and Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza to create an open source version of Microsoft's .NET development environment. Mono does not get installed when one chooses the standard desktop and base install for Lenny.

"The default installation is chosen quite carefully to fit on the CDs and DVDs, and that's more of a limiting factor than you might realise. Given that, there is a fair amount of mono software in the archive (and therefore on subsequent discs) for people who want to use it. After all, it's free software and we have developers who use and work on it daily. As you know, those are the main criteria that we need to be fulfilled for something to be in Debian."

McIntyre said the first things on the list for Squeeze, the next version, were the few release goals that were not achieved for Lenny. "Beyond that, we're going to carry on growing and collaborating more and more with our community," he said.

"I feel incredibly proud and honoured to be involved in Debian at this point just before a release. It's a wonderful thing to be part of such a large, dedicated team of people pulling together like this. We may not agree on absolutely everything, but the end result is great. I'm looking forwards to a busy weekend followed by some big celebrations."