Bits from the DPL: Looking back

Posted by grouch on Aug 10, 2006 2:02 PM EDT
Mailing list; By Anthony Towns
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[DPL == Debian Project Leader]



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Hey all,

It's been a while since I've posted anything DPLish to dda, so to avoid ending up with a traditionally long aj-esque spiel, I'm splitting the stuff I want to talk about between two posts. We'll see how that works out...

First bit of news is that we've tweaked the "2IC" role that I announced back in April [0]: as of the 25th of July, Steve's been added to the [e-mail:leader@debian.org] alias, and listed as "assistant leader" on Debian's organisation page [1]. It's been a pleasure to work with Steve up to this point [2], and I'm looking forward to continuing to share the load of the DPL role with him.

[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/04/msg00015.html [1] http://www.debian.org/intro/organization [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/05/msg00003.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/07/msg00000.html

Speaking of gender-specific pronouns, over the past few months the Debian Women project has had a number of successes worth noting, including official inclusion under debian.org [3], and a couple of the Debian Women proteges being accepted as developers, namely Marcela Tiznado [4] and Erinn Clark [5]. Amaya Rodrigo, was interviewed by a major Spanish newspaper [6] on the goals, successes and trials that Debian and the Debian Women project have had in encouraging women to be involved in the project. Finally, Fedora have also recently introduced a similar project, Fedora Women [7], which joins KDE Women, Gnome Women and Ubuntu Women in following the Debian Women project's lead in this sort of integration.

[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2006/06/msg00058.html [4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2006/05/msg00031.html [5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2006/06/msg00038.html [6] http://amayita.livejournal.com/74715.html [7] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Women

One thing I've been very lax about, is congratulating the DebConf 6 organising team, particularly Andreas Schuldei and Gunnar Wolf for organising and running a pretty impressive conference under, at times, quite trying circumstances. In part, the conference was overshadowed by some of the problems or controversies that ensued, letting us forget the rather more important successes -- such as some great work by Latin American Debianites, which we can look forward to seeing continue at some regional miniconfs, starting with Colombia in just over a week [8], or the integration of the GUI installer into d-i [9], or the work done to improve Debian's approach to internationalisation [10], which has since resulted in an important step towards fully localised systems in the form of initial support for translated package descriptions [11].

As mentioned on debian-project [12], DebConf 7 will be taking place in Edinburgh next year -- the local team are expecting to confirm the exact venue and dates in a couple of weeks, once the massive Edinburgh Festival season finishes, at which point there'll be a less subtle announcement.

[8] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/08/msg00002.html [9] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/GUI [10] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/06/msg00003.html [11] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/07/msg01323.html [12] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/07/msg00045.html

During the DPL election, one of the issues discussed was stable release management -- and concurrently with that, Martin Schulze resigned [13] =66rom his long standing role as stable release manager (having originally stepped up to that position in early 2001 [14]), and Andreas Barth and Martin Zobel-Helas took over the role [15]. While we were successful in getting 3.1r2 out in a reasonably timely manner [16], unfortunately it's taken much longer than we'd hoped to implement some of the changes to handling stable updates, with the result that 3.1r3 wasn't able to be released in June-July as hoped [17]. Happily, I've found time to do a reasonable bit of the work I'd been planning, and with some of the nice work done by Julien Danjou in reporting the status of the SRM work queue [18], we're now well and truly back on track, with the additional benefit that future stable releases should be much easier to manage.

[13] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00008.html [14] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2001/03/msg00008.html [15] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00009.html [16] http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/debian-announce-2006/msg00001.= html [17] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/06/msg00007.html [18] http://ftp-master.debian.org/proposed-updates.html

One final thing I'd like to mention is that I had the opportunity recently to accompany Rusty Russell (wearing his "Linux Australia Intellectual Property advisor" suit and tie, rather than his usual "l33t kernel hacker" t-shirt and cap) to a meeting with the Australian Attorney-General's department regarding the drafting of changes to the Australian copyright act concerning how we handle technological protection measures -- you might know it better by the acronym "DMCA", or perhaps as "digital restrictions management". While the best outcome we could hope for was restricted by the already signed Free Trade Agreement with the United States, we were very pleased to have been given a serious hearing before the drafting began, and as things stand, the approach that the government is taking appears to be one that will allow distributions such as Debian to produce and distribute competitive free players for legally acquired content. Linux Australia will continue to monitor developments in this area over the coming months, of course, but at present it seems we have cause for some cautious optimism.

But that's enough for today -- so effusive optimism will need to wait for the next mail. :)

Cheers, aj

--=20 Anthony Towns Debian Project Leader

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