Well, made it to Edinburgh, via a forty hour stopover in Singapore. Picked up a tie and kilt in the Debian tartan. Sadly Edinburgh in midsummer isn’t as warm as Singapore in summer, or even as Brisbane in winter, so there’s good odds my knees are going to be shaking as well as visible all to soon. Oh well, there’s reports that there might be scattered sunshine by Monday – fingers crossed. The dak BOF’s been delayed until tomorrow (Saturday 3pm, Edinburgh localtime) so Andi and Steve can sit in. Bit weird having something that technical on Debian day, I guess, but hey, whatever. It’s scheduled for a 2hr session, but I’m hoping it’ll be pretty informal and hacky rather than slides and lecturing or whatever. I’m hoping people will arrive with some ideas on what cool things that dak ought to be handling, and we can spend the time actually making dak support as many of those things as possible. Some of the ideas I like are in the BOF proposal. It might also be worth having a look at the video (or audio) of Robert Collins’ talk (“…Release always?”) at the Debian miniconf at linux.conf.au earlier this year, particular related to some of the ideas about setting up separate GNOME or KDE or libstdc++ staging areas for getting major updates ready for unstable rather than mixing them all up in experimental. Anyway, feel free to plan on arriving or leaving anytime during the BOF, unstructured is just another word for freedom! Yesterday I had a quick chat with Frans about getting debootstrap officially incorporated into the d-i subversion repo, so that it’s officially team maintained, and there’s a convenient central place for hacking on it. Given the recent discussion (while I was flying to debconf, in fact – how inconsiderate!) hopefully that’ll mean we’ll get a couple of cleanups there too. Oh, also got informed that Eben Moglen will be giving a free lecture in Edinburgh on Tuesday after debconf (the 26th) courtesy of the Scottish Society for Computers and Law. Sounds interesting if you’re into the whole theory of law and the effects of modern technology thereon:

In this lecture, Professor Moglen considers how private legislation is replacing public law as the organising intellectual structure for software and the technology industries, with far-reaching social consequences and theoretical implications.

Not sure if he’ll arrive in time to drop by during DebConf proper or not.

Continuing the theme from my previous post – the first and fundamental thing any distro needs to have, and thus the first and fundamental thing to think about disintermediating, is some way of distributing software. That might be burning CDs and sending them out to resellers or OEMs, or having your stuff available for download, whether by putting it up on your own server, hosting it via a dedicated high-reliability provider like akamai, or maintaining a network of mirror sites and keeping them up to date. And, of course, anyone who wants to distribute their own software has to do the exact same thing – which either means doing it themselves, and not being able to take advantage of the scalability the distributor has already made work, or going through the distribution and dealing with the problems that entails, as well as the benefits. In this case, disintermediation and decentralisation are pretty much one and the same thing: and decentralising content distribution is already a well understood problem: that’s what peer-to-peer is all about, and peer-to-peer distribution of, well, distributions is already very successful – at least when it comes to CD (and DVD) images. Which means that just about anyone can create a CD image, and distribute it to the world in exactly the same way a major organisation like Debian or Red Hat would – upload a torrent file, run a seed, and let the magic of BitTorrent do its thing. Scalability is no longer something you need a distribution organisation to manage, instead it’s built directly into the technology itself. Unfortunately BitTorrent is designed for large static images – not something you update on a daily basis. And for better or worse, my preferred distribution (Debian testing, currently lenny) does update that frequently. Fortunately, though, BitTorrent’s an open protocol and has dozens of open source implementations – so last year I was able to propose it as part of the Google Summer of Code, and was lucky enough to get a few responses and a student to work on it. It didn’t get much further than that unfortunately – the student lost internet access not long into the programme (and for most of its duration), and that was pretty much that. So when this year’s SoC rolled around, I didn’t really expect much, and didn’t put the idea up for consideration again, but lo and behold someone came through and asked if it was still possible and if there was any more information, and when I forwarded on some of the mails from the previous year we ended up with a second chance at the project. So far it’s looking pretty good – we’ve had a lot more success at keeping in touch, and thanks to the extended schedule for the SoC this year we’ve been able to do a much better job of keeping on top of what’s going on. So much so, in fact, that there’s a first (alpha) release out before the SoC is officially due to start! Wonderful stuff! What it does at the moment is allow you to take a Packages file (the stuff “apt-get update” downloads, which includes descriptions of all the packages that are available, how they inter-depend, and so forth), and from that information create a usable torrent from which to obtain the packages themselves which can then be used to share and distribute the packages. There are two crucial steps in that: the first is allowing the torrent to work without requiring huge amounts of extra information to be distributed (which would introduce scalability problems of its own, instead of solving them), and the second is that the pieces that make up the torrent are selected in a way that matches the actual packages, so that when you upload a single new package, you are in fact only making a minor change to the torrent, rather than having it (on average) completely redefine half of the torrent (and again introduce scalability problems rather than solve them). There’s more information on the DebTorrent wiki page and Cameron’s blog if you’re interested. Anyway, it’s just an alpha release at the moment, which means while there’s code that does something, it’s not actually all that useful yet. The current plan is to next add some code to make it automatically prioritise packages based on what you’re actually using – so that rather than downloading all the debs it see, it’ll only download the ones you’ve got installed, or maybe only newer versions of the ones you’ve got installed, which should get us pretty close to the point where it’s actually useful for something. The end result, of course, is to build a tool that you can point at a Debian archive, run it on a machine connected to the Internet, and you won’t have to do anything more to have a reliable, scalable and reasonably efficient means of allowing your users to distribute and update their systems. In this case, scalable means that if you end up with as many users as Debian or Ubuntu, your users will have a comparable experience, as if you’d arranged for a similarly comprehensive mirror network, without actually having to do the leg work. And heck, presuming that works, it doesn’t even matter if no one else actually does that – it’s worth it even if it saves Debian or Ubuntu the effort of keeping track of a mirror network by hand. There are interesting possibilities at smaller scales too, of course. :)

A couple of months ago I was sitting in a north Sydney pub cradling a beer with the ineluctable jdub, the decidedly unparsimonious rusty and (if I’m accurately remembering who’d left and who hadn’t by this point) the irremediable mrd. As you might imagine, these sort of conditions are a perfect breeding ground for a particular type of discussion, and with Jeff’s departure from Canonical not that long beforehand accompanied by the then ongoing DPL elections, talk turned to the future of Debian, and in particular Jeff’s views on that future. Obviously more than a few weeks have passed since then, so please imagine this as a dream sequence with a stylish TV fade-in accompanied by appropriate fine print caveats about paraphrasing and the perfidy of memory. I think it’s fair to sum Jeff’s main point about the future of distros as one of “disintermediation” – that is removing, or at least minimising, the barriers between the authors and users of a piece of software, and in general getting closer and quicker collaboration between everyone involved and interested in developing and maintaining that software. Which means things like trying to remove the line between the Debian bug tracker and upstream bug trackers entirely, so that Debian users end up talking directly with the upstream maintainers, rather than having a Debian maintainer relaying information between the two. It also means making the path for updated packages to get to users quicker and smoother – so that as soon as a developer commits a new version of the software to version control, the next time users of that software “apt-get update” they see it, download it, and start using it. Or at least, they do if they’ve chosen to follow the bleeding edge. Jeff had a bunch more ideas in that vein – like not bothering with a central archive, but having users collect the packages they’re interested in from upstream sites all over the place, standardising, reducing or removing the “control” information for packages so that creating the correct packages for 80% of free software (that uses ./configure in the usual way, eg) was a complete no-brainer, and perhaps viewing distributions not so much as the gatekeepers and central players of the open source world, but perhaps more as systems of providing resources, assistance and opportunities to software authors who deal with their users directly – and in so doing have more of an opportunity for their users to actively participate in the project’s development, and have more feedback (and control) of how their project is perceived by its users. I’m not sure if I’m doing it justice – it’s a pretty radical notion, and as an upstream-type hacker, Rusty was pretty enthralled by it. As a distro-type hacker, on the other hand, I’d have to say I was daunted: getting rid of the middleman here means getting rid of Debian, which I must admit I have something of an attachment for… and yet, in principle at least, I can’t see anything but good sense in the idea – getting users and developers interacting more closely is important to improving the free software community, and while distros have historically been a force for making free software more accessible to people, it’s entirely possible we can now make it even more accessible now by, in some sense, doing away with distros. And if that’s the case, then we definitely should, because it’ll benefit both users and developers of free software, which is what we’re all about. On the other hand, distributions (at least currently) aren’t just about collecting and compiling software which could be automated; it’s also about integrating it, standardising interactions between software, and in some cases acting as a buffer between users who want to use a bit of software and developers who for one reason or another don’t actually want to deal with those users (perhaps due to lack of a shared language or political or philosophical disagreements). I think it’s also pretty interesting to view Gentoo through this light; that is, not so much as a distro that makes you compile everything from source, but rather as a distro that gives its users a system based on exactly what the developers produce, with the addition of only a comparably tiny amount of Gentoo-derived content. Maybe it’s just me, but Gentoo sounds a lot more interesting to me in that light. So is that a foretaste of the future of binary free software distributions too? There’s a lot of things that would stand in the way of Debian managing that, but so far all I can think of is a thousand problems that should probably be solved anyway, and not even one that can’t. I think, btw, that jdub had been reading Accelerando (also available as a Creative Commons licensed ebook) somewhat concurrently with thinking about this stuff, so perhaps it should be called “Distributions 2.0” or something. Accelerando’s a crazy-awesome near-future/singularity book by Charles Stross, who happens to live in the city that will host the forthcoming DebConf 7…

I was away when the results were announced, so I didn't comment on it at the time, but this seems a good result. For those of you who are non-graphical and maths-blind: Sam Hocevar is the new DPL. Steve McIntyre was arguably second, with Rapha l Hertzog and Wouter Verhelst also in the second group. Gustavo Franco and Anthony Towns were also above None Of The Above, with Simon Richter and Aigars Mahinovs below. With the exception of the scarily high placings of Anthony Towns and Steve McIntyre, that seems a good result to me. Hopefully it was just the "don't change horses in mid-stream" silly ticket boosting those two. Sam Hocevar's first Bits from the DPL has just gone out so: where do you want debian to go today?

Welcome! I will be posting here about the work that is underway on my Google Summer of Code project: BitTorrent Proxy for Debian Archive. A lot of the initial discussion about the path this project will take has already occurred between myself and my mentor Anthony Towns. This has led to an inital name for the software program created by the project: debtorrent. To support the project, an Alioth project has been created, including a mailing list. All of the previous discussion has been archived to that mailing list. A wiki page is available for contributing ideas and comments on the proposed implementation of this project. The program will be based on the BitTornado bittorrent client. A subversion repository has been created for tracking the changes made to the client to create the debtorrent program. It currently contains the unmodified BitTornado code from version 0.3.18. If you're interested in contributing, join the mailing list, update the wiki, or try out the experimental code in the subversion repository.

So, now that the results of the DPL vote are in, I feel I can reasonably show my DPL ballot without doing something which I would consider "campaigning". And since I've done this a few times in the past now, I feel I ought to do it again. So, here goes:

[ 1 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 6 ] Choice 6: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 4 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 2 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 1 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 5 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 5 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 3 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[   ] Choice 9: None Of The Above

I guess it's no surprise I put myself up first. Running for DPL is a serious business, so it makes no sense running if you don't believe in it yourself. However, as I expressed during campaigning, I believe Steve was a very strong candidate, too; so I wouldn't have mind if it was him who won instead of me. Next, I put Sam Hocevar, since he also had a rather strong platform; he has some experience in leading a project (albeit on a much smaller scale); and yes, humour is good, too. I didn't put him first too, because there are some things in his platform that I have second thoughts on (mainly some of the technical matters that I believe have nothing to do with the DPL), but that didn't cause me to rank him down. Simon Richter had a rather weak platform, and failed to convince me during campaigning, too. That I still put him rather high has everything to do with having met him in person a few times. What follows are people I would have preferred not to see elected. I didn't feel that strong about it that I would vote them below NOTA, but still. Gustavo is very enthousiastic and had many projects he would have liked to accomplish, but I sensed some naivete coming from him. Therefore, I wasn't sure he'd make a good DPL. If I look at this past year, I look at a lot of unneeded bitterness. Some of that bitterness is a direct result of actions the DPL took; others are a result of things the DPL failed to act upon properly. Therefore, I feel the current DPL hasn't done much of what I want a DPL to do. Ranked along with him is Rapha l; after thinking about it, I think a DPL election is not the right place to promote a replacement structure in place of the DPL. Hence. Last, I've put Aigars. I'm sorry to say that I feel his platform has lost all touch with reality. Finally, I'd like to congratulate Sam Hocevar for winning, and Steve for making a very close second—again. I don't know about him, but I'd be rather frustrated with such a result.

Finally, I managed to sent out those “You (maybe) get money” / “Sorry, no money” mails to the DebConf7 attendees that asked for sponsorship. Nice amount of mail. The process to get to this point involved a bit of mail discussion but also two long and exhausting meetings of the whole team. Basically we had to go through the whole list of people, voting if we would give them money. We could vote yes, no, maybe, pass, which gets scored as 1, -1, 0.5, 0. Then after the meeting simply add all votes for one single attendee together and you know a score for him between 100% and -100%. I wrote a little script for my irssi, making it a bit simpler, but still lots of work. That was later on followed by a second meeting where you decide what you do with the score rates, basically - where do we draw the line of “Gets money”, “Gets no money”, “Maybe, if we have enough”. And you are done. Sounds simple, but uses a lot of energy. Fortunately that was most of the needed work. There will be a little bit during DebConf, and some small pieces until then, but majority is done. Now, everyone, say thanks to those who participated in this team, making it possible for me to send the mails: * Anthony Towns * Steve McIntyre * Moray Allan * Holger Levsen * Amaya Rodrigo * Margarita Manterola * Martin Wuertele * Gunnar Wolf * Junichi Uekawa * Neil McGovern * Marcela Tiznado * Felipe Augusto van de Wiel One thing you encounter with such a wide-spread team is that of “What damn time can we meet?”. You end up with some having the meeting near midnight, while the other have problems waking up.,. :)

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[ 8 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 9 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 6 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 1 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 5 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 7 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 9 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
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read more

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[ 2 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 7 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 6 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 5 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 8 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 4 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 6 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
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A lot of people seem to post their votes onto planet these days. More so than 2 or 3 years ago. I'm still not going to post the full details, but here's my usual summary, based on the debate and the platforms.

Above None Of The Above

• Sam Hocevar - I share his view of the problems, although I don't agree with all the suggested actions. A bit quirky, but seems nice enough.
• Aigars Mahinovs - I think he could be an accountable and fair DPL. Has ideas - not all good ideas and I don't like the aim of releasing less often - but I can't see him driving on if he's getting flamed to a well-done crisp. A leader more than a ruler.
• Gustavo Franco - nice guy, but maybe I just think that because I've had more direct contact with him than other candidates recently. I agree with most of his views of the problems, except Ubuntu and the tattoo. Maybe too inexperienced for this time.
• Raphael Hertzog - I think the team model is a good idea for the size of the project now and it learns from past attempts.

Borderline

• Wouter Verhelst - I'd be voting mainly based on what I've seen of him. I don't want to vote for someone standing with a low-detail platform, as that's just scary. Even when people break promises, it's hard enough to remove them. The debate did give a bit more detail. I fear the adoption of ESR-style "authority follows responsibility" - that's just impractical for parts of the debian infrastructure.
• Simon Richter - Generally OK, but I'm worried by the cutting it fine with the platform, not posting any rebuttals and being late for the debate because one battery went flat.

Below NOTA

• Steve McIntyre - This won't surprise anyone: it's because of the manner in which the Debian UK Society retail business was started; but also the trial misadvertised as mediation of the d-i conflict. I shudder to think what social conformance tests he wants in NM.
• Anthony Towns - last year I didn't vote for this politician (while correct in one way, most DDs have never even seen me in a mediation situation and he didn't have the courage to cc me on that email) because I thought that email suggested he'd be a terrible DPL. This year, he's demonstrated how terrible and the platform and debate suggests he hasn't even noticed: he thinks he's been a successful leader, despite the recall vote. One or two interesting ideas, but not enough to overcome that. His rebuttal seems to utterly miss Sam Hocevar's point about how being not-evil (Corporate Social Responsibility, as seen in the private sector) is different from actively being good (Concern for Community, as seen in the third sector): is that being dense or devious?

So, how wrong am I this year? Is there more trouble ahead?


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[ 6 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 6 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 3 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 2 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 4 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 1 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 6 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 5 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
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My rationale follows, if you care... I've been pondering how to vote for well over a week, and I'm still not entirely happy that the ballot I've chosen accurately expresses my wishes, but it's the best approximation of them that I can come up with at this time. My dilemma has two parts

1. I don’t think the current office of the DPL is effective, due to how it is viewed by a significant proportion of the project (if not an outright majority), so regardless of how much I might like the goals and ideas proposed by an individual candidate I’m very pessimistic that being electing as DPL will actually bring those things to pass.
2. Much of what will make a good DPL is about how a specific set of ideas and goals will be put into action, and how interpersonal relationships between the DPL and various parties will be managed. This comes down to the personal character, experience and leadership skills of the candidate While I can form some level of an opinion about each of these aspects from mailing list archives, and IRC, etc. I don’t really feel comfortable making judgements in these areas until I’ve actually met them in real life. Too many people come across badly in the (severely limited) online communication methods we use, and are actually very decent reasonable people in real life. Out of the candidates, AJ is the only one that I’ve ever actually met and talked to.

Given these problems, my first step in choosing how to vote was to eliminate those candidates who I will rank below NOTA based on their published platforms. I have nothing personal against any of these three people, but given the other possible candidates I think that we’d be better off having another election than just electing one of these three for the sake of it.

• Wouter Verhelst - Wouter’s platform lacks any detail that tells me what he stands for or where he wants to see Debian go. Wouter’s platform also seems very conflict averse, it favours discussion and agreement over making hard decisions. I think Debian needs to make some hard decisions and the project leader needs to be someone who is able to willing handle (civilised) conflict.
• Aigars Mahinovs - Most of the topics that Aigars proposes to work on do not make my list of the most important issues for Debian to solve, and as others have pointed out, are possible better dealt with by other organisations.
• Simon Richter - Simon doesn’t actually state what he wants to achieve as DPL or where he sees Debian’s future direction as being, other than some vague hints that he is against projects that are similar to ‘dunc-tank’ and that we need a common goal. Stating what that common goal should be, would have lifted this above NOTA.

That leaves five remaining candidates:

• Anthony Towns - AJ gets my top ranking because I think that having some consistency in the DPL is a worthwhile goal. While I think that the whole Dunc-tank fiasco could have been managed much, much better, there were obviously hostile factions that would have made anything AJ did look bad. AJ’s platform seems to mostly involve him leading infrastructural improvements (good) and encouraging others to work on things that they want to see changed (also good). The one area where I possibly disagree with Anthony is around what the DPL role should look like. Anthony appears happy with the current state of the DPL office, I think that some significant changes are needed. However that’s going to require constitutional changes, so I’m not going to rank Anthony down on that basis alone.
• Steve McIntyre - Steve comes second primarily because he’s implicitly endorsed by AJ and everything that I’ve seen online related to Steve suggests that he is a level-headed, decent individual with good leadership skills. If I can’t have consistency in the DPL office via AJ, then Steve would definitely be the next choice. Steve’s platform also doesn’t contain anything that I disagree with.
• Sam Hocevar and Gustavo Franco - Sam and Gustavo are ranked equally based purely on the basis of their (relatively similar) platforms containing lots of great ideas and vision for Debian that I agree with. I don’t for a minute think that they will be able to achieve all of it, but at least by providing clear goals and a mandate for implementing them we might be able to start down the track of regaining some common purpose as a project. I have some reservations about Sam’s style based on what I’ve read in archive, but seeing as I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to people I haven’t personally met, I’m going to assume, that if elected Sam will be a great DPL.
• Rapha l Hertzog - Rapha l gets my final vote above NOTA to indicate that I support the idea of a board governing Debian, but that I don’t think his particular proposal is the correct way for the board to run. If Rapha l were to win, I wouldn’t object to him placing his suggested board in ‘office’ for the upcoming year, but I hope that a major piece of their workload would be to lead the discussion, drafting and passing of a constitutional change to replace the DPL with an elected board with rotating terms of reasonable length (2-3) years.

*yawn* It’s made me tired writing all of that out. Maybe sometime soon I should explain in more detail exactly what parts of Debian’s governance model I think need changing or maybe I need to wait until I’ve achieved a few more technical things and gained enough respect before anyone will listen to my opinions…

As I have stated here long ago, I do not really believe in the Debian Project Leader. Yes, it has an importance. Yes, it's not merely a decoration figure. But I do doubt it can really make much of a difference. I don't hold exactly the point of view I held back then, but it's still quite close ;-) Anyway...

[ 1 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 7 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 2 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 4 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 4 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 5 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 3 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 6 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above

As it's not a post I strongly believe in, with that many proposals in play, I cannot say I thoroughly reviewed each of the platforms/rebuttals/debate (I did follow them all, of course). I agree with most of what most of them propose (Sorry, Aigars, but I don't agree with you a bit ;-) ). One thing is, yes, worth noting: During the dunc-tank brouhaha, I spoke very little, but was mostly supportive of AJ's pushing a real new proposal. Why am I ranking lowish AJ, Rapha l and Steve (who were, after all, in there)? Because I did really appreciate AJ having the guts of pushing, of being brave enough to go into uncalm territories trying to change Debian. Is that the change I want? No, I don't really think so, so I'm not voting him (or Steve, as the 2IC, or Rapha l, as one of the board members) very high. And yes, one of the reasons I'm ranking Wouter first is his tendency not to be too passionate in flamefests. And, of course, not having much of a platform - Having an overly ambitious platform which would change the conception of Debian both towards the inside and towards the outside is completely unrealistic. And that's one of Aigars' cardinal sins :)

So, I have voted after the second call for participation to Debian developers for the Debian Project Leader 2007 election. Here is my voting:
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[ 4 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 4 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 2 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 3 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 4 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 3 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 6 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 5 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
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The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize:- It is a well known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

It’s election time, as Debian Developer I get to chose who is going to be the Debian Project Leader for the next year - but I don’t really care. If we can’t get a naturally strong leader, then I don’t think it matters at all. A naturally strong leader is one who actually leads and do so by strong consensus instead of just wanting to rule. For a naturally strong leader the election is a mere formality and he will run virtually unopposed. So my vote is:

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e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[ 1 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 1 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 1 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 1 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 1 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 1 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 1 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 1 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
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What about “None of the Above” option? Isn’t that excatly what I want? No, not really. I don’t think we would be better of by not electing one of the candidates than we would by electing one of them. So “None of the Above” should be ranked equally with the others. Why vote at all? I want to make a point, as feeble as it is, which is clearly different from just being lazy. I want to show by active participation that I don’t think the election matters. Effectively a whatever option. Now go grab some beer…

The Debian project is having it s annual vote for the the post of the Project Leader, a mostly representative and medidative post. Here is my ballot:

[ 6 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 7 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 5 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 3 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 2 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 4 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 6 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 6 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above

I voted for Sam first because he has some fresh ideas and takes it not too serious after all, working on Debian should be fun. Next is Rapha l Herzog. He got the big plus of some good people on the prospective DPL board and I know he is doing some good stuff with regard to collaborative maintenance, e.g. in pkg-perl. I d then rank the current DPL and his Second in Charge equally. They didn t do anything particular bad (besides maybe the dunc-tank-experiment, but I m not blaming that failure entirely only on them), and continuity is normally a good thing. Well, just for fun, I ll give the advantage to Steve. Gustavo has a lot of ideas, and I m not sure how realistic they are. I ll still prefer him to nothing, so he is ranked next. I don t know enough about Simon and Wouter to really vote for or against them. Aigars plans though, despite knowing him personally, are not the right for a DPL post, so sorry, that puts him below NOTA.

As I am not a DD yet, I don’t have vote rights. That means I cannot vote in the DPL election. The only way I can influence the decision is to influence other people and try to make them vote the right way (or alternatively, just vote what I would have done) Is there a vote sponsorship page anywhere? <big smiley> If anyone got a spare vote, you are most welcome to send in my ballot:
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e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[2] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[7] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[2] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[1] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[5] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[6] Choice 6: Raphael Hertzog
[8] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[4] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[3] Choice 9: None Of The Above
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And yes, jcristau, Myon, Q_ and others - I need to get back to my application.

I hopped onto IRC and put most of the debate questions to Gustavo Franco (stratus). You can read it next to the others - SynrG and pusling tried to help recreate the cage fight, but I think we're just too tame. There's also this linux.com article where Steve McIntyre and Anthony Towns don't answer questions and it seems the reporters didn't notice Sven Luther's withdrawal.

So, that was the debate. Now I can stop and read the answers properly. It was a bit disappointing that one candidate (gustavo) didn't appear, one was late (sjr) and one withdrew on the day of the debates (svenl). I guess I'll see what explanations are submitted. The debate opened with a fairly gentle question, asking for introductions. Makes sure the process is working, I guess. Generally inoffensive, but Anthony Towns's answer is puzzling: shouldn't he have documented stuff during the last transition if he thought it lacking? If he's re-elected, there won't be a transition, so any documentation would be based on year-old memories... he's giving an argument for electing someone else! The communication question got a variety of responses. Not sure that Wouter Verhelst's aim of better team communications is achievable, but maybe it is - don't know without more communication from people who aren't currently communicating well! Not sure whether Steve McIntyre is arguing for diplomacy and politeness or the truth of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is more worrying. Releases. Oh! Releases. Aigars Mahinovs's plan to release less often is interesting, but is it realist or defeatist? None of the candidates seem keen to give NM the radical revision that I think it needs - the median time in DAMnation is longer than the median time for the whole of the AM-led review, contrary to what Wouter Verhelst seems to claim later (line 754). About the only reforms suggested are Anthony Towns making permissions more gradual and Steve McIntyre's (IMO scary) social conformance test. Each of the candidates sees a slightly different thing as debian's biggest problem, although some of them overlap. Maybe this is the axis that differentiates the candidates most? Also, a full range of "code of conduct" views seem to be there: from it being a good idea, through leaving it for others to try, to being opposed. Then it was onto the buck-passing round. Another communication question brought some similar responses and this absolute gem from Aigars Mahinovs:-

"A technical solution to a social problem - a cron job that will send the email every two months, 6 text files with a template saying that nothing has been done and I just need to remember to write something good into those files before they are sent."

I like that idea! A few technical questions brought some interesting reminders about work that is actually already underway, but maybe not very visible, then there was a question about other distributions. Predictably, most of the focus fell on Utnubu and other derivatives, with a few mentions of Gentoo too. The targetted questions brought a few amusing replies: at least one candidate seems to say that they won't pursue a past comment if elected, while Anthony Towns seems to see the new FDL and CC licences and GPL'd Java as personal achievements. The cage fight (or open discussion, as it is more usually known) spent most of its time emphasising and clarifying points from earlier. It only seemed to be at the end when it cut new ground, with questions about demographics and $10million. Finally, closing summaries again showed the differences of approaches and views. Then that was that and the participants logged off into the night...

• The debate
• The audience
• The sources

• Wouter Verhelst: No idea of what he’d do once elected. Asking for carte blanche?
• Aigars Mahinovs: Half of his platform has nothing to do with Debian. The other half is on crack.
• Gustavo Franco: Some good ideas, but looks like he had trouble thinking his platform through.
• Sven Luther: Should have published his platform on time.
• Sam Hocevar: Lots of good ideas, competent, brilliant and funny. Couple of ideas I am not entirely comfortable with, but I can probably live with that.
• Steve McIntyre: Current 2IC. Nothing new. Unimpressed.
• Rapha l Hertzog: I fear he could rm -rf the Project. Definitely needs a DPL hand-holding team. Doesn’t like ponies.
• Anthony Towns: No ambition for Debian. Lots of ambition for himself and money. Go away.
• Simon Richter: Empty platform. One more candidate, triggers interesting issues in devotee.
• NOTA: Great platform! Would make a perfect DPL.

These are some random thoughts based on a not very thorough reading of candidate platforms of the DPL Election 2007, and my subjective view of the candidates based on the mailing traffic I remember reading. Wouter Verhelst: Has quite a broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. Aigars Mahinovs: Quoting from his platform: “My goal of running for DPL is not to be DPL, but to get a few concepts closer to real life.” So don't run for DPL, but start doing these things you're thinking about. Not being DPL has the advantage that you don't have to spend time on DPL stuff that would detract you from these goals. Speaking about your goals: (i) No release: I've thought about that, too, but I feel this would quickly make Debian irrelevant. (ii) $HOME configuration files organisation: take it up with the upstream developers of all the application. I think this is a very good idea, but freedesktop.org would be a better platform. (iii) Old Maintainer Process: Idea looking for a problem. (iv) Dropping Trademarks: not sure what to think about this. Gustavo Franco: Some focus on the desktop, and a constructive attitude towards Ubuntu, both positive in my book. (The first one primarily because on servers Linux is already quite well established, while the desktop is where more work is still to be done. Not because servers are less important.) His goals: (i) Core teams: as with Wouter, he sees that people and what goes on between them are where the problems are. (ii) Release goals: I think building the release based on release goals could be a driving force, but this is more RM area than DPL. (iii) Adding features to the bts doesn't need DPL powers. (iii) New developers: certainly an area that still needs attention, but the intended course is not entirely clear to me. (iv) NEW queue: same. (v) CTTE: Not sure what the idea behind this is. (vi) Groups: yes, but again not entirely clear what and how. (vii) Backports: yes, new versions of some software should go into Debian (stable) faster. Officially supporting backports or something else, I don't know, but this is an area where a DPL could pull together the RMs, security team(s), backports.org people etc. (viii) Universal OS: is this about more media coverage or about more face to face meetings? Both are good, but we should set clear goals beforehand. (ix) Much work is needed, especially in the area of buildd management (meaning: the processes and people behind it!). Does Gustavo have previous involvement here? (x) Vendors, Website, Publicity: This is more or less all about media coverage and popularity. Much needed, but as Debian as it is will never be able to commit to a public official opinion of anything, we'll need to think hard about what to do here. (xi) NMU: I don't see a great need for action here, personally. Overall: this platform contains too much material, I fear trying to tackle all these areas will lead to a burned out DPL within three months and little actually getting anywhere. Sven Luther: It's true that it always needs at least two people for a flamewar. But having a DPL who is always ready to provide one side of an argument is not a good idea. Sam Hocevar: Everything is high-level on his platform. Both good and bad. Not sure how to rate this platform, but I see myself nodding along. Learn from other OSs is good, but I hope he also means active cooperation and not just passive let's see how they do it. Steve McIntyre: Should have won 2006. Certainly did a lot of both behind-the-scenes work and some good communication. The platform lacks mention of relations between Debian and the outside world, which is an area where I feel some work is missing (and where the DPL as the only person with a official role also known outside Debian can make a difference), and also lacks mention of legal problems (trademarks and patents) where I'm not sure how solid Debian's work is. Additional argument in favor of Steve: Having a 2IC and promoting him to DPL the year after might be a good idea overall. Maybe we should actually elect the 2IC and only have a confirmation vote to promote him to DPL? Raphaël Hertzog: I like the DPL board idea. I also like how Raphaël focuses, in his platform, on the DPL board idea and some selected problems. On the other hand, the platform is wholly focused inward, outside relations are important, too ! Anthony Towns: Not sure what to think of the current DPL. I think he had good ideas, and I still think the original “spend Debian funds for the release”-idea was not that bad, but seeing how it all worked out was very, very painful for too many people. The platform seems pretty much empty, so I guess ajt won't have my vote this time. Simon Richter: Maybe I miss something, but I only see “don't repeat the dunc-tank flamefest” in his platform, which seems a bit thin. His observation that the real power of the DPL is to get everybody's attention may be partly true, though, even if this power will be spent as soon as a DPL, trying to mediate, lets himself be drawn into the flamewar instead (I don't accuse Simon that he ultimately will do this, but I fear that it happens all too quickly). Now what? I really don't have the time to thoroughly follow the campaigning, but I'll certainly have a look at the rebuttals, and perhaps somebody will do some summary. So the ballot below will certainly change. (You might also be able to buy the vote if you're rich enough ;-)

 [ 1 ] Wouter Verhelst
 [ 5 ] Aigars Mahinovs
 [ 3 ] Gustavo Franco
 [ 6 ] Sven Luther
 [ 3 ] Sam Hocevar
 [ 1 ] Steve McIntyre
 [ 2 ] Raphaë Hertzog
 [ 5 ] Anthony Towns
 [ 4 ] Simon Richter
 [ 5 ] NOTA