Out of curiosity, and because it is Sunday morning and I have a cold and
can't get my brain to do anything tricky, I counted the number of
candidates in each year's DPL elections.
| Year |
Count |
Names |
| 1999 |
4 |
Joseph Carter, Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Richard Braakman |
| 2000 |
4 |
Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Joel Klecker, Matthew Vernon |
| 2001 |
4 |
Branden Robinson, Anand Kumria, Ben Collins, Bdale Garbee |
| 2002 |
3 |
Branden Robinson, Rapha l Hertzog, Bdale Garbee |
| 2003 |
4 |
Moshe Zadka, Bdale Garbee, Branden Robinson, Martin Michlmayr |
| 2004 |
3 |
Martin Michlmayr, Gergely Nagy, Branden Robinson |
| 2005 |
6 |
Matthew Garrett, Andreas Schuldei, Angus Lees, Anthony Towns, Jonathan Walther, Branden Robinson |
| 2006 |
7 |
Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ari Pollak, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Towns, Andreas Schuldei, Jonathan (Ted) Walther, Bill Allombert |
| 2007 |
8 |
Wouter Verhelst, Aigars Mahinovs, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Steve McIntyre, Rapha l Hertzog, Anthony Towns, Simon Richter |
| 2008 |
3 |
Marc Brockschmidt, Rapha l Hertzog, Steve McIntyre |
| 2009 |
2 |
Stefano Zacchiroli, Steve McIntyre |
| 2010 |
4 |
Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy, Margarita Manterola |
| 2011 |
1 |
Stefano Zacchiroli (no vote yet) |
Winner indicate by boldface. I expect Zack to win over "None Of The Above",
so I went ahead and boldfaced him already, even if there has not been
a vote for this year.
Median number of candidates is 4.
gimp-plugin-registry 0.3.1-1
Some hours ago the new 0.3.1-1 version of my
gimp-plugin-registry package was uploaded to unstable. Thanks to Ari Pollak - not only for sponsoring the upload, but also for asking me to include the
GIMP Liquid rescale plug-in, which is one of the most amazing plugins I've ever seen for The GIMP. If you have no clue what 'liquid rescaling' means, here's a YouTube video for you (if anybody finds a non-flash version of that video in the net - please let me know and I'll link it):
(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc)
And again, if you'd like to see a plugin included, please let me know.
I’m one of those waiting until the last call for votes to send the ballot:
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don’t Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
52717dc0-26e3-4337-a88b-cc2c260fcb51
[ 3 ] Choice 1: Jeroen van Wolffelaar
[ 4 ] Choice 2: Ari Pollak
[ 2 ] Choice 3: Steve McIntyre
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Anthony Towns
[ 3 ] Choice 5: Andreas Schuldei
[ 6 ] Choice 6: Jonathan aka Ted Walther
[ 4 ] Choice 7: Bill Allombert
[ 5 ] Choice 8: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don’t Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Good luck to everyone on the election!
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don t Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
52717dc0-26e3-4337-a88b-cc2c260fcb51
[ 3 ] Choice 1: Jeroen van Wolffelaar
[ 5 ] Choice 2: Ari Pollak
[ 1 ] Choice 3: Steve McIntyre
[ 3 ] Choice 4: Anthony Towns
[ 4 ] Choice 5: Andreas Schuldei
[ 7 ] Choice 6: Jonathan aka Ted Walther
[ 2 ] Choice 7: Bill Allombert
[ 6 ] Choice 8: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don t Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This year, we're dealing with the worst DPL election I've known. Despite the high number of candidates, none of them makes me really feel like voting for him.
Summarizing the general tendencies of the candidates:
- Jonathan Walther is a populist who's saying anything that could bring him any vote, after having spread infamous political ideas on Debian lists two years ago.
- Andreas Schuldei is a pure teletubby, fed with rainbows and sunshine.
- Steve McIntyre talks like something that's between a teletubby and a commercial guy with ultra-bright shining smile.
- Ari Pollak likes cats and Samuel L. Jackson. There can be nothing wrong with such a guy.
- Anthony Towns has a very appealing platform, but his past behavior when occupying a key position makes me very reluctant to see him as the DPL.
- Jeroen van Wolffelaar wants to force developers to be nice to each other. Teletubbies can also have fascist tendencies.
- Bill is a very nice guy with good ideas. He's also the only candidate who hasn't voted for option 2 in the GFDL GR - read, the only one who seems to be interested in truly free software. Sadly, he's not very good with public relations.
That makes only 2 candidates I can decently put above "None of the above": Bill and Zeke the cat. I know many developers disagree with my analysis for the other ones, but when filling your ballot, you shouldn't forget that behind their words, there is what they will actually do if elected.
Since everyone else seems to give their opinion on DPL candidates
over at
Planet Debian, I'll join
the chorus. Since I've met and know most of the candidates, I'll focus
on what cannot be in their platform: their personality.
- Jeroen Van Wolffelaar: I've met him in person a few
times (at FOSDEM, and at DebConf5 in Helsinki), and his dedication to
and passion about Debian is... wonderful. His experience with being in
the DPL team last year and his infrastructural involvement in the FTP
team should mean that he's quite up to date on Debian's big
picture.
That being said, I'm not entirely sure he'd be the perfect DPL
candidate. All his passion and dedication aside, he's rather new(ish) to
the project (having received his Debian account only one or two years
ago, IIRC), and might not have the experience one would expect from
someone who's been with Debian for a longer time. That's not a fatal
flaw, but it does mean I'm a bit... reserved as to his candidacy. I'll
still rank him pretty high, but not as number one.
- Ari Pollak: ha. ha. hah.
- Steve McIntyre: Also someone I know from both
previous FOSDEMs and DebConf5. The impression I have from Steve is that
he's someone who has a very (very) clear view on how Free
Software in general, and the Debian project specifically, works. He's a
very nice guy, easy to work with in the encounters I've had with him,
and has the sort of calm but focussed attitude you'd expect from someone
who's done a lot of things in his time, and therefore isn't all that
easily impressed by new but short-lived manies anymore. Which, I think,
is a virtue for a leader; a leader should be focused on the long-term
benefits, not on the short-term fun. I expect him to be able to
disconnect himself from immediate issues, instead having a look at the
big picture when required.
I think the message is clear: Steve is going to get my #1 vote.
- Anthony Towns: a difficult one to form an opinion
about. Aj has been a long-time valuable and dedicated contributor to the
project; for that, he deserves (and receives) my respect and praise. He
can be expected to know the project inside out, which is something
very helpful for a DPL.
However, I don't think it's a secret that aj and I disagree
on certain issues of the social aspects of the Debian project. Since his
platform specifically mentions those things, I don't think I'll be
ranking him very high on my list. I won't object to him becoming DPL,
however, and I'll still be happy should he be our DPL. Just not as much
as if it were Steve.
Additionally, Anthony has a bit of a tendency to be imposing his view
on others, which I think is a bad quality for a DPL. He's aware
of that, however, and claimed he'll try to avoid making that
mistake, which is helpful.
Oh, and what's with the singing? ;-)
- Andreas Schuldei: When Andreas mentions in his
platform that he's got great leadership capabilities, he isn't lying, as
everyone looking at how DebConf is organized can see. However, the few
times that I met him in person, there was something subconsciously that
now makes me think twice to vote for him. I don't know what it is. I'll
still rank him pretty high, but not as number 1.
- Jonathan Walther: This guy needs a reality check.
No, really.
- Bill Allombert: Also someone whom I've met a number
of times at FOSDEM. Bill is a bit of a modest, timid guy with a passion
for Debian and Free Software. Though I respect him as a person and for
the work he does in Debian, I don't think he has the perfect personality
to become a DPL. No offense, Bill; but you'll end up rather low on my
list.
Long time no blog I guess. Things haven't been that exciting on the Debian front for me. Many of you may have noticed the Xorg -8 packages just hit unstable, complete with minor annoying debconf bug (fixed in svn now). That work was almost all packaging bugs, most of which are now taken care of. All those changes apply to the 6.9 packages too, so it's like I'm getting a two for one. This means that the 6.9 packages will be pretty well cleaned up on the Debian side of things when they actually ship. Thanks to Sven Luther, Julien Cristau, and Ari Pollak we can build 6.9 for powerpc, sparc, and amd64 (although there's currently an unrelated bug on amd64 stopping us from building any X packages there). Hopefully we can get the remainder of the arches ready to go so that we can drop 6.9 in to unstable as soon after it's released as possible.
One of the very cool changes that's come about lately is that David Mart nez Moreno has taken up the torch for xterm and produced a package for experimental. xterm never really lived at X.Org, and now we're getting it from the real upstream source. So thanks to David we'll have an up to date xterm ready to go with 6.9. It's sort of a little taste of the modular tree: if you need to get an xterm update for some reason, then you don't have to update all of X in the process.
Terrifyingly, I've reached a point where I can start working on the modular packages the moment I sit down to do Debian work next time. I'm going to repeat what I did with 6.8 and start with the Ubuntu packages and work from there. Now that I know a little more about how the whole thing is laid out I feel a lot more confident in what I'm doing. Last time it was really by the seat of my pants. The scariest thing for me is that I finally have to break down and learn the autotools, which is something I've managed to avoid until now. That should be the biggest hurdle for me in moving the modular packages forward. I have no idea how long it'll take, although history has shown that my time estimates are about 1/3 of the time that it actually takes to do a thing :-) The first third of what I set out to do (get Xorg in to Debian) is finished. The second third will be when 6.9 is in testing. The final third is when the modular packages that I'm happy with land in testing. It may take the entire etch release cycle to run this marathon, but I feel like I've reached the halfway point around now, with 6.9 stabilizing.
I've started talking with people about where to go after all that. Once the Debian packaging work is done, I want to start working on the Xorg codebase itself, preferrably on making the xserver a little nicer on the user. I have a project or two in mind, but I don't want to start on them until Debian's X packages are well in hand for the forseeable future.
Nothing new to report, really. The drscheme Debian packages are in dire need of some help, so if you have any skills with Scheme (especially PLT) and Debian and would like to help, please contact me.
Here are some pictures from the FSF's pre-GPLv3 conference cocktail party and subsequent party at the Acetarium.
pictures
Whew, finally finished moving in. Not exactly settled, but moved. Here are the obligatory pictures from the last few days of moving & new years' party, since I've been toting my new camera around everywhere (where "everywhere" is limited to 4 different values)
pictures
Alexander Wirt had wondered if there was a page that tracked the topic of #debian-devel. There wasn't any, so I decided to whip up a tiny irssi script that used WWW::Mechanize to update
this Debian wiki page automatically when the topic changes.
Personally, I think installing apt-listbugs/apt-listchanges and being aware of debian-devel-announce is more useful than reading the tiny topic, but to each his/her own. There's already a
StatusOfUnstable page, but that has to be updated manually and right now just seems to reflect the /topic anyway.
< piman> Why don't we have a drama severity/tag?
< ari> piman: because we're not on livejournal
< ari> let's post all of -private to livejournal with backdates
< mjg59> We should move debian-devel to Livejournal
< piman> Let's move all Debian development to LJ.
This (Full download
here) is going to be the talk of the blogosphere for at least a good couple of hours.
# Function Usage: doc packagename
# doc pac
doc() cd /usr/share/doc/$1 && ls
_doc() _files -W /usr/share/doc -/
compdef _doc doc
Thanks to Clint for the completion stuff.
You should be good text file get at a place as we set window type a different countries, and fun way of code which is said I'm a drink! We point and displays it can be to the server and Free Software weblog at Debconf this has a place as a working at this unusually cheap used Google AOL, real: post Microsoft Apple hype going to be rid of the second one internal structure, explained how that he'd been a few more important. Ian Murdock Developers! As if I needed to take the man claiming to look at some relevance and he said the test cases.
Obviously this before and a bit of Launchpad team: have several staff who didn't plan to finally on the code, we want it.
