In 2017, I was attending FOSDEM when GNOME announced that I was to become the new Executive Director of the Foundation. Now, nearly 5 years later, I ve decided the timing is right for me to step back and for GNOME to start looking for its next leader. I ve been working closely with Rob and the rest of the board to ensure that there s an extended and smooth transition, and that GNOME can continue to go from strength to strength. GNOME has changed a lot in the last 5 years, and a lot has happened in that time. As a Foundation, we ve gone from a small team of 3, to employing people to work on marketing, investment in technical frameworks, conference organisation and much more beyond. We ve become the default desktop on all major Linux distributions. We ve launched Flathub to help connect application developers directly to their users. We ve dealt with patent suits, trademarks, and bylaw changes. We ve moved our entire development platform to GitLab. We released 10 new GNOME releases, GTK 4 and GNOME 40. We ve reset our relationships with external community partners and forged our way towards that future we all dream of where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. For that future, we now need to build on that work. We need to look beyond the traditional role that desktop Linux has held and this is something that GNOME has always been able to do. I ve shown that the Foundation can be more than just a bank account for the project, and I believe that this is vital in our efforts to build a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem. For this, we need to establish programs that align not only with the unique community and technology of the project, but also deliver those benefits to the wider world and drive real impact. 5 years has been the longest that the Foundation has had an ED for, and certainly the longest that I ve held a single post for. I remember my first GUADEC as ED. As you may know, like many of you, I m used to giving talks at conferences and yet I have never been so nervous as when I walked out on that stage. However, the welcome and genuine warmth that I received that day, and the continued support throughout the last 5 years makes me proud of what a welcoming and amazing community GNOME is. Thank you all.

This was originally posted on the GNOME Foundation news feed The GNOME Foundation was supported during 2020-2021 by a grant from Endless Network which funded the Community Engagement Challenge, strategy consultancy with the board, and a contribution towards our general running costs. At the end of last year we had a portion of this grant remaining, and after the success of our work in previous years directly funding developer and infrastructure work on GTK and Flathub, we wanted to see whether we could use these funds to invest in GNOME and the wider Linux desktop platform. We re very pleased to announce that we got approval to launch three parallel contractor engagements, which started over the past few weeks. These projects aim to improve our developer experience, make more applications available on the GNOME platform, and move towards equitable and sustainable revenue models for developers within our ecosystem. Thanks again to Endless Network for their support on these initiatives. Flathub Verified apps, donations and subscriptions (Codethink and James Westman) This project is described in detail on the Flathub Discourse but goal is to add a process to verify first-party apps on Flathub (ie uploaded by a developer or an authorised representative) and then make it possible for those developers to collect donations or subscriptions from users of their applications. We also plan to publish a separate repository that contains only these verified first-party uploads (without any of the community contributed applications), as well as providing a repository with only free and open source applications, allowing users to choose what they are comfortable installing and running on their system. Creating the user and developer login system to manage your apps will also set us up well for future enhancements, such managing tokens for direct binary uploads (eg from a CI/CD system hosted elsewhere, as is already done with Mozilla Firefox and OBS) and making it easier to publish apps from systems such as Electron which can be hard to use within a flatpak-builder sandbox. For updates on this project you can follow the Discourse thread, check out the work board on GitHub or join us on Matrix. PWAs Integrating Progressive Web Apps in GNOME (Phaedrus Leeds) While everyone agrees that native applications can provide the best experience on the GNOME desktop, the web platform, and particularly PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) which are designed to be downloadable as apps and offer offline functionality, makes it possible for us to offer equivalent experiences to other platforms for app publishers who have not specifically targeted GNOME. This allows us to attract and retain users by giving them the choice of using applications from a wider range of publishers than are currently directly targeting the Linux desktop. The first phase of the GNOME PWA project involves adding back support to Software for web apps backed by GNOME Web, and making this possible when Web is packaged as a Flatpak. So far some preparatory pull requests have been merged in Web and libportal to enable this work, and development is ongoing to get the feature branches ready for review. Discussions are also in progress with the Design team on how best to display the web apps in Software and on the user interface for web apps installed from a browser. There has also been discussion among various stakeholders about what web apps should be included as available with Software, and how they can provide supplemental value to users without taking priority over apps native to GNOME. Finally, technical discussion is ongoing in the portal issue tracker to ensure that the implementation of a new dynamic launcher portal meets all security and robustness requirements, and is potentially useful not just to GNOME Web but Chromium and any other app that may want to install desktop launchers. Adding support for the launcher portal in upstream Chromium, to facilitate Chromium-based browsers packaged as a Flatpak, and adding support for Chromium-based web apps in Software are stretch goals for the project should time permit. GTK4 / Adwaita To support the adoption of Gtk4 by the community (Emmanuele Bassi) With the release of GTK4 and renewed interest in GTK as a toolkit, we want to continue improving the developer experience and ease of use of GTK and ensure we have a complete and competitive offering for developers considering using our platform. This involves identifying missing functionality or UI elements that applications need to move to GTK4, as well as informing the community about the new widgets and functionality available. We have been working on documentation and bug fixes for GTK in preparation for the GNOME 42 release and have also started looking at the missing widgets and API in Libadwaita, in preparation for the next release. The next steps are to work with the Design team and the Libadwaita maintainers and identify and implement missing widgets that did not make the cut for the 1.0 release. In the meantime, we have also worked on writing a beginners tutorial for the GNOME developers documentation, including GTK and Libadwaita widgets so that newcomers to the platform can easily move between the Interface Guidelines and the API references of various libraries. To increase the outreach of the effort, Emmanuele has been streaming it on Twitch, and published the VOD on YouTube as well.

Before I start, I would like to make it clear that the below is entirely my personal view, and not necessarily that of the GNOME Foundation, the Debian Project, or anyone else. There s been quite a bit of interest recently about the petition by Software Freedom Law Center to cancel the Software Freedom Conservancy s trademark. A number of people have asked my views on it, so I thought I d write up a quick blog on my experience with SFLC and Conservancy both during my time as Debian Project Leader, and since. It s clear to me that for some time, there s been quite a bit of animosity between SFLC and Conservancy, which for me started to become apparent around the time of the large debate over ZFS on Linux. I talked about this in my DebConf 16 talk, which fortunately was recorded (ZFS bit from 8:05 to 17:30). This culminated in SFLC publishing a statement, and Conservancy also publishing their statement, backed up by the FSF. These obviously came to different conclusions, and it seems bizarre to me that SFLC who were acting as Debian s legal counsel published a position that was contrary to the position taken by Debian. Additionally, Conservancy and FSF who were not acting as counsel mirrored the position of the project. Then, I hear of an even more confusing move that SFLC has filed legal action against Conservancy, despite being the organisation they helped set up. This happened on the 22nd September, the day after SFLC announced corporate and support services for Free Software projects. SFLC has also published a follow up, which they say that the act is not an attack, let alone a bizarre attack , and that the response from Conservancy, who view it as such was like reading a declaration of war issued in response to a parking ticket . Then, as SFLC somehow find the threat of your trademark being taken away as something other than an attack, they also state: Any project working with the Conservancy that feels in any way at risk should contact us. We will immediately work with them to put in place measures fully ensuring that they face no costs and no risks in this situation. which I read as a direct pitch to try and pull projects away from Conservancy and over to SFLC. Now, even if there is a valid claim here, despite the objections that were filed by a trademark lawyer who I have a great deal of respect for (disclosure: Pam also provides pro-bono trademark advice to my employer, the GNOME Foundation), the optics are pretty terrible. We have a case of one FOSS organisation taking another one to court, after many years of them being aware of the issue, and when wishing to promote a competing service. At best, this is a distraction from the supposed goals of Free Software organisations, and at worst is a direct attempt to interrupt the workings of an established and successful umbrella organisation which lots of projects rely on. I truly hope that this case is simply dropped, and if I was advising SFLC, that s exactly what I would suggest, along with an apology for the distress. Put it this way if SFLC win, then they re simply displaying what would be viewed as an aggressive move to hold the term software freedom exclusively to themselves. If they lose, then it shows that they re willing to do so to another 501(c)3 without actually having a case. Before I took on the DPL role, I was under the naive impression that although there were differences in approach, at least we were coming to try and work together to promote software freedoms for the end user. Unfortunately, since then, I ve now become a lot more jaded about exactly who, and which organisations hold our best interests at heart. (Featured image by Nick Youngson CC-BY-SA-3.0 http://nyphotographic.com/)

Delayed update Firstly, an apology I ve been rather lax about doing these updates. I ll try and highlight more happenings in the project more frequently in future. GUADEC Birthday party

In August it will have been 20 years since the GNOME project was founded. To celebrate this occasion, a special party is being organised. All current and former GNOME Foundation members are especially welcome to attend. We d love it if you could join us! The party is taking place as part of GUADEC 2017. For more details and announcements, follow @guadec.

Engagement team Did you know about the GNOME Engagement Team? This is the team that helps promote GNOME and push for adoption of GNOME. It s a fantastic way to get involved in the non-technical part of the project, and they re always looking for more help PIA affiliate programme Private Internet Access is a long time supporter of the project, and we ve recently worked out an affiliate deal with them If you sign up for their VPN services via https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/buy-vpn/GNOME, then the foundation receives a contribution to help further the project. I ve personally signed up for PIA s VPN services, as working remotely I sometimes find myself on public wifi hotspots, and the risks of these are fairly well documented. Board elections One of the characteristics of the Foundation is that the board is elected by foundation members. It s the time of year again where this happens and we have a great list of candidates. Voting is open until 9th June, so I d encourage any foundation member to read up, and vote accordingly!

New release! In case you haven t seen it yet, there s a new GNOME release 3.24! The release is the result of 6 months work by the GNOME community. The new release is a major step forward for us, with new features and improvements, and some exciting developments in how we build applications. You can read more about it in the announcement and release notes. As always, this release was made possible partially thanks to the Friends of GNOME project. In particular, it helped us provide a Core apps hackfest in Berlin last November, which had a direct impact on this release. Conferences GTK+ hackfest I ve just come back from the GTK+ hackfest in London thanks to RedHat and Endless for sponsoring the venues! It was great to meet a load of people who are involved with GNOME and GTK, and some great discussions were had about Flatpak and the creation of a FlatHub somewhere that people can get all their latest Flatpaks from. LibrePlanet As I m writing this, I m sitting on a train going to Heathrow, for my flight to LibrePlanet 2017! If you re going to be there, come and say hi. I ve a load of new stickers that have been produced as well so these can brighten up your laptop.

Conferences After quite a bit of work, we finally have the sponsorship brochure produced for GUADEC and GNOME.Asia. Huge thanks to everyone who helped, I m really pleased with the result. Again, if you or your company are interested in sponsoring us, please drop a mail to sponsors@guadec.org! Food and Games I like food, and I like games. So this week there was a couple of awesome sneak previews on the upcoming GNOME 3.24 release. Matthias Clasen posted about GNOME Recipes the 1.0 release tasty snacks are now available directly on the desktop, which means I can also view them when I m at the back of the house in the kitchen, where the wifi connection is somewhat spotty. Adrien Plazas also posted about GNOME Games now I can get my retro gaming fix easily. Signing things I was sent a package in the post, with lots of blank stickers and a couple of pens. I ve now signed a load of stickers, and my hand hurts. More details about exactly what this is about soon :)

As mentioned in my previous post, I ll be posting regularly with an update on what I ve been up to as the GNOME Executive Director, and highlighting some cool stuff around the project! If you find this dull, they re tagged with [update-post] so hopefully, you can filter them out. And dear planet.debian.org folk if this annoys you too much I can turn the feed category to turn this off it s not interesting enough :) However, if you like these or have any suggestions for things you d like to see here, let me know. Conferences One of the areas we ve been working on is the sponsorship brochure for GUADEC and GNOME.Asia. Big thanks to Allan Day and the Engagement team for helping out here and I m pleased to say it s almost finished! In the meantime, if you or your company are interested in sponsoring us, please drop a mail to sponsors@guadec.org! Press A fairly lengthy and wide-ranging interview with myself has been published at cio.com. It covers a bit of my background (although mistakenly says I worked for Collabora Productivity, rather than Collabora Limited!), and looks at a few different areas on where I see GNOME and how it sits within the greater GNU/Linux movement I cover some uncomfortable subjects around desktop Linux . It s well worth a read. Release update The GNOME 3.24 release is happening soon! As such, the release team announced the string freeze. If you want to help out with how much has been translated into your language, then https://wiki.gnome.org/TranslationProject/JoiningTranslation is a good place to start. I d like to give a shout out to the translation teams in particular too. Sometimes people don t realise how much work goes into this, and it s fantastic that we re able to reach so many more users with our software. Google Summer of Code GNOME is now announced as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code! There are some great ideas for Summer (Well, in the Northern hemisphere anyway) projects, so if you want to spend your time coding on Free Software, and get paid for it, why not sign up as a student?

For those who haven t heard, I ve been appointed as the new Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and I started last week on the 15th February. It s been an interesting week so far, mainly meeting lots of people and trying to get up to speed with what looks like an enormous job! However, I m thoroughly excited by the opportunity and am very grateful for everyone s warm words of welcome so far. One of the main things I m here to do is to try and help. GNOME is strong because of its community. It s because of all of you that GNOME can produce world leading technologies and a desktop that is intuitive, clean and functional. So, if you re stuck with something, or if there s a way that either myself or the Foundation can help, then please speak up! Additionally, I intend on making this blog a much more frequently updated one letting people know what I m doing, and highlighting cool things that are happening around the project. In that vein, this week I ve also started contacting all our fantastic Advisory Board members. I m also looking at finding sponsors for GUADEC and GNOME.Asia, so if you know of anyone, let me know! I also booked my travel to the GTK+ hackfest and to LibrePlanet if you re going to either of those, make sure you come and introduce yourself :) Finally, a small advertisement for Friends of GNOME. Your generosity really does help the Foundation support development of GNOME. Join up today!

I m currently over at FOSDEM, and have been asked by a couple of people about the state of ZFS and Debian. So, I thought I d give a quick post to explain what Debian s current plan is (which has come together with a lot of discussion with the FTP Masters and others around what we should do). TLDR: It s going in contrib, as a source only dkms module. Longer version: Debian has always prided itself in providing the unequivocally correct solution to our users and downstream distributions. This also includes licenses we make sure that Debian will contain 100% free software. This means that if you install Debian, you are guaranteed freedoms offered under the DFSG and our social contract. Now, this is where ZFS on Linux gets tricky. ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, and the Linux kernel under the GPLv2-only. The project views that both of these are free software licenses, but they re incompatible with each other. This incompatibility means that there is risk to producing a combined work with Linux and a CDDL module. (Note: there is arguments about if a kernel module, once loaded, is a combined work with the kernel. I m not touching that with a barge pole, as I Am Not A Lawyer.) Now, does this mean that Debian would get sued by distributing ZFS natively compiled into the kernel? Well, maybe, but I think it s a bit unlikely. This doesn t mean it s the right choice for Debian to take as a project though! It brings us back to our promise to our users, and our commercial and non-commercial downstream distributions. If a commercial downstream distribution took the next release of stable, and used our binaries, they may well get sued if they have enough money to make it worthwhile. Additionally, Debian has always taken its commitment to upstream licenses very seriously. If there s a doubt, it doesn t go in official Debian. It should be noted that ZFS is something that is important to a lot of Debian users, who all want to be able to use ZFS in a manner that makes it easier for them to install. Thus, the position that we ve arrived at is that we can ship ZFS as a source only, DKMS module. This means it will be built on the target machines, and we re not distributing binaries. There s also a warning in the README.Debian file explaining that care should be taken if you do things with the resultant binary as we can t promise it complies with the licenses. Finally, I should point out that this isn t my decision in the end. The contents of the archive is a decision for the FTP-Masters, as it s delegated. However, what I have been able to do is coordinate many conflicting views, and I hope that ZFS will be accepted into the archive soon!

Two years ago, I discussed various ways of constructing a list in a Monad (or, more specifically, in IO) in Haskell, and compared their merits in terms of elegance, stack usage, number of traversals of the list and run-time efficiency. Recently, two blog posts discussed the issue further and proposed new, more daring alternatives. Neil Mitchell breaks through the abstraction provided by IO, duplicates the world and traverses the list twice, and obtains a speed-up for long lists. Twarn van Laarhoven went even further and wrote custom C-- code to destructively update the tail-pointer of the list cell to be able to create the list completely evaluated on the first start. This basically answers my question from two years ago:

I m still wondering: What would be required from Haskell, GHC or the monads in question to have a fully satisfactory solution here, i.e. one that is as fast as the naive recursion, as stack efficient as the difference list solution, and allocates no thunks, only list cells?

He also has a variant with a slightly nicer interface around holes , i.e. explicit objects on the heap that can later be replaced by indirections. Obviously, both approaches are very unsafe. I took this as an opportunity to redo my benchmark measurements, and include their variants (named escapeIO, hackIO and holeIO). The following table omits the variants with quadratic performance, as I ran it on longer lists now:

Variant	10^0	10^1	10^2	10^3	10^4	10^5	10^6
accumReverse	37ns	153ns	1134ns	12 s	208 s	8540 s	97ms
recursion	29ns	139ns	680ns	6790ns	160 s	6441 s	76ms
replicateM	26ns	126ns	677ns	6785ns	168 s	6314 s	78ms
accumDList	35ns	165ns	995ns	10 s	190 s	9706 s	100ms
streams	27ns	136ns	691ns	6788ns	173 s	5771 s	75ms
unsafeInterleave	60ns	329ns	2804ns	28 s	373 s	5605 s	57ms
listFix	51ns	412ns	4109ns	56 s	2761 s	42ms	445ms
escapeIO	41ns	187ns	1808ns	16 s	234 s	4409 s	45ms
hackIO	30ns	152ns	1199ns	11 s	140 s	3701 s	42ms
holeIO	40ns	222ns	1725ns	17 s	218 s	4446 s	53ms

The following graph shows that around 10000, the naive approaches become much slower and the fancy hacks pay of, with Twarn s tail-pointer-updating code performing the best: I would really like to see a package that provides a API like Twarn s holes, either in this raw unsafe variant (but with the garbage collector related code checked), or with a safe API using type hackery similar to the ST monad that ensures that after normal code gets its hands on a term possibly involving holes, the holes may no longer be modified. I have put the code and results on GitHub.

As some may know, since October 2013, I ve been studying to gain my Private Pilot Licence, and I finally achieved this goal. It s actually taken quite a bit more than 45 hours a total of around 60, but that does include a day trip to France (Le Touquet) and getting my night rating as well. This basically means I can fly single engine piston aeroplanes on my own, with passengers, as soon as my paperwork gets processed by the Civil Aviation Authority anyway. I ve been flying Cessna 172s from Cambridge Aero Club, where they have four of them, G-SHWK, G-UFCB, G-HERC and G-MEGS, as well as a Extra 200, G-GLOC. It s a great club, with fantastically maintained planes and great instructors, and Cambridge Airport has a full ATC service as well, so it s been useful to get that experience, especially as the UK s airspace is fairly contended with a lot of controlled and military airspace which needs permission to enter. As for what next, I need to work that out. When you get your licence, it s often described as a license to learn, so that s what I intend to do. Apart from popping over to France for lunch every now and again, I m probably going to have a go at aerobatics and farm strip flying, then probably look at my IMC rating. So, if it s a nice day, and you re around in Cambridge, let me know if you want a trip up in the skies!

Yesterday, my first term started as the Debian Project Leader. There s been a large number of emails congratulating me, and thanks to everyone who sent those. I d also like to thank Mehdi Dogguy and Gergely Nagy for running, and of course Lucas Nussbaum for his service over the past two years. Lucas also did a great handover, and so (I hope!) I m aware of most of the issues that are ongoing. As started previously, I ll keep my daily log of activities in /srv/leader/news/ on master.debian.org.

This year's DPL campaign is over and voting period is also almost over. Many did not vote yet and they really should consider doing so. This is meant as a reminder for them. If you didn't have time to dig into debian-vote's archives and read questions/answers, here is the list with links to candidates' replies:

• How would you spend Debian's money? (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• Would you authorize to use regular Debian funds to sponsor Debian participation into Outreachy? (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• What do you think about outsourcing some of the gruntwork related to accounting and treasury to professional agencies? (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• Will you revoke <20131008134615.GA19150@xanadu.blop.info> or do you think this authorization is useful? (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• SWOT analysis (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• A bundle of long questions from ajt (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• What is your perception of DebConf and its organisation? (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• What is your perception of fundraising in and around Debian? (neilm, algernon). I didn't answer to this question explicitly as I mainly agree with algernon and a similar topic has been discussed/explained elsewhere (platforms, other questions, ...)
• Dropping 5 from our social contract (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• Debian in five years? (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• PPA (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
• Have you considered working with a "DPL team" (mehdi, neilm, algernon)
  
• More women in key positions? (mehdi, algernon)
• Also, as a reminder, you can find candidates platforms here.

Compared to past years, we had a comparable number of questions. All questions did not start big threads as it used to be the case sometimes in the past :-) The good side of this is that we are trolling DPL candidates less than we used to do :-P

Now, if you still didn't vote, it is really time to do so. The voting period ends on Tuesday, April 14^th, 23:59:59 UTC, 2015. You have only a few hours left!

0. Who are you and what's your history with Debian Project? My name's Neil, I've been involved with Debian for over 10 years now. I've held a variety of roles, from the SPI board, writing policy and secure testing team, to being one of the Release Managers for Squeeze and Wheezy. 1. What's your most proud moment as Debian Developer? Probably the release of Squeeze, my first as RM. It was the end of a great effort to get the release out. I particularly remember at the end of DebConf 10 in New York going to the local Disney store and buying every single small squeeze plush toy they had, so I could send a thank you gift to the rest of the release team! Another perhaps was when I first got my Debian kilt. 2. In your opinion what is the strongest part of Debian Project? I think this is our social contract. It guides us, and is what we all agree on. This is our promise to ourselves, to the wider open source community and to our users. 3. And what is the weakest part of Debian Project? At a push, I'd say it's the variety of packages we have in the archive. I'm not sure it's weakness, but it's certainly a challenge. It becomes exponentially harder to ensure that everything integrates well as you add more packages. To have made it do so this far is quite impressive. 4. How do you intend to resolve the weakest part? Well, see the section in my platform on PPAs, and modernising our build and infrastructure system Wouldn't it be great if you could stage a package against all of stable, testing and unstable, and see what fails to build and where, with live build logs on all architectures? 5. DPL term lasts for one year - what would you challenge during that term and what have you learned from previous DPL's? I think my primary role as DPL for 2015 would be to get a great start of development for Stretch. The start of a new release cycle is the exact time to implement wide changes that are potentially disruptive. Every couple of years we seem to relax after the release, rather than get geared up for the next one, and then time passes, and plans slip, and before we know it, the freeze is fast approaching. If we start planning /now/, then we can hopefully enter the freeze with fewer RC bugs, which should be great news for everyone! For the second part, I've talked to a lot of the previous DPLs, and worked with them in one role or another. The main thing I was told was that I shouldn't try and do everything I planned on. It's hard work, and all sorts of things pop up that derail your original plans. 6. What motivates you to work in Debian and run for DPL? The people involved. I've met and worked with some of my greatest friends due to the project. The work, dedication and commitment of those over the years is outstanding. Most of these people are still with us, and unfortunately, a few are not. Whenever I'm feeling disheartened or annoyed, usually due to a giant flame-war then I simply remember that what we're doing is truly remarkable, and the effort that everyone has put in over the years isn't something that should be taken for granted.

It's that time of year again for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader! Starting on April 1st, and during the following two weeks, the Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year. The results will be published on April 15th and the term for new the project leader will start on April 17th, 2015. Lucas Nussbaum who has held the office for the last two years won't be seeking reelection this year and Debian Developers will have to choose between three candidates:

• Mehdi Dogguy
• Gergely Nagy
• Neil McGovern

Gergely Nagy and Neil McGovern previously ran for DPL in past years; it's the first run for Mehdi Dogguy. The campaigning period started today and will last until March 31st. The candidates are expected to engage in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list where they'll reply to questions from users and contributors.

Some people may have seen recently that the Barbie series has a rather sexist book out about Barbie the Computer Engineer. Fortunately, there s a way to improve this by making your own version. Thus, I made a short version about Barbie the Debian Developer and init system packager. (For those who don t know me, this is satirical. Any resemblance to people is purely coincidental.) Edit: added text in alt tags. Also, hai reddit!

This post was an April Fools' Day joke. In accordance with its constitution, the Debian Project has just elected Javier Merino Cacho as Debian Project Leader. More than 80% of voters put him as their first choice (or equal first) on their ballot papers. Javier's large majority over his opponents shows how his inspiring vision for the future of the Debian project is largely shared by the other developers. Lucas Nussbaum and Neil McGovern also gained a lot of support from Debian project members, both coming many votes ahead of the None of the above ballot choice. Javier has been a Debian Developer since February 2012 and, among other packages, works on keeping the mercurial package under control, as mercury is very poisonous for trouts. After it was announced that he had won this year's election, Javier said: I'm flattered by the trust that Debian members have put in me. One of the main points in my platform is to remove the "Debian is old and boring" image. In order to change that, my first action as DPL is to encourage all Debian Project Members to wear a clown red nose in public. Among others, the main points from his platform are mainly related to improve the communication style in mailing lists through an innovative filter called aponygisator, to make Debian less "old and boring", as well as solve technical issues among developers with barehanded fights. Betting on the fights will be not only allowed but encouraged for fundraising reasons. Javier also contemplated the use of misleading talk titles such as The use of cannabis in contemporary ages: a practical approach and Real Madrid vs Barcelona to lure new users and contributors to Debian events. Javier's platform was collaboratively written by a team of communication experts and high profile Debian contributors during the last DebConf. It has since evolved thanks to the help of many other contributors.

It's again that time of the year for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader! Starting on March 31st, and during the following two weeks, the Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year. Among this year's candidates there is the current DPL, Lucas Nussbaum, who admits that "the workload involved in being the DPL is just huge," and motivates his nomination with the need for stability in the project in this release cycle, especially after the difficult decision about the default init system. In his platform, Lucas speaks of technical and social steps to improve the project: from reproducible builds for a more secure archive to a renewed effort to run Debian on new platforms (especially smartphone and tablets); from a more welcoming approach to prospective contributors to an easier collaboration with organizations. The only other candidate left after Gergely Nagy withdrew his nomination, is former Release Manager Neil McGovern. Neil's platform focuses mainly on the need to "ensure that we cater to our users, and there's millions of them. From those running the latest software in unstable, to people who simply want a rock solid core release." In his opinion "the size of Debian is increasing, and will reach a point where we're unable to guarantee basic compatibility with other packages, or the length of time it takes to do so becomes exponentially longer, unless something changes." To fix this problem, Neil proposes the implementation of PPAs (Personal Package Archives), the modernisation of the current build and infrastructure system as well as generally supporting the various teams. The campaigning period will last until March 30th: the candidates are already engaged in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list where they'll reply to questions from users and contributors.

After a number of years in Debian, in various roles, I decided to put my name forward for election to Debian Project Leader. My platform has now been published, and campaigning is now under way!

Featured image is CC-BY by State Library of Victoria Collections

Valve have announced the availability of Portal 2 beta for Linux! It s exciting to see such a fantastic game coming to the platform. Luckily, some developers can get it for free :) Interestingly, there s also a public bug tracker, which also hosts the public bug tracker for a number of their linux engagements, and also quite a bit of code for things like voglperf, steam-runtime, halflife and the source-sdk. Additionally, Valve s logo also now appears as a gold sponsor for DebConf14, in Portland. A huge thanks I think to Valve for putting in the effort!