Sam is our new DPL. The margin with the second (Steve McIntyre again!) is very slim, 8 votes. And Steve only has 25 votes more than me. That’s not much either.

What we can learn from this election:

• the principle of a DPL board makes its way, I have been ranked well above NOTA and I have been mainly advocating this proposal (and this despite some votes anti-dunc-tank that I probably suffered from)
• my selection of board members was pretty good, the 4 candidates that I selected for the board are the top-4 of the election
• Debian developers are fed up by the various problems in some core teams (overwhelmed, not recruiting new members, not communicating enough, etc.). I’ll try to help Sam fix those issues, but it’s going to be a big challenge for us.

In the end, I really hope that sam is going to find a way to cooperate closely with the various candidates that are still highly motivated to work on improving Debian. I doubt that he will choose a board structure (although I would be glad to be proven wrong!), but I really hope that he will expand the 2IC principle (or something similar).

I once told sam that he would have my full support if he got elected, and I intend to stand up to this promise. I said that because I share many of his ideas. The few fears that I have are mainly on how he is going to try to address these issues. But I have no reason to believe that he’s not going to listen to what we (and I) have to say. That’s why he got ranked just after me on my ballot.

Good luck Sam, do not disappoint us!

Since the initial announce of the transition to the new Python policy, there has been some grumblings due to some unexpected last minute changes.

I spent a copious amount of time discussing with all parties involved (Matthias Klose and Josselin Mouette mainly), rewrote dh\_python 2 times to accomodate everybody’s needs (those who use the XS-Python-Version field, those who won’t) while still preserving backwards compatibility and went as far as NMUing debhelper to unblock the situation (Joey didn’t want to take an active role in the dh\_python update).

But this is now over and things have settled down. All the infrastructure is now in sid, the interfaces have been defined and won’t change anymore. It’s now really time to continue the transition. Update your python related packages by following the instructions here. Please help by providing patches and NMUing all the packages that have not yet been updated. Join #debian-python on OFTC if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone who gave a hand to update the infrastructure required for this new policy: Matthias, Josselin, Marc Dequènes for the CDBS class, Joe Wreschnig for the update of the policy, Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth for their advice as release managers.

I gave this morning a quick conference presenting how the PTS works internally. My hope is to attract some contributors like aj (Anthony Towns) managed to do with the BTS. He got impressive results in a few months, I hope I’ll get some too. 🙂

Anyway, for those of you who aren’t there in Darmstaadt at the Debian-QA conference, you can still check my slides. Of course, feel free to ask me some questions if you’re currently trying to hack on the PTS… I’d love to help you if you’re gonna help me maintain it in the long run.

We got some interesting ideas for improvements, I hope they’ll evolve in some patches.