I won’t re-explain in great length why I think it’s good to endorse the concept of Debian Maintainers. I have been enough involved in the debian-vote discussions (and the previous debian-project discussions).

I would just like to remind everybody that we elected sam to see changes and progress on many areas. We haven’t seen many results yet, but I know that sam has been working hard and I’ve been helping him as much as I can on the problem of our DSA team (one day I might blog about it or even start a GR if the situation continues to not improve despite the numerous efforts that we’ve put into it).

Here we have a concrete proposal for a change, and I believe a change for the better. But just like for every change, people have fears: they fear people who only care about technical excellence and not too much about philosophy, they fear that the quality level will drop, they fear that nobody will care about NM afterwards, etc.

It’s legitimate to have concerns, to express them and to discuss them. But we should not let them take us over or we’ll end up abandoning all initiatives that are required to evolve and adjust to our moving environment.

We need to encourage people who are ready to try out new things. In cases where it’s not entirely clear how the situation will evolve, it’s better to try out and react accordingly instead of doing nothing and hoping that people will wait us. When we do things while hoping for the best, the worst won’t come up true so easily.

Have faith in our future.

Stratus seeks for comments from Alioth admins.

Yes I’d like to see OpenID integration with Gforge. The upstream situation is a bit difficult, so I don’t think that you’ll have official opinion from them.

In my case, I want OpenID integration because it would be cool to offer a standard wiki and be able to define ACL on some pages which refer to the Alioth accounts that people are used to use. In the longer term, we have other web services which are going to need authentication (DWTT, new version of the PTS, …) in order to provide customized content and it would be great to rely on OpenID for that part.

I’m waiting your patches! 😉

And next time you want an opinion from the Alioth admins, please mail us instead of hoping that we won’t miss your blog entry in planet.debian.org.

Madcoder decided to quote some bits of an IRC conversation held on #debian-devel-fr and (of course, given his current frustration) he munges the meaning of my quote.

I was explaining that for me dunc-tank was definitely not perfect but that it was a first step in a global direction that I’d like to explore. I explained my long term project with dunc-tank in a french blog entry and I also explained it to Bruce Byfield who interviewed me as a member of dunc-tank.

My long term project always involved that decision-making of what to fund would be shared between the donors and all Debian developers. I sincerly hope to avoid many of the current criticism with this infrastructure but I can’t be sure. In the mean time, the current experiment is not run because it’s perfect and ready for generalization but because we want to see if it’s possible to get enough funding, and if it’s actually worth to invest more time in developing something more acceptable to everybody. (And also because we would really love to have etch release in december)

This is my opinion: I’m not speaking for dunc-tank although I have the feeling that others members of the board are there for similar reasons.

Update: following sam’s bad interpretation I fixed my wording to say “…decision-making of what to fund would be shared…”.

There’s a new idea floating around: creating a steering committee for Debian. I like the principle but I think we should aim for a broader change in the constitution.

I don’t think creating a new separate structure is a good idea, because in my opinion the DPL should be the steering committee. Of course a single individual can’t play that role. And in fact, this is true for almost any task that the DPL currently has to handle.

So we need to get rid of the DPL and to replace it with a board. And that board would be the steering committee and would also have the responsibilities that come currently with the DPL hat. Why?

First of all, the role of DPL is to provide a vision but most recent leaders have not been able to do that as they tend to get overwhelmed by simple administrative work. If you remove the hope to effectively lead Debian by giving that power to a committee, then you scare everybody that wanted to be DPL because it effectively become an administrative position with no interest.

Then, in recent years, the DPL position tended to become a multi-person thingie, first with the DPL team idea and this year with the 2IC (sort of a “DPL assistant”). So it looks like we’re ready to switch to a fully multi-personal leadership: one of an elected board.

And last point, since the DPL tends to be active only on internal organizational issues, for most persons he’s only working on “political” stuff and he’s not valued as contributor leading the distribution where it needs to be lead: to the next release.

That’s why I suggest that the board should be elected for an entire release with a maximum of 21 months. After each release we elect a new board and it should be in place for 18 months ideally.

Tying the term to a release seems like the right approach to me: at the beginning the board is effectively doing most of its work as steering committee (setting/approving release goals) and at the end, during the period where we’re freezing it has more time to concentrate on organizational issues.

The questions is now: how is that going to work with the release managers? Will that position become only an administrative work of low-level coordination without any influence on the whole distribution?