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?

I have to agree with Joey, I have the feeling that we’re not doing many “transversal” improvements and that we’re busy enough simply trying to keep up with new upstream version of software. That’s not completely true but I also wouldn’t want Debian to evolve in that direction.

I think that less people are interested in doing large scale changes because the coordination with 1000 maintainers and 10000 packages is simply too complicated and taking too much time. Luckily we had significant improvements recently that should ease that coordination work. I’m thinking mainly of the usertags that allow us to use the BTS as big TODO list. But usertags are obscure to many people and not well documented yet.

So there’s room for improvements: that’s why I proposed a project for Google’s Summer of code called “Distribution-wide tracker tools” (see list of accepted projects here). Check the project proposal of Arnaud Fontaine to have a more precise idea of what it could give.

I want this infrastructure because I think it may help Utnubu to effectively coordinate the integration of Ubuntu improvements and because it may help Debian be more on the leading edge (instead of trying to catchup with derivatives). And last but not least, I believe many more people (with different level of skills) will be able to effectively work on some projects once the work to do has been clearly identified and registered in such a system.

The project is about to start, so all ideas/comments are welcome of course!

Given the low participation, it looks like the choice of a DPL is difficult this year. It probably means that the platform of the candidates do no suit everybody… however with DPL teams, there’s more than just the DPL and in theory each member should have their own platform. That’s not the case for me because writing a platform is a big job… which I can avoid since I’m not candidate. 🙂

However I now do feel the need to tell what I would like to propose (and do) if I’m part of a team so that you know better what to expect if you vote for a team where I’m involved. I’d just like to give a warning, those items are quick notes and are in no way full- and flesched out solutions, they will need to be discussed and refined in all cases, and somes ideas may be dropped of course.

• Discuss with the core teams, ask their opinion on the problems / critics made outside. Make propositions and implement them myself when possible in order to unblock the situation when needed. Communicate the results to the DD.
• Discuss with NM, DAM and ftpmasters how to make the NM process evolve. An example of a possible solution sketched out on the basis of recent discussions could be :
  • Require from candidates entering the NM process to setup a wiki page listing their regular contributions to Debian in the last 6 months.
  • Allow NM who have been successfully sponsored on a package to upload themselves this package (and only this one, no NMU).
  • Implement changes in the LDAP database to differentiate privileges (upload, unix account, vote, email) so that people who are not requesting upload rights can have a simplified NM process
• Ensure that the scripts to help management of keyring-maint have been written.
• Suggest to the press team to work with an associated debian-press mailing list which could review the announces before being sent and which could make proposals of announces as well.
• Make irc.d.o point to OFTC to put an end to the useless split on two networks.
• Discuss with DAM to change the expulsion process: the first step should be a mediation with the DPL (or someone delegated for that task) and not a public call for “seconds”… and if the process goes further, then the message indicating that the procedure continues will be posted by the mediator which should allows for more moderated messages.
• Try to moderate the first message of a new thread on debian-devel in order to redirect misplaced messages to the appropriate list and increase the quality of the list and get back people who unsubscribed because of the noise level.
• Try to document as much as possible from the working of core teams in some wiki pages.
• Ask everyone what decisions they would like the DPL to take (maybe use polls to evaluate suggestions).

This list is neither complete nor definitive. Not all items will be achieved but each of them is a real progress IMO and I’d like to be able to work on them.

For people who are concerned by those changes, I’m sorry if you discover my ideas by this post even before I had the opportunity to talk to you… I’m posting those ideas now because they may be considered by people who are currently voting, but it does *not* mean that I’m not interested to discuss them with you.

It’s also true that some of those ideas can be implemented without being part of the DPL team and I’ll certainly try to implement some whatever the outcome of the election, but I really believe that being part of a DPL team helps greatly because you have access to some important informations, and you can effectively discuss with core teams which are otherwise difficult to approach for non-technical discussions when you’re a random DD. And last but not least, the trust of the developers is a big motivation (at least for me) to work effectively on those problems.

See this post for my personal vote recommandation and see you in 3 days for the result of the election !