Pdub and Jefka - Congratulations dudes!
Linux Australia -
STATUS: MOVING FORWARD
- things are happening (FTA, Media Training) overall, Treasury slowly appears to be coming together (although I spend too much time in spinlocks waiting on others presently)
Debian - The local reaction to the recent Debian GR has been interesting, mostly, Death of Debian, News at 11. At work, the largest common fear is that the GR will basically result in an even more out of date stable release and we'll have to migrate to a different platform for our various servers for up to date software with the features needed for the various systems that we support (for example, later versions of php)
With the usual synchronicity of my life things at work have highlighted the link between strategy, policy and implementation with each needing to support the other to make effective progress. The GR and AJ's subsequent post highlights the schisms between all three in the Debian project. GNOME seems to have tackled this (taking examples) with an organised release schedule (Strategy), freezes (Policy) and documented release planning and bug days (Implementation).
Of course, things are much easier for a desktop environment than a software distribution ... okay, now taking a step back and looking at Debian. Release is determined by the number of bugs (specifically release critical bugs, but the number of other bugs has impact too) in the "stable" set of packages (with the number of packages growing at an ever increasing rate). The disconnect here lies in the criteria for a release and how a package is chosen to be pushed into the
release with the DFSG and number of bugs being absolute criteria for that; I don't think it's being viewed as a process from the creation of a package through to DFSG compliant bug free goodness with the community being able to take snapshots along the way.
On a related note, another observation that I noticed being made about the GR and recent election of the DPL was the low percantage of Debian Developers that voted. The Debian Project reveals it's American heritage here with non-compulsory voting (this is being written from an Australian point-of-view), developers are not meant to be uncontactable by email and are meant to be active, so why can they opt out of voting on things such as GRs that affect the whole project?
Governance - have being thinking about this in relation to the half dozen committees that I have been on and other projects that I have observed, why is it so hard to get it right?
shiny new work desktop - 2.8Ghz goodness, hopefully, I'll get the opportunity to actually getting around to doing some dev work on it before it becomes hopelessly slow :)
Barriers to entry... - It's good to see the Evolution guys giving ways for people to help out their project; however it's not the itch for me ... I wonder what ways there are for us with low attention spans to help out projects.