Debian Long Term Support Progress, Jessie Bugs, and the Election
It was a busy day for Debian today as the election for Debian Project Leader 2015 was decided. Raphaël Hertzog posted about his presentation on the Debian Long Term Support project and Richard Hartmann reported the latest bug counts standing between us and a shiny new Debian 8 release.
An automated devotee post to the Debian Development mailing list this morning at six seconds passed midnight GMT informed the impatient that Neil McGovern was elected the new Debian Project Leader. (Ian Jackson verified the results as well.) McGovern will replace Lucas Nussbaum, who has lead the project since April 2013. Neil McGovern was formerly on the release team and later became Release Manager for Lenny, Squeeze and Wheezy. Other positions held by McGovern in his 12 years with Debian include application manager, assistant secretary, SPI member, and press officer.
McGovern ran on a platform of helping Debian move into the future while remaining a base distribution as well as a go-to distro for users. He promised to help developers and other team members "to get what they need, when they need it." He hopes to modernize the Debian infrastructure and reach out to non-developing contributors. McGovern has lots of ideas but one overarching theme is for Debian to be more open and transparent in what he termed "democratic accountability." He said, "We will not hide problems."
McGovern said the Project leader position is to lead and guide the project and make decisions for the best of the project. "It is the DPL's job to remove the blockers and let our colleagues get on with their jobs." Official tasks assigned to the Project Leader include:
* Appoint Delegates or delegate decisions to the Technical Committee
* Lend authority to other Developers or members (statements of support)
* Make any decision which requires urgent action
* Make any decision for whom nobody else has responsibility
* Make decisions about how money owned by Debian is to be used.
Richard Hartmann issued his weekly bug report a few days ago and found 40 blockers remained at that time, it's down to 33 as of now. That number is down from 60 reported March 25. It seems like they just might make that April 25 release goal.
In related news, Raphaël Hertzog today posted some statistics and slides from his presentation at the Mini-DebConf last weekend. The project receives funding from sponsorships through interested companies and Freexian. The Freexian sponsors are responsible for most of the progress on Squeeze LTS, per Hertzog's graph.
