Bodhi 4.0.0 Time Line, First Woman Debian TC
The top story today in Linux news is the controversy following the removal of Nano from the GNU umbrella. Original maintainer Christian Allegretta had to address the resulting rumors that threaten the community. Elsewhere, Jeff Hoogland posted an updated time line for Bodhi 4.0 and the Debian project welcomes its first woman Technical Committee member. Linus is on the hot seat again after losing his patience over commenting style and the Korora project is dropping their driver manager Pharlap.
Nano has left the GNU project or it's been forked, depending upon how you look at it. Apparently last month new co-maintainer updated the Nano website instead of starting his own and some felt this was "hostile." A lengthy discussion followed with several ugly accusations thrown at the Nano team. It's become a bit heated so former lead maintainer had to blog to clear the air.
Chris Allegretta explained that contributor Benno Schulenberg has been doing the bulk of the work on Nano in recent years and Allegretta wanted him to take over. Schulenberg refused to sign the GNU agreement so wasn't given access to GNU servers. The team voted and decided rather than give up Schulenberg they just leave GNU. GNU considers this hostile and any new code a fork of Nano although Allegretta moved the website and gave Schulenberg the key. Allegretta is more or less giving the project to Schulenberg and asks for to be respectfully in their discussion. It's too early to know if GNU will try to maintain a version and, if so, which will distributions choose? The Register had a story today on a hacker who tried his hand at replacing Nano. I began using Nano over 10 years ago and can barely remember the old Vi commands. Let's hope this doesn't signal trouble for Nano users.
Last week the Debian Technical Committee welcomed new member Margarita Manterola. Manterola has been contributing to Debian for over 12 years working mainly on Python and is married to another Debian developer. She, a native of Argentina, is currently employed by Google as a Site Reliability Engineer. She ran for project leader in 2010 and has helped organize several DebConfs. Manterola is the first women to be elected to the Technical Committee.
Speaking of DebConf, DebConf16 wrapped up Saturday. More than 280 people attended the 114 events this year. Next year's DebConf17 will take place in Montreal, Canada August 6 to August 12.
Jeff Hoogland posted today that version 4.0.0 has been delayed in waiting for upstream Enlightenment 1.18. So he's going to wait until their projected release date of July 18 and if it's delayed again, he's going to go with his existing 1.17 EFL. Hoogland said his goal is to release 4.0.0 by the end of August.
In other news:
* Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols said Mint 18 is "the best desktop period."
* Jesse Smith had lots of good things to say as well about Mint 18.
* Jack Germain wrote that HandyLinux is quite handy if they could clean up their English version a bit.
* The Register and The Inquirer made a big deal out of Linus' latest venting about contributors' commenting style.
* The Korora project announced the end of their Pharlap driver manager saying it isn't needed anymore.