As promised in my platform, this is the first of my periodic reports to the Debian developers on the tasks I have been undertaking since being elected Debian Project Leader (DPL).
The issue foremost on most people's minds is, of course, the status of the Sarge release process. While many of us had our attention focused on the Project Leader election, the ARM port suffered a debilitating setback when two of its build daemons, europa and elara were rendered inoperative. The administrator at the hosting sponsor, Xandros, reports that the 2.5-inch hard drives within each of these NetWinder machines are making unpleasant noises.
The good news is that we seem to be in a position to recover. Steve McIntyre has placed an ARM, toffee, in a position where it can do some good; the needs-build backlog is dropping accordingly. (See Ian Lynagh's statistics for more information.) Gerfried Fuchs has retrieved another ARM, grieg, from Othmar Pasteka, and is putting it into operation. More good news is that Ryan Murray has been making progress with preparing the testing-proposed-updates and testing-security environments on the build daemons.
The Release Management team plans to have another release update ready in the coming days. I should, however, caution us collectively regarding a phenomenon they have witnessed in the recent past: when a positive-sounding release update is sent out, the scramble to get non-release-critical changes into unstable renews, and the build daemons consequently bog down, not just due to the load, but due to the inevitable failures-to-build-from-source (FTBFSes) that result due to sloppy errors made in the frenzy to "get that one last set of fixes in before the freeze". Please don't do that. These actions do not bring the Sarge release closer; they push it farther away. Use the experimental upload target, exercise restraint, or consult with your fellow developers or with members of the Release Management team to establish the urgency of your upload vis-a-vis the Sarge release.
I offer a status report on the Sarge release because of its criticality, and because as DPL I want to do everything I can to keep our developers and users apprised of this central issue. If the release managers see that this report is correlated with a spike in reckless uploads to unstable, however, I will be forced to refrain from offering them. As I said in all three of the interviews I conducted recently (see Interviews and Public Appearances, below), my top priority as DPL is to not get in the way of the Sarge release. Please do not put me in the awkward position of having to refrain from reporting on this issue to serve that goal.
The ARM problems we've had have also affected the timeliness with which we've been able to get security updates out. A security fix to xfree86, for example, has been stalled for weeks because no ARM build daemon has been operational to compile it. (See Debian bug #298939 for details.)
I've been trying to get an idea of what organizations around the world hold assets in trust for the Debian Project. The only body with much in the way of formal recognition, of course, is Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI), which is explicitly mentioned in section nine of our Constitution.
SPI holds approximately USD 40,000 in cash assets, and the Debian UK Society recently founded by Steve McIntyre holds about GBP 2,000. There are also people or organizations in (at least) Italy and Brazil holding some money in trust for Debian. In the case of Brazil, some cash had to be left in the country after DebConf 4, apparently because it proved difficult for the money to be taken out of the country. It has therefore served as seed money for a new organization. I expect to be in touch with these organizations shortly. If you know of any other organizations holding cash in trust for the Debian Project, please let me know.
The issue of non-cash assets is more difficult to nail down, and the enumeration of these will likely take some time. If you're interested in assisting with this task, please contact me and the Debian Accountant, Benjamin "Mako" Hill.
The leadership team affectionately(?) known as "Project Scud" held its first meeting on 24 April 2005 at 2200 UTC. The meeting agenda was mailed to the debian-project mailing list shortly prior to the meeting. In the future, we expect to have the agenda published farther in advance of the meeting so there is a useful public comment period. We continue to grapple with ways to balance openness and accountability with the discretion that some issues sometimes require, and welcome your feedback on how we can better achieve this. Andreas Schuldei volunteered to be our secretary, and minutes of the meeting will be posted to the -project list as soon as they have been prepared and approved by those in attendance.
One thing I thought I would note in advance of the meeting minutes is that we voted to extend an invitation to Benjamin "Mako" Hill to join our numbers, and he accepted.
I haven't made any public appearances yet, but I have been invited to FISL 6.0. I hope to attend this conference, and am working on the details of sponsorship for my flight and visa fees.
Three interviews with me have appeared over the past week. Interestingly, each was conducted (predominantly) via a different medium. Please let me know in which forum I make the best (or worst) impression.
I'm pretty happy with all of the above interviews, and do not feel misrepresented. If you have any concerns about about any of the issues in the above interviews, I urge you to contact me.
Much of the initial mail I received at the leader alias was, as you might expect, CCs or forwards of messages regarding ongoing business that Martin Michlmayr was involved in when his term ended. The very first message I received via that alias was -- predictably -- Nigerian 419 spam.
Martin has been very helpful and responsive with the transition. Some of the matters not already mentioned above and currently under discussion are:
I have run across a couple of interesting articles and thought I would commend them to wider attention:
That's all I have for now. I hope you have found this report useful, and I welcome your feedback on how I can improve on it for next time. You can reach me at leader@debian.org.
$Id: 2005-04-24.rst 150 2005-04-26 20:44:05Z branden $