On April 17, Branden Robinson, a senior employee at Progeny Linux Systems, took over the role of Debian Project Leader from Martin Michlmayr. For Robinson, the moment was a long time coming.
Interview: Branden Robinson, new Debian Project Leader
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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At Last! Some indication of forward movement… Though I think Debain is safe no matter what really.
Too much politics for my taste. I’m in it for technology & fun…
Some very good points that Branden Robinson makes:
“A lot of Debian consumers are, in fact, companies. That’s something that might have seemed strange to me some years ago when I first joined. Then it seemed a distribution for geeks by geeks.”
“if you look at Debian unstable, there’s this ongoing wellspring of fresh packages. You can think of it almost as a subscription service that you don’t have to pay for. That is something that makes sense to a lot of business interests.”
“There’s always been a large contingent of business-friendly developers in Debian. It’s not all a bunch of communists, and I don’t think it ever was.”
If Branden Robinson can demystify Debian’s image, that’s most certainly a good thing. Both the business world as well as the geek community should be more informed about the possibilities that Debian’s different branches have to offer. I’ve heard that they’re planning to add the security updates support to Debian’s testing branch. If that turns out to be true, then Debian will become an outstanding distro after the Sarge release, even more amazing than it currently is. You can run the stable release on servers, and you can run the testing branch on desktops, receiving security fixes and pulling the occasional package or two from the unstable branch to keep your system on the cutting edge. This would put an end to all that nonsense about Debian being somehow antiquated and needing spin-off distros to bring it up-to-date. (Not that I see anything wrong, as such, with Debian derivative distros.)
“I’ve heard that they’re planning to add the security updates support to Debian’s testing branch. If that turns out to be true, then Debian will become an outstanding distro after the Sarge release, even more amazing than it currently is.”
Yep, it’s true. Check out http://secure-testing.alioth.debian.org/ and see for yourself. The Debian-derived Skolelinux (aka Debian-edu) are the ones to thank for providing the initial push to get it off the ground. In fact, they’re actually paying people to work on it, including the lead dev Joey Hess – see http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg02060.html for details.
Excellent news! 😀 Thanks for providing the info, Andrew.
Debian is going to lose a lot of users unless they merge X.org soon. I know this is a big task, and will require a lot of man hours, but X.org *is* the new standard windowing system, and the most active one.
The delay of it isn’t going to make me move distributions, but if debian loses a good chunk of the userbase, it cause it to lose developers too — and that would be a very bad thing.
On a related topic, does anyone have success stories for X.org on Debian Sarge, whether it be from a 3rd party apt repository (Ubuntu maybe?), or compiling. Will all the packages still function, or are they linked only for XFree 4.3.0?
“Debian is dead! At least for end-users… g3nt00 0wnZ”
Actually Debian is really hard to die … All commercial distros such as Mepis,Linspire,Xandros,Libranet ..etc and most LiveCDs are based on Debian… The most popular distro @ distrowatch.com is Ubuntu — Debian based ….
Most of the Linux distributions are Debian based. That’s the truth.
Believe or not – Debian has really strong influence in the Linux world and it will continue to exist for sure
I’ve compiled the xorg sources from ubuntu on my sarge box. A bit of an ordeal.But there are third party repositories availabe like this one:
deb http://neo.wh-stuttgart.de/debian sarge xorg
And all the current things that depend on XFree will just automagically work with X.org?
Do you know if these packages actually replace XFree, or install to a different location?
I’m surprised X.org didn’t come up in the interview.
Of course, more info here:
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ under “Debian X FAQ” and “X Strike Force”.
Yes everything will work because there is no direct dependency of X clients to the x server, only to xlib.
It will replace Xfree, but will introduce a new config file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf