Debian: New Project Leader, Old Code Removal, and Recommendations for Using Git

During the last days Debian developers have been active about distribution and is that, to begin with, last week the results of the annual election were released from the Debian project leader.

Also information was released on the decision of the team «X Strike Force» (maintains packages for the X Window System) to remove code from old drivers and also A post of a draft recommendation on using Git was released.

New Debian Leader

On the results of the annual election in which 339 developers participated in the vote (which is 33% of all participants with the right to vote and that last year participation was 37%, the year before the last 33%), de the three candidates for the position of leader, Jonathan Carter, Sruthi Chandran, Brian Gupta participated in the elections.

Jonathan Carter being the winner and with this he becomes this year the leader of the Debian project.

Since 2016, Jonathan has backed over 60 packages on Debian, participates in improving the quality of live images in the debian-live team and is one of the developers of AIMS Desktop, a compilation of Debian used in several South African scientific and educational institutions.

Jonathan considers community leadership to be their main task to work together to solve existing problems and provide support for community-related work processes at a level close to the state currently occupied by Debian technical processes.

Jonathan considers it important to attract new developers to the project, but, in his opinion, the preservation of comfortable conditions for current developers is no less important.

Jonathan it also offers not to turn a blind eye to the many idle little things that many are used to and they learned to move. If older developers may not notice these flaws, then for beginners such issues can be significant.

Removing old code in Debian

Perhaps one of this week's Debian news that stands out is the decision made by the X Strike Force team to remove several of the old controllers that still exist in the Debian repository.

And it is that this in view of many users who prefer Debian over other distributions is due to the great support they have for old computers in which thanks to it they can still have a longer life.

But with the action that has been taken, controllers such as r128 (that has been around for 20 years) Mach 64, Savage, Silicon Motion, SiS, Trident, among others they will soon be out of the system. According to the notes for the upcoming Debian, the reason for removing the old drivers is that they are no longer developed and there is no reason to remain on the system as users do not use them.

Although it is actually true that it is quite rare to find a team that has components of this type, many users have expressed their disagreement although others mention that this can be a step to improve the performance of the system.

Git usage recommendation

Finally, another of the news that was released is posting a draft recommendation on using Git when accompanying packages prepared on the basis of discussions held last year.

With this it is proposed to make recommendations related to the use of Git in the recommendations category. In particular, if the package is hosted on a platform that supports merge requests, such as salsa.debian.org, it is recommended that maintainers accept merge requests and process them along with patches.

If the upstream project for which the package is being created uses Git, the accompanying Debian package is invited to use Git for the package. The recommendation also suggested adding the use of the vcs-git field in the package.


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  1.   ajqr01 said

    Jonathan Carter, of the three candidates, was the least worst. Although his application had a slight stink of political correctness, it is not a big change from the speech that Sam Hartman had been bringing, so in that aspect Debian's internal politics have remained relatively stable.