inamerrata

After a lot of discussion on -private, and a fair bit more discussion off list, a bunch of Debian developers, including myself, have launched dunc-tank.org. The idea is that we think getting etch out on time is important enough to be worth paying the release managers to work on it full time, so in the free software spirit, we’ve gone ahead and done something about it. We’ve already put up some of our own money, as have some other developers, and if you’d like to join us, there are more details at the website. We’re currently hoping that SPI will agree to accept funds on our behalf, and thus provide a good level of accountability. The board meeting later today will hopefully shed some light on whether that’s feasible.

There’s also some information in press release form, and some interesting background detail for people who don’t follow the Debian release process as closely as some of us do.

The first article on the topic’s already been published; with one somewhat inaccuracy — this is not a Debian project, and is being specifically handled outside of Debian to both ensure that any conflict of interest that might occur can be decided by Debian in Debian’s favour, and to allow other groups that have different ideas about what priorities are important to encourage contributions to those areas.

A question that has been raised is whether the organisation can be sufficiently “outside” of Debian when the DPL is intimately involved. I don’t have the answer to that — in my opinion it can be, but whether this one is will be up to Debian to decide.