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Improved communications

hO: Your term as a Debian project leader is nearing its end . One of your priorities has been the improvement of communications within the project. Would you say you have succeeded?

SM: Yes, to a certain extent. Many of the core teams now have enough manpower to both do their work *and* tell other people about it, and that was one of the bigger problems we had. We're a long way from perfect and it's probably an issue that will never be totally solved, but I'm happy to have made some progress here. There's nothing that helps boost morale and interest in the project more than people sharing their cool ideas and telling everybody else about what they're working on. Highly visible work breeds more developers.

hO: In December Manoj Srivastava resigned his post as Project Secretary over the issue of proprietary firmware. Any word an a new Secretary yet? Will binary firmware make it into the distribution?

SM: Well, we've appointed a new Secretary in the last two weeks: Kurt Roeckx was one of a number of volunteers who offered to take the job, and I was happy to give it to him. Alongside him, Neil McGovern will be continuing as an assistant: he has experience of the job already and should be able to help a lot with upcoming votes.

We do have some binary firmware in Debian already, since the results of the last vote. There are some cases where we're not 100 per cent sure about whether the firmware needs explicit source to be supplied; until we see confirmation of that we've given some of the packages in question the benefit of the doubt.

I'm expecting some more votes to come up soon on this front, so I'm sure there will be news in the next few months. My own preference would be for an extra firmware section in our archive for some of these cases, but it's not my decision to make alone...

hO: One last question: Looking back at nearly a year as DPL, which areas do you think Debian really needs to focus on in the near future?

SM: The main things for me right now are the two issues we just voted on: firmware and contributors. There will be more work on communications (*grin*), and finally what I would want us to do is encourage more of the Debian family to work together more closely. We have dozens of distributions that are using Debian as a base now, and it would be great if more of those people were actually contributing directly to Debian so that everybody gains from their changes.

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