Kurt Roeckx is the new Debian Secretary

Steve McIntyre, the leader of the Debian Project, has appointed Kurt Roeckx as the new Debian secretary. The decision was made in close cooperation with Bdale Garbee, the current acting secretary. Neal McGovern was confirmed as an assistant, "due to his recent experience as assistant to the previous secretary."

The replacement for the post of secretary was necessary because the former secretary, Manoj Srivastava, resigned on the 18th of December, 2008. He was responsible for the administration of project voting and was harshly criticised for mistakes made over a vote on the future of binary blobs that contained proprietary code.

The next main task for Roeckx and McGovern will be to organise the election of the new Debian Project Leader that will take place in April.

Roeckx previously focused on maintaining the OpenSSL package in Debian Etch and Lenny. He was apparently responsible for the fateful patch which caused problems in the project's OpenSSL library. Roeckx accidentally broke the central instruction in the function ssleay_rand_add (), which is supposed to put new data into OpenSSL's entropy pool. Once this change had been made, the function simply ignored the data transmitted.

See also:

• Lenny debuts - Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 released, a report from The H.

(crve)