Helmut Grohne

debvm – Ephemeral Virtual Debian Machines

debvm – Ephemeral Virtual Debian Machines

Towards collective decision-making and maintenance in the Debian base system

Over the years, there has been lots of friction in the Debian project when trying to effect system-wide changes affecting core components of the operating system. We believe that a lot of this tension, that has accumulated over the years, has some of its roots in the separate strong maintenance of the packages constituting the core Debian system (that is, packages in the transitively Essential set).

Many community Free Software projects have some form of developer body, elected or otherwise, which steers the direction of the project and gets buy-in from the community of maintainers of the base system; For instance, Fedora has an Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), Ubuntu has a Foundations team, the Python project has a Steering council, etc.

We would like to explore the ways Debian could draw from these ideas and move towards more collaborative direction-setting and maintenance for its base system components. The aim of this session is to get more points of view on the topic, and maybe gather some more volunteers to prepare a project-wide discussion to be started once the bookworm release is out of the door.