base-config and d-i leadership

In this blog entry, Daniel Silverstone uses a reducio ad absurdum argument in favor of keeping non-free. One I've heard before, that is not very convincing. Then he gets down to the mud-slinging.

Although I certianly enjoy being called a "charismatic leader who can make a large team pull together" -- mainly because there's a first time for everything, and the only time I've been called charasmatic before was when I rolled an 18/00 ... Er, where was I? Oh yes, despite that, Daniel's blog entry seems to be innarurate in a few areas.

Now I thought that Joey's main remit was the debian-installer system. The bit of the system which asks about non-free in Woody appears to be base-config which afaict isn't Joey's domain but rather that of the entire Debian Boot team.

Perhaps Daniel is not aware of some of the other significant software I maintain for Debian? Anyway..

As its changelog will attest, I wrote base-config in 2000, basing it on a little bit of ugly code (in the boot-floppies) written by Bruce Perens. While Petter Reinholdtsen has recently became a co-maintainer of that package, and others have contributed in various ways, I was almost entirely responsible for it through several Debian releases. This has always meant making large decisions and large changes in what users see when they install Debian. In a very real sense I "own" base-config much more than I do most of Debian-installer, which I didn't write. Until this August, my name was in the maintainer field for base-config; we decided to change it to point to debian-boot when Petter came on board.

Some of my other notable and controversial decisions about base-config have included making it not install standard priority packages by default (a bad decision, later reverted), putting "stable" in sources.list instead of the release code name, defaulting to shadow passwords, etc. So yes, I feel entirely justified in making large sweeping changes in what base-config does. I've been doing it for years and while base-config is not ideal, there have been few complaints and fewer interested in taking over some of the load.

Then again, it looks like the entire of Debian's Boot/Installer team defer almost entirely to Joey -- it's good to have a charismatic leader who can make a large team pull together, but that doesn't make it good to follow them unquestioningly

The reason you won't find much discussion on debian-boot about my decision to lower the priority of apt-setup/non-free is because I checked that change into CVS from a hacking room at DebConf3 in Oslo, surrounded by other d-i developers, and we discussed it there. (Petter was busy organising the conference, and missed it.) Since then we've had over 300 reports of d-i installs, and not one of them has complained about non-free not being available by default, so I feel we made the right decision.

Daniel's perception of me dominating decisions in debian-boot is shallow. There are many areas where I defer to other developers, like Denis Barbier for i18n and cdebconf issues, Christian Perrier for i18n and l10n issues, Bastian Blank for libdebian-installer, Santiago Garcia Mantinan for CD stuff, James Troup for archive stuff, David Nusinow and co for discover, Anton Zinoviev for partman, and numerous porters for their own architecture. We're a team with many specialists, and one of my specialisations happens to be the design and interaction of the system as a whole, that's all.

But yes, I do work double-full-time on d-i -- I'm winding up a 14 hour work day on it now -- and I can see how it would be easy to get the impression Daniel has gotten. We're rushing feverioushy to make the best damn installer we can, and we don't have a lot of time for the kind of senseless bickering and sniping that so many developers abuse Debian mailing lists to engage in.

Followups to debian-boot@lists.debian.org, please.