# Debian Linux Elections Fascinate Me ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Brodie Robertson - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59Or9iJLclQ - **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/23254 ## Транскрипт ### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) [] Can I just say how absolutely fascinating is that Debian is really struggling to survive struggling to bring new maintainers new developers in and basically nobody cares so much that you're not even seeing anyone try to EEE it embrace extend extinguish it's kind of just slowly burning out as the years go on and nobody's talking about it nobody wants to do anything about it so a little while back i talked about this post from the Debian project leader Andreas Tille alongside some other things basically pointing out that a lot of people just kind of leave the project and don't say anything about it leaving certain systems with no maintainer but people think it's maintained other people pointing out that it's a nightmare to get involved with Debian people don't want to report bugs because to report bugs through email and then reply through email there's no you know web interface for the bug tracker and a lot of the systems that Debian use are kind of just not pleasant now Debian is a very interesting project so rather than just having a project leader a project maintainer that sticks around for 10 15 years like a lot of projects do even if they're really old still have their original people around Debian has always had this position of let the community decide every year they have a vote on who the project leader is going to be and sometimes that ends up being the same person there have been many cases where someone is a leader for multiple years in a row but because of this system it's led to this where they have had a lot of people involved in the project a lot of people running the project and really this system has kind of just been what Debian does and kind of Debian alone the way they do this is every single year they send out an email to people being like hey do you want to run as a project leader are you interested the slots open for 2026 this opened on the 7th of march and then closed on the 13th of march so a little bit less than entire week about six days then you enter the campaign stage on the 14th and this is the stage we are currently in and then voting happens on the 4th of april and then ends on the 17th for this year of 2026 here are our nominations firstly is probably gonna butcher this Sruthi Chandran apologies if i butchered that she just said i would like to nominate myself okay fair enough our second person is not a second person this is actually Sruthi sending an email again and once again nominating herself because Debian does everything through a mailing list and it is really confusing to know if your email was actually sent and if anyone actually saw your email so she ended up double posting the email um yeah our actual second person is this one here Hector Oron Martinez or at least it would have been the second person apologies for sending this email one day late but i was unable to get a hold of my key earlier i have also been sick as a good friend mentioned it is better to be late than never therefore i'd like to nominate myself for Debian project leader thanks very much for your consideration and then a sign off here's the problem though Debian has very strict rules on when you can nominate yourself hi Hector i'm sorry the nomination period is clearly over and the constitution is clear that no candidate can be added after the nomination period has ended so his nomination was not counted what does that mean for Debian well that means that they are running an election with a singular candidate one person is in the election now frankly i don't care what her positions are people have been arguing like oh she supports this thing it supports that thing i don't actually care what her positions are it is up to the Debian people to vote on whether they agree with them or they don't i am far more interested in the fact that there is one person in the election right now and what might surprise you is this is actually not the first time that this has happened this is not the first time this has happened and they for some reason had never actually done anything about this problem so back in 2023 you had jonathan carter in 2018 you had Chris Lamb and in 2016 you had Mehdi Dogguy and in all of these cases these people ended up being the Debian project leader so we have jonathan carter here for actually a relatively long tenure we had Chris Lamb for two years and Mehdi Dogguy for just a singular year it is genuinely fascinating ### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00] to me that you have a project as important as Debian and firstly there ever exists a situation where only one person is running to be the project leader right like imagine something like i don't know KDE imagine one person being interested in running the project or even GNOME or Arch Linux or Fedora Linux or any of these projects imagine there only being a single person interested in taking the role as the project leader anyone involved in those projects probably you know can't even think of a case of that ever happening but somehow with a project as important as Debian we've witnessed it not once not twice but at least three times from what i've checked now this has happened with something like OpenSUSE but OpenSUSE is it's not considered as foundational of a project as something like Debian this giant list of candidates was announced in an email on march 14th we are now into the campaigning period we have one candidate this year Sruthi Chandran from there for a few days there were emails like this one i'm concerned by the lack of candidates in the 2026 leader elections and disagree with denying potential candidates based on constitutional deadlines given the circumstances of a single candidate being guaranteed the position and the voting process now being pointless exceptions should be made to restore a semblance of democratic values to the process and that kind of set off a torrent of emails i say torrent but this is the Debian mailing list so you know it's still you know there's people talking but um you know quite active for Debian at least following all this going on Hector did feel the need to reply hello all i took a few days away and i'm back today finding lots of emails in several mailing lists i'm struggling to go over all of it however i encourage Sruthi to keep her participation and not withdraw the candidature yeah sorry i've never said that word before i do really feel secondhand embarrassment about all the mailing list behavior we should be attempting to bring community to higher stance level with our participation i would like you to know since i was the one doing the late nomination that Sruthi got all my support some people have been calling on the rules to be changed immediately or allow this one more person to step in or reset everything and go back to the start but in situations like this Debian does sort of have a contingency plan in place it's just not being used before at least not being used against a single candidate i also would prefer if there was more than one candidate perhaps changing the rules during the election isn't what we want there's in fact two ways this could happen firstly Sruthi temporarily withdraw her nomination just in order to restart the nomination period is this really possible i believe it is and secondly Sruthi refuses to do this and then a majority vote for nota that is none of the above basically you don't agree that any of the candidates should be running Debian and everybody votes literally anybody else usually the purpose of that is to still be able to vote in the election but not have to vote for somebody that you don't think should be a Debian project leader here it would be used as a way to basically just reset the election now regarding her nomination considering the fact that there have been cases of Debian project leaders being elected with no one else running i could see why she wouldn't want to step down just as a way to sort of reset the election let other people run also this isn't the first time she has run she ran back in 2025 against three other people she ran in 2024 against one person she ran in 2021 against one person again and she ran in 2020 against two other people so if she wants to be Debian project leader and there is precedent for having an election with a singular person this is kind of her year following this there have been some mixed opinions about what should be done firstly we have this one from Pierre Elliot Becue Becure French i presume how about we actually focus on the campaign rather than giving too much energy into what looks like polar design destabilization campaigns the mail that started this thread comes from someone who to my knowledge never participated in Debian mailing list or Debian at all i think this should die out right now let the campaign happen if shruthy fails to convince the vote will tell however there was also an email from former Debian ### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00] project leader Jonathan Carter this was the leader just before andreas till so he said i'd like to add a third option after the elections propose a gr for a change in the voting process a general resolution that if any candidates nominate themselves in the last 12 hours of the nomination process then the nomination window extends by another 48 hours to allow someone who specifically wants to challenge that person to do so it's perhaps not perfect but it would catch a lot of cases that people are concerned about perhaps the exact definition and time frames could do with some tweaking but that's the general idea that's the other fun part there actually were zero nominations until about six hours before the nomination period ended so if she forgot if maybe she had something to do or anything else like that there was a very high probability of zero people being in the election honestly my guess is because she's run a number of years in the past she wanted to wait until the last minute and see if anyone else was going to nominate themselves because if nobody else nominates themselves there's a pretty high chance you're going to get that position and then Hector nominated himself you know the next day right i don't know like i think that's a very compelling argument right if somebody nominates themselves right at the end of the election period maybe you should probably extend it like that seems to make sense to me in response to that simon richter said i don't see the benefit of that because such a candidate must have been sufficiently disinterested to find it acceptable if no candidate step forward because that is someone else's problem yet feel strongly enough about another candidate that they suddenly decide the time of commitment of being dpl is so insubstantial that they can decide that on a whim i don't see one and intend to vote the same way as the last two elections with truthy in the top position as i said i do see the possibility of wanting to game this very abusable system where you know that very few people are running so you do step forward at that last moment as a way to sort of like sneak in there when nobody else is looking do i necessarily think that is what has happened here it's hard to say but the result is still the same you do have an election where one person is running Jonathan Carter replies again yes their concerns have zero impact on this after talking to a few other people offline i felt this might be a good idea long before the nomination period ended i'll provide more context after the election and possibly to private as well but it can and should really wait until the election is done so basically sort of cleaning up this loophole to make sure it can't really happen again do note however that Jonathan Carter was in a zero person election so i just want to make that clear grunted it wasn't the first year he got elected that was a few years earlier this was one of the years indium already being a Debian project leader before that took place whilst it is an unofficial account i do find it kind of crazy that the Debian account on mastodon which has obviously a lot of followers never announced the election happening it just didn't happen this is like such a normal Debian thing where exists as if it's still like 1997 where if it doesn't happen the mailing list irc it might as well just not exist like nothing was announced anywhere except on the mailing list and that's that's basically it now voting doesn't begin until the 4th of april and i'll be very curious to see how this plays out honestly what i expect is sort of as like even just as a protest of the people who have an issue with the way the election was going i expect her to just get the role as the Debian project leader is she gonna do a good job i don't know probably it can't be going any worse than the way Debian's already going honestly man Debian just fascinates me it fascinates me that we have a project that is as important as Debian and just nobody cares like at all about anything that happens with this project so on that note let me know your thoughts down below i guess yeah what do you think of what's going on um are you a Debian user are you paying attention to what's going on with Debian i'd love to know so if you like the video go subscribe as well and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out the Patreon, SubscribeStar, Liberapay, linked in the description down below that's gonna ### Segment 4 (15:00 - 15:00) [15:00] be it for me and maybe if we left the 90s things would change probably not