I’m trying to use this to capture some of my thoughts on the current GR, and to document my approach to this vote. If nothing else, I hope to use this to convince myself that I’ve read and understood the various options in the GR. From my perspective, two of the choices on this ballot are easy to deal with, in that they have very clear meaning and the ramifications are easy to understand.

Further Discussion builds concensus within Debian! Further Discussion gets things done! Further Discussion welcomes diverse perspectives in Debian! We’ll grow the community with Further Discussion! Further Discussion has been with Debian from the very beginning! Don’t you think it’s time we gave Further Discussion its due, after all the things Further Discussion has accomplished for the project? Somewhat more seriously, have we really exhausted the community of people interested in serving as Debian Project Leader?

When reviewing pull requests on GitHub, it’s often useful to have local access to the changes under review. There are a few different documented ways to accomplish this, but none have left me entirely satisfied. So, I came up with something different. Maybe it’ll work for you. The existing methods are: You can add a new git remote referencing the source of the PR, then fetch it and check out the branch containing the proposed changes.

Lwn, Slashdot, and many others have marked the recent announcement of Linux Journal’s demise. I’ll take this opportunity to share some of my thoughts, and to thank the publication and its many contributors for their work over the years. I think it’s probably hard for younger people to imagine what the Linux world was like 20 years ago. Today, it’s really not an exaggeration to say that the Internet as we know it wouldn’t exist at all without Linux.

Following up on a previous post announcing the availability of a first round of AWS AMIs for stretch, I’m happy to announce the availability of a second round of images. These images address all the feedback we’ve received about the first round. The notable changes include: Don’t install a local MTA. Don’t install busybox. Ensure that /etc/machine-id is recreated at launch. Fix the security.debian.org sources.list entry. Enable Enhanced Networking and ENA support.

At this past November’s Debian cloud sprint, we classified our image users into three broad buckets in order to help guide our discussions and ensure that we were covering the common use cases. Our users fit generally into one of the following groups: People who directly launch our image and treat it like a classic VPS. These users most likely will be logging into their instances via ssh and configuring it interactively, though they may also install and use a configuration management system at some point.

Following up on Steve McIntyre’s writeup of the Debian Cloud Sprint that took place in Seattle this past November, I’m pleased to announce the availability of preliminary Debian stretch AMIs for Amazon EC2. Pre-generated images are available in all public AWS regions, or you can use FAI with the fai-cloud-images configuration tree to generate your own images. The pre-generated AMIs were created on 25 January, shortly after Linux 4.9 entered stretch, and their details follow:

This post could easily have been titled “Why did this hurt so much?” or even simply, “What happened!?” It’s nice to come away from a race having learned something. Unfortunately, the lessons aren’t always pleasant. The best way I can phrase the lesson from this year’s Bavarian Bike & Brew race is like this If you want to find out whether your training is working, stop doing it for a year and see what happens.

Animagraffs makes really cool visualizations of complex things including all the various systems inside car engines, how jet engines work, and more.

A couple of notable things stand out from last weekend’s race. It was a super fast course and the weather was beautiful. It had rained the day/night before, so there was no dust and the traction felt infinite. (unlike a couple years ago, where a rider 20 feet in front of you would literally vanish in a dust cloud) I didn’t take any time to warm up before the race, and it starts with a mile of climbing right out of the gate.