Background information
This page collects various information relating to the background and inspiration of the Dunc-Tank.org project for convenient reference.
Advances since the release of Debian 3.1
As indicated above, there have been a number of significant advances since the release of Debian 3.1 (codenamed sarge), particularly in areas that affect Debian's ability to release on-time.
Firstly, the release team has doubled in size, from five members to ten, thanks to the release assistant recruiting programme conducted in July 2005, and changing to team based stable update management in March 2006. This provides the Debian community with more experience and more capacity in dealing with issues that may cause bottlenecks in development and the release process. Since the release of sarge, the release team has also developed and implemented new standards for architectures to meet to be considered for release, and has successfully managed a number of important transitions including the inclusion of X.org, the official introduction of AMD64, enhanced security support for apt, major updates to gcc and python, and many others.
Over the same period, the security team has undergone a similar expansion that has included inactive members of the team being replaced by new recruits, the introduction of limited security support for the "testing" release, and some other scalability improvements to the security support infrastructure.
The debian-installer team has also been very active and resourceful, recently making their third beta release which introduced support for installation onto encrypted partitions, and a graphical user interface with additional language support.
Past criticism of delays in Debian's release process can be found in articles such as Sarge in Debian Toybox Until 2005? (InternetNews, 2004-04-30) and The Debian Delay: Is Sarge MIA? Or Simply a POW of Process? (LinuxPlanet, 2005-03-03).
Volunteer nature of Debian
Debian is a volunteer organisation, and the volunteer spirit is a core principle, and forms the basis for the very first rule in the Debian constitution. This does not mean that all Debian developers work for free: many do Debian development as part of their paid work, and Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, was supported by the Free Software Foundation to work on the project for a year.
It does, however, mean that questions of control and conflicts of interest are considered very carefully by the project, and after an in-depth discussion on the developer-only mailing list, debian-private, it was decided to run this project outside Debian proper, to ensure that any potential conflicts of interest that might develop can be safely quarantined from Debian itself.
Martin Schulze wrote a relevant series of journal entries in December 2005 based on his thoughts and experiences related to the organisation of LinuxTag. As a long-time member of Debian who has served the project as a member of the security team, the system administration team, the new maintainer team and the press team amongst numerous other roles, his experiences in this regard make for an important cautionary tale about mixing paid and unpaid activities in free software.