Joey Hess Resigns From Debian, Unhappy With How It's Changed

Joey Hess is now distancing himself from the Debian project as he resigns from his roles after being involved with Debian since 1996. In his parting remarks, Joey says his biggest regret over the past eighteen years is not speaking out against the Debian constitution.

Joey Hess played critical roles in the development of the Debian Installer, Alien, debhelper, and many other widely-used Debian components.

Here's Joey's parting remarks from the mailing list:

It's become abundantly clear that this is no longer the project I originally joined in 1996. We've made some good things, and I wish everyone well, but I'm out.

Note that this also constitutes an orphaning as upstream of debhelper, alien, dpkg-repack, and debmirror.

I will be making final orphaning uploads of other packages that are not team maintained, over the next couple of days, as bandwidth allows.

If I have one regret from my 18 years in Debian, it's that when the Debian constitution was originally proposed, despite seeing it as dubious, I neglected to speak out against it. It's clear to me now that it's a toxic document, that has slowly but surely led Debian in very unhealthy directions.

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see shy jo