Andreas Tille, the Debian project leader, published a monthly report in which he explained that he did not run for a third term to encourage other participants to put forward their own candidacies. As a result, there is only one candidate for the leadership this year — Sruthi Chandran, a participant from India. Voting began yesterday and will last until April 17, but the outcome is already pretty much decided; it is unlikely that the majority of participants will vote 'against all.'
Sruthi joined the project in 2016 and has been involved in maintaining 194 packages, including libraries for Ruby, Node.js, and Go, as well as packages containing fonts. She was also among the organizers of DebConf India and DebConf, and is a member of the Outreach team, which develops initiatives for training newcomers and encouraging women and minority participation in the project.
Sruthi's plans as leader focus on supporting diversity in the community, delegating some of the leader's tasks to 1-2 assistants to improve efficiency, creating a structured course on Debian for students, organizing the pre-installation of Debian on laptops, working towards a more welcoming communication style within the community, and supporting participants who propose new ideas and processes for improving Debian. The plans also mention creating a simpler decision-making process for approving minor everyday matters than the General Resolution (GR) that is currently used, which is considered excessive for such issues.
In the second part of the report, Andreas Tille shared his views on the implementation of laws mandating the integration of age verification APIs into operating systems, which have been enacted in some U.S. states and in Brazil. It is noted that the applicability of these laws to a non-profit project developed by volunteers and distributed for free remains unclear — the implementation of compliance measures for the distribution concerning these laws is under discussion among developers and legal assessment by the SPI (Software in the Public Interest) organization.
It is assumed that the obligations to comply with laws primarily affect distributors and commercial companies that create products based on Debian. The Debian project is ready to integrate the necessary features to meet legal requirements in derivative distributions, but this functionality will be optional and will not be imposed on users from countries without such laws.
The addition of an API for applications to request user age information is also being discussed by the developers of the Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, and NixOS distributions. Specific solutions have not yet been adopted, but the possibility of implementing the necessary API is being considered. A change has already been made in systemd, adding a birthDate field in userdb for the user's birth date, along with the ‘--birth-date’ option in the homectl utility for setting the age. The added field can be used in the developing xdg-desktop-portal for distributions and the AccountsService to provide applications with information about the user's age category through the D-Bus interface 'org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1' or 'org.freedesktop.ParentalControls'.
Source: opennet.ru
