Being Debian leader can be 'scary at times'

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A little more than three months after he became leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project, Steve McIntyre is beginning to realise that it can be a little scary at times.

Though he's been with the Debian project a long time and met many of his fellow 1000+ developers, either face-to-face or through online communication, McIntyre still knows that he cannot go out ahead of his troops.

"We do have our occasional heated discussions, we have 1000+ developers and that sometimes means on any given topic, we may have 2000 opinions. There's no telling people this is what we're going to do, it's more of the consensus approach. If i tried anything without a reasonable amount of backing from the developers, I'll probably get shot," he said with a chuckle when I met him at the British International Motor Show in London last month.

That McIntyre took time out to meet an inquisitive journalist on what was probably the one full day of leisure he's had since he began Debian leader says a lot about his attitude to the media - he's accessible and his behaviour isn't conditioned by the type of coverage he receives.

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