I agree with Thomas' comment: "Of course, one can and should discuss about things not wanted in Debian and how to get rid of them, but in my opinion the root problem of Debian is that there is nothing that people in Debian universally want." http://halbgar.com/english/debian-vision.2008-12-21-15-00.html If Debian can move to a situation where quality is more important than quantity and where every member works towards the goal of releases, then Debian does have a rosy future. I think it is time to require a higher level of commitment to quality from all members.

Debian has been slowly rotting for some time. As a long time Debian user and supporter (and occasional bug reporter) it is disheartening to watch. It was evident during the Etch release phase that there are some serious problems within Debian. Thomas' comment (linked by Neil above) is spot on. Debian needs to set some hard goals. Fuzzy worded visions statements aren't enough.

That which will not kill us will surely make us stronger. ;) (Perhaps that was your point about KB2. In which case sorry to have overstated the point.)

I've seen Debian go through worse and survive before, such as the Ubuntu folks doing their own thing and fracturing .deb in stupid ways (a-la the Red Hat RPM world) instead of doing the right thing and putting their time and effort behind the Debian Desktop project.

I guess developers now get easily irritated because Sid has been frozen for six months and there's still no release in sight. If the firmware issues don't postpone the stable release, you should concentrate on pushing Lenny out as soon as possible, preferably in January. After that, things should immediately start looking better.

@Baloo: In retrospect I don't think Ubuntu did the wrong thing at all - their goals are dramatically different to a few key tenets of Debian GNU/Linux and they're innovating in their own space with a thriving community which is now probably considerably bigger (desktop/laptop users) than the parent project from which they sprung. At no point have they said their sometimes excellent work cannot be pulled back upwards into the 'parent' distribution.

@velihuilu: If the DDs all vote to postpone Lenny until the firmware issues are resolved I will be extremely disappointed - just the other day two of my servers "exploded" because I did a kernel upgrade and rebooted as per normal only to find the 'bnx2' driver now requires 'firmware-bnx2' to be installed in order to function! Definitely the worst thing was the complete lack of warnings that I'd have a fscked system during the kernel upgrade process, were it not for tools like DRAC/iLO ....