Debian Project Leader election 2025 edition

Four candidates have stepped up to run in the 2025 Debian Project Leader (DPL) election. Andreas Tille, who is in his first term as DPL, is running again. Sruthi Chandran, Gianfranco Costamagna, and Julian Andres Klode are the other candidates running for a chance to serve a term as DPL. The campaigning phase ended on April 5, and Debian members began voting on April 6. Voting ends on April 19. This year, the campaign period has been lively and sometimes contentious, touching on problems with Debian team delegations and finances.

Debian's Constitution defines the duties, powers, and responsibilities of the project leader. Part of the role includes serving as a public face for Debian, giving talks and attending events on behalf of the project, and managing Debian's relationships with other projects. The DPL role is not merely ceremonial: the project leader appoints delegates to various committees, such as the Debian Technical Committee, Debian System Administration (DSA) team, Treasurer team, and others.

The DPL serves a one-year term, with no limits placed on how many consecutive terms a person may serve. Jonathan Carter, who declined to run again last year, currently holds the record for most terms served: he held the position for four consecutive terms, from April 2020 to April 2024. Two candidates stood for election last year: Chandran and Tille. Out of more than 1,010 Debian developers who were eligible to vote in 2024, only 362 voted; Tille won the election by a healthy margin.

Andreas Tille

Tille has been involved in Debian for more than 25 years. He initiated the Debian Med project to create a Debian-based operating system that fits the requirements of medical practices and biomedical research. His platform for 2025 is significantly shorter than his 2024 platform and is less ambitious in scope. He notes that he has learned a lot during his first term and realizes that "making significant changes within Debian in a single DPL term is not feasible". This is illustrated by one of his platform planks, "supporting infrastructure teams and key package maintainers":

As I looked deeper into our processes, I identified issues that need improvement to better support our volunteers. The reason I am running for a second term is that I initially hoped these issues could be resolved quickly—but I was wrong. Now, with the experience I have gained, particularly in the social aspects of these challenges, I am committed to addressing them more effectively.

He also wants to focus on face-to-face meetings and diversity. Tille said that his "main approach to addressing geographic diversity within the project" has been face-to-face meetings, but it is difficult to measure success there. He thought that his "tiny tasks" initiative, an attempt to highlight easy ways for new contributors to become involved with Debian, would help to increase diversity. He started by creating a bug of the day project to choose five random bugs that might be good entry points to contributing to Debian. In March, he declared that it had not worked as intended.

The original goal was to provide small, time-bound examples for newcomers. To put it bluntly: in terms of attracting new contributors, it has been a failure so far. My offer to explain individual bug-fixing commits in detail, if needed, received no response, and despite my efforts to encourage questions, none were asked.

However, the project has several positive aspects: experienced developers actively exchange ideas, collaborate on fixing bugs, assess whether packages are worth fixing or should be removed, and work together to find technical solutions for non-trivial problems.

Sruthi Chandran

Chandran has contributed to about 200 packages since she began contributing to Debian in 2016—though her platform page notes that she is "not very active nowadays"—working on packages. Some of her other activities in Debian include working with the Outreach Team, the DebConf Committee, and as an Application Manager. Chandran was the chief organizer of DebConf 23, held in Kochi, India, in 2023. She also notes that she has been mentoring people to contribute to Debian for many years and is involved in organizing "numerous packaging workshops and other Debian events throughout India" as well as other free-software events like Free Software Camp.

Chandran's primary goal in running for DPL is to bring diversity issues to the fore:

I am aware that Debian is doing things to increase diversity within Debian, but as we can see, it is not sufficient. I am sad that there are only two women Debian Developers from a large country like India. I believe diversity is not something to be discussed only within Debian-women or Debian-diversity. It should come up for discussion in each and every aspect of the project.

DPL elections [are] an important activity in our project and I plan to bring up the topic of diversity for discussion every election till we have a non-(cis)male DPL.

Gianfranco Costamagna

Costamagna began contributing to Debian in 2014, focusing on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing packages. He became a Debian developer in 2015, and an Ubuntu core developer since 2016.

Professionally, I work in the embedded Linux domain, allowing me to bridge my expertise between Debian and Ubuntu. This dual involvement has enabled me to contribute significantly to both communities, particularly in package maintenance and architecture support.

His short platform page indicates that his major goals as DPL would be strengthening the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu, improving quality and maintenance of packages, supporting emerging architectures like riscv64 and loong64, encouraging more community participation, and simplifying Debian's processes. "As an engineer, I aim to simplify complex processes, making it easier for contributors to engage and for users to benefit from Debian's offerings."

Julian Andreas Klode

Klode has been a Debian developer since 2008, and is currently the primary maintainer of Debian's Advanced Package Tool (APT). He has been employed by Canonical since 2018, and is involved with APT and other package-management topics for Ubuntu. According to Klode, being "deeply rooted in both Debian and Ubuntu gives me the means to bridge gaps between the communities". He would like to try to make Debian more attractive to users from Ubuntu and other operating systems.

One of Klode's platform proposals is delegating responsibilities away from the DPL. One possibility that he suggests is to establish a DPL advisory council that could make binding decisions for the DPL. He, like Tille and Chandran, emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in his platform, but from a slightly different perspective. Klode talks about not just geographic and gender diversity, but also providing accommodations for contributors with disabilities, dietary needs, or those "not having enough money to attend DebConf". He said that it was not a complete list, but all contributors' voices deserve to be heard, "and we need to ensure that we provide safe environments for them to thrive in".

He notes that he cares very deeply about Debian, and sometimes overcommits. "This results in a bit of burnout and in me not picking the best words when trying to respond as quickly as possible".

Questions for the candidates

It is traditional for Debian developers to put questions to the candidates, town-hall style, on the debian-vote mailing list. It is up to the candidates to respond, or not, to questions during the campaign phase. Tille, Costamagna, and Klode all participated in the discussion. Chandran sent a message on April 5 apologizing for "being totally absent from the DPL campaign scene" due to personal issues and said "I do not wish to come at the last moment and ask for votes".

As a former DPL, Carter thanked the candidates for running and threw out several questions and ideas for them to chew on. One of his prompts for candidates was on version-control requirements for Debian. He wanted to know if there should be a requirement to maintain packages in Debian's Git forge, Salsa, and their opinions on dgit and tag2upload.

Klode said that he disagreed with some of the technical choices in dgit, but "that shouldn't be a particular surprise, given I filed bugs about it". He did think that every package in Debian should be in a git repository, and that maintainers should be expected to participate in merge-proposal workflows for their packages and merge patches submitted that way.

I mentioned this in another email recently, Ubuntu has automatic git imports of most of its packages, and treats merge requests in those git repositories as equal or more recommended than debdiffs; and I think this has tremendously improved quality of life, both in submitting changes as well as reviewing changes.

Tille's response was along the same lines: Debian should require packages to be maintained in a version-control system and hosted on a unified platform—in other words, Salsa. But, he said, that won't realistically be accomplished within the next DPL term.

For now, I will focus on migrating packages that remain outside Salsa _for_ _no_ _good_ _reason_-for instance, cases where the maintainer is inactive, and nobody truly cares.

He said that tag2upload would present a "positive step towards modernization", though he had not felt a need to use it himself, and might serve as a stepping stone on the path toward unified Git-based workflows within Debian. If a Debian member did not agree that all Debian packages should be maintained in a common Git-based platform, "you should not vote for me".

Costamagna answered that he really liked to use Git and did not like to use anything that is not Git. He also liked Salsa, but did not go so far as to suggest that all packages should be hosted in Salsa or with a version-control system.

The ftpmaster situation

Debian's ftpmaster team has a somewhat misleading and archaic name. The team is responsible for the infrastructure required to support Debian's archive of packages, as well as reviewing new packages, setting the installation priority of packages, and more. The Debian wiki page has an in-depth description. The team is often simply referred to as the "FTP team" on Debian mailing lists. The ftpmaster team is appointed by the DPL, or delegated in Debian-speak. The current ftpmaster team delegation was last updated in 2017 by then-DPL Chris Lamb and has not been changed since.

In his 2024 platform, Tille had said that one of his reasons for running for DPL was to improve the team's process of integrating new packages. Sean Whitton sent an email asking Tille why nothing had changed, and why developers should vote for Tille again if he was unable to make progress on one of his core goals for his first term as DPL. He detailed his discussions with Tille at DebConf24 last year about problems with Debian's ftpmaster team and proposed solutions. He and Tille "agreed on almost everything that needed to be done", but nothing had changed in the interim. "The DPL has the responsibility to ensure the core teams are fit for purpose, and it is far from clear that the FTP Team is fit for purpose."

Whitton asked the other candidates whether they agreed about the seriousness of the issues he described, and what they would do differently to achieve more.

Tille responded that he disagreed with the general statement that the ftpmaster team was not fit for purpose, and did not find it to be a helpful characterization. He did agree with Whitton's suggestions for improving the team, but did not agree with the way Whitton proposed to achieve them. Tille pointed out that there was "known friction" within the ftpmaster team between Whitton and others around the tag2upload project. LWN covered some of that saga in July 2024. Tille included a timeline of his activities related to the ftpmaster team from May 2024 through March 2025, and said that if Whitton felt another candidate would be more effective, "you absolutely shouldn't vote for me":

I have great respect for the other candidates and will gladly support them - especially with anything I've learned around the ftpmaster situation - if they are elected. But if you trust that I've learned from the overly high expectations I had going into my last DPL term, and believe I can now put that experience to better use, then I'd appreciate your support.

Tille also said that during his term he "never got the impression that there was any consensus within the FTP team on the need for improvements". Whitton agreed that there isn't consensus, and that was his point. The team should not be allowed to "decide that things should be a certain way" if the rest of the project disagreed. If making suggestions "which will mostly be ignored" does not work, then it is up to the DPL to fix problems with delegations.

Former DPL Ian Jackson said that it seemed Tille was laying the blame on Whitton. "As Project Leader you had all the management tools, and the whole resources of the Project, available to you." Jackson said that the ftpmaster team had become a "powerful institution" within Debian that needed to be kept in check, and it is up to the DPL to hold delegates responsible to the project.

To renew this institution, we need to get rid of the toxicity first. That means getting rid of the toxic people.

Yes, that is disruptive and risky. But the alternative is to allow the current situation to persist, as you have allowed it to persist.

Tille did not respond to those points. Costamagna replied that he thought the ftpmaster team should be split in two: one team should handle the review of packages in the new queue, and the other should handle the infrastructure for the Debian archive. That would allow people to focus on one or the other, and not require people interested in license reviews to be able to code or require people interested in improving the architecture to deal with copyright reviews.

Like Costamagna, Klode thought that the ftpmaster team had too many responsibilities tied together, and that members needed to satisfy all of them. He floated the idea of splitting the team into three new teams: an archive-license-auditing team for copyright review of packages, an archive-infrastructure team that would develop infrastructure such as dak, and an archive-management team that would handle adding and removing packages to the archive.

Debian finances

A member of Debian's treasurer team, Hector Oron, quizzed the candidates on their knowledge of Debian's finances and plans for them. He wanted to know if they knew how Debian funds were spent last year and how much yearly income Debian has. He also asked what areas the candidates would prioritize for spending, and what ideas the prospective DPLs had for fundraising, "if you think this is needed at all".

Costamagna did not weigh in on the budget threads. Klode responded that "the current DPL has an advantage in responding to this" but that he believed the majority of expenses are for conferences and travel. He mentioned ideas for cost savings, such as emphasizing smaller regional events like MiniDebConfs to save on travel, or establishing relationships with hardware vendors to have hardware donated rather than spending Debian funds on it.

He also floated the idea of "a future where we actually have a Debian Foundation that perhaps actually employs the DPL", and pays for other work in other areas where there are not enough volunteers or "where it's critical for the job to be done right because there's legal consequences otherwise". As far as donations and fundraising, it seemed to him that donations were "flowing in steadily over the years" and that Debian had a "healthy buffer" of about $500,000 with Software in the Public Interest (SPI). Klode did raise a concern about dependence on big donors "especially in the volatile political and economical situation we've been thrown into in the last couple of weeks", and had some ideas about making it more obvious how people could donate money and adding more trusted organizations to take in money for Debian around the world.

It may perhaps all be easier to start setting up a Debian Foundation and regional outlets of it; not that I particularly have a strong knowledge in the complexity of international tax law involved.

Actually, the amount with SPI currently is lower than Klode believed, Oron said. SPI only has about $300,000 right now. He added that the project would need to be managing at least $1 million per year for the idea of a foundation to make sense.

Tille said that he did have some advantage answering the question, but rather than simply answering, he wanted to focus on whether Debian needed to improve its transparency and readability of financial information for Debian members and possibly the general public as well. He noted that there are monthly reports from SPI, "though they are admittedly difficult to interpret". He added that understanding Debian's finances was essential for the DPL, since the project leader makes decisions about funding requests, but the actual financial management is handled by the treasurers.

As for prioritizing, Tille said it did not make sense to imagine hypothetical conflicts between different spending categories; those should be made on a case-by-case basis. "In short: For complex financial decisions, I will consult the treasurers first and also speak with those directly affected by the decision." He did acknowledge that it was no longer as simple as approving every funding request that is received.

In his Bits from the DPL talk, Neil [McGovern] once mentioned at DebConf15 that he approved every single funding request he received, and Debian's financial reserves still grew during his term. Unfortunately, these simpler times seem to be over, and the need for careful financial planning has increased. I'd love to be in Neil's shoes, and I hope that future DPLs will see those times return.

Improving fundraising, he said, "is a necessity if we want to continue running the project as we have in the past". That reply got the attention of former DPL Lucas Nussbaum, who asked if the need for careful spending constituted a problem, and what solutions the candidates envisioned. "Also, why do you think we aren't anymore in the comfortable situation we were in ten years ago?"

Pierre-Elliott Bécue, a trusted organization administrator, responded that he had part of the answer, "but it's not my place to disclose the full situation publicly". Essentially, Debian's funds have roughly halved since 2019/2020, and while the project is not broke, its funds could be depleted quickly "if we are not vigilant". Part of the problem is that Debian did not receive enough sponsorship for DebConf 2023 and DebConf 2024, which made a significant dent in funds. The project also needed to buy hardware, he said, and the time when companies gave away hardware to Debian "seems far away".

Klode replied that it would be optimal if Debian had a buffer of two years' worth of expenses, and for its expenditures to match regular donations. He did not, however, offer any suggestions on cost-cutting or how to achieve the regular donations. Tille did offer a few quick ideas, such as working with Debian's partners team to explore sponsorship opportunities. "I admit that fundraising isn't my strongest skill - but I'm very open to suggestions". He also said that finding sensible places to cut the budget is "something I personally find difficult".

In the hands of the voters

This is merely a summary of some of the important and interesting discussions that surfaced during the campaign period. Debian members have ample information at their fingertips to sift through in deciding who they would like to serve as DPL during the next term. It is clear that there are some thorny problems in need of solving, no matter who wins. The results of the election should be available on April 20.