Debian Project Leader Election 2008 [LWN.net]

By Rebecca Sobol
April 2, 2008

The Debian Project Leader election is well underway. The debate is over and the first call for votes has gone out. If it seems like the process is going faster this year, that's because it is. Last year a constitutional amendment to reduce the length of the DPL election process was adopted by the developers.

There were three candidates nominated for this year's election; Marc Brockschmidt, Raphaël Hertzog and Steve McIntyre. Information about this election can be found on this year's vote page.

Steve McIntyre has been a Debian Developer for more than 11 years. During that time he acquired a wide range of packaging experience, worked on creating the official CDs (and DVDs) and hosting machines used by Debian.

Steve also served as Assistant Project Leader under Anthony Towns, so he has some idea of what the job entails. This is not the first time he's run for DPL either. In addition to this year's platform, his 2006 and 2007 platforms are also available.

While Steve has no plans to appoint a DPL team, he is willing to delegate tasks when appropriate. His goals include improving communications within the project and improving the workflow, getting people to ask for help when they need it or to step down when they can't devote enough time to the job.

In my opinion, a key part of working effectively is honesty. We can all suffer from a lack of time to do the jobs that we've promised to do. After all, real life has a nasty habit of intruding on our so-called "spare" time. So long as we don't let things delay too far, we can cope and still contribute. But at some point, we need to be more honest with ourselves and actually admit that we can't continue with the jobs that we've promised to do. It's a hard thing to do, but in a friendly community where we're all working together towards a common goal there should be no shame in asking for help.

Raphaël Hertzog is also no stranger to DPL elections. He ran in 2002 and 2007, in addition to this year.

Raphaël has proposed a small team of two other individuals (Moritz Muehlenhoff and Lucas Nussbaum) to help him with the DPL duties. His goals include making Debian more visible and recruiting more contributors.

While the number of packages in Debian increased a lot since 2001, the number of active developers stayed the same. We could definitely use more developers to continue increase the quality of our distribution (teams with hundreds of bugs are quite common). We made a first step with the Debian Maintainer proposal, but we can do more. I'm not saying that we should give upload rights to less skilled people: we don't want to compromise on quality.

He would also like to improve the core teams such as keyring managers, NM/DAM, ftpmasters, and the press team. Unofficial services that have proved useful (mentors.debian.net and backports.org) should be integrated officially into Debian.

Marc Brockschmidt has been a Debian Developer since 2004 and has been involved in many parts of Debian since then, including helping with the New Maintainer process, as an AM to dozens of people, at the NM Frontdesk and working with the release team. He also helps to manage a network of hosts used for autobuilding, porting and other Debian-related services. Improving communications is a popular goal for DPL candidates, but has some thoughts on that:

Before writing this platform, I had a look at the platforms of the past years and was amazed that nearly everyone talked about "improving communication", usually meaning that flaming shouldn't be allowed. I don't think this is possible - we can hardly replace all involved developers by cuddly stuffed animals. Good software developers have a strong opinion about topics dear to their heart, two good developers usually have two different opinions. Discussion, even bordering on flames, is OK - as long as it leads to a result.

He would like to see more "Bits from ..." mails on debian-devel-announce for better internal communication. He would also like to see better presentation of Debian to outsiders. Like Raphaël, he would like backports.org to become an official Debian service. Summer of Code has been useful in bringing together some cool ideas with people who can work on them. Marc would like to see that wiki page remain active throughout the year. Marc admits that he doesn't have as much free time as the DPL will take, and plans to delegate heavily, especially finding others to present Debian to the rest of the world at conferences.

Voting for these candidates will be open until April 13 and the term for the new DPL will start soon after, on April 17, 2008.