The Debian project leader election

While a few weeks back it looked like there might be a complete lack of Debian project leader (DPL) candidates, that situation has changed. After a one-week delay, five Debian developers have nominated themselves. We are now about halfway through the campaign phase; platforms have been posted and questions have been asked and answered. It seems a good time to have a look at the candidates and their positions.

The five candidates are Joerg Jaspert, Jonathan Carter, Sam Hartman, Martin Michlmayr, and Simon Richter. Platforms for four of the candidates can be found here along with their rebuttals to the other platforms. Simon Richter has not provided a platform or participated in the debian-vote mailing list since his nomination mail on March 17. It is not clear what that means and there was no response to an email query about his plans. The other four candidates provided detailed platforms that outlined their experience in the Debian project and their vision for its future.

Joerg Jaspert

Jaspert has been involved with the project since 2002 and has been a member of the FTP Masters team and Debian Account Managers (DAM) team for over a decade. He has lots of other roles in the project as well. He would like to see the project engage with those who are choosing other distributions as well as those who are choosing Debian derivatives. The intent would be to "see if we can enhance Debian to provide the features, while balancing it with our current users".

He sees the role of the DPL as one of enabling others in the project to get their work done; that work specifically includes more than just development and packaging:

Jonathan Carter

Carter has been in and around Debian since the early 2000s, with a detour into Ubuntu for a while. He got back involved with Debian by way of DebConf, eventually helping to organize one in his native Cape Town, South Africa in 2016. He became a Debian developer in 2017 and is part of the DebConf committee. "I now actively maintain over 60 packages and have recently joined the debian-live project to help improve the quality of our live images."

His platform is lengthy, with a lot of detailed bullet points on his goals and eight separate steps he would like to take to make those goals a reality. For example:

Sam Hartman

Hartman has been part of Debian since 2000. He initially started by packaging Kerberos, but soon ran into problems because of the US export restrictions. He helped navigate the legal problems with the cryptographic packages, which eventually allowed that code to move into the main Debian repository.

His focus seems to be on smoothing things out within the Debian community through mediating disputes and trying to help the project make decisions on contentious topics. Overall, the goal is to keep Debian fun:

Martin Michlmayr

Michlmayr has been involved with Debian since 2000 and served as DPL from 2003 to 2005. He started his platform by confessing that he had considered retiring from Debian over the last few years because the project "just doesn't seem all that exciting anymore". But the project and community are too important to him to let go. He suspects that he is not alone in feeling that way and he would like to find ways to change that.

He pointed to a blog post by Michael Stapelberg that highlights some of the problems that Michlmayr also sees in the Debian project.

Questions and answers

The above is meant to simply give a bit of a taste of the ideas that the candidates are running on; those who will be voting or are otherwise interested will find them worth reading in full. Around the time the platforms were first posted, the usual Q&A got started in the debian-vote mailing list. One of the first was about Stapelberg's blog post; Andreas Tille asked a two-part question based on it. The first regarded the legendary leeway that Debian package maintainers have over their packages, while the second asked about the future of collaborative packaging efforts like the Salsa project.

Jaspert's positive response to the second part spawned a sizable sub-thread discussing ways to make packaging more collaborative and, crucially, to have a more standardized packaging methodology for Debian. The other candidates were also in favor of at least discussing it (Hartman), documenting the existing workflows (Carter), and recommending that packagers use Salsa, or perhaps even "go further than that" (Michlmayr).

Most seemed in favor of moving away from the "wild west" of packaging, where maintainers can do whatever they like so long as it follows the policy manual. It is not clear how far anyone would want to take that (and, on their own, a DPL can't really effect that kind of change). Of the four, only Carter expressed reservations about the blog post, as he found it to lack solid arguments for reasons to step away from the project.

In his platform, Michlmayr called for more effort toward funding Debian projects, possibly even using some of the project's funds. Hartman asked his fellow candidate about that, and a recent statement "about potentially turning the DPL into a paid position, acknowledging that would be controversial". Hartman noted that agreed that lack of funding was holding Debian back to some extent but he worried about a repeat of the controversial Dunc-Tank experiment.

Michlmayr acknowledged the problems that Hartman describes, but thinks things may have changed since 2006 when the Dunc-Tank experiment was run. Debian needs to at least consider the possibility of funding projects and developers. That is not the only way to fund more Debian developers, of course, and Michlmayr would like to involve more companies so that there are lots of opportunities for Debian developers to be paid for what they do. He is also concerned that the Dunc-Tank example perpetuates the avoidance of considering paying for staff:

There are, of course, other questions being asked and answered. For example, the platforms of Hartman and Michlmayr have enough parallels and agreement that two separate questions have been posed about the two potentially teaming up. Other questions concern whether Debian should truly aim to be the "universal operating system", if free software and/or Debian are inherently political, and the communication platforms used by the project. Undoubtedly, more will be posted over the next week and a half or so.

In the end, the candidates clearly have the best interests of the project in mind, though they may have different approaches. Jaspert seems like the most "stay the course" candidate, perhaps, while Michlmayr is probably the candidate most interested in rocking the boat—or at least considering rocking it. The DPL's power is extremely limited, so any real changes will require convincing a substantial portion of the members—starting with convincing them to vote in your favor for the DPL position. The voting period runs from April 7–20. It will be interesting to see who wins, but even more interesting to see what happens after that.