The Debian Project has published the results of its election of the new Debian Project Leader (DPL). Lucas Nussbaum was voted the new DPL after Stefano Zacchiroli, who has led the Debian community for three consecutive years, didn’t stand for re-election. Nussbaum was selected from three nominees – the other two being Gergely Nagy and Moray Allan.
Nussbaum is an assistant professor at the University of Lorraine
where Debian is taught as part of system administration courses. He is also known within Debian for maintaining its Ruby packages and has worked on improving relations between the distribution and Ubuntu as the two projects increasingly diverged over the last few years. In his application for the DPL post, Nussbaum said that, since 2006, he has been instrumental in rebuilding the packages in the Debian repositories on a regular basis, filing over 7000 release critical bugs in the process and commenting: “Yes, I do feel bad about it, but I try to think of it as detecting problems early, not only as delaying releases”.
Describing his vision for the next five years of Debian, Nussbaum says he would like the distribution to be more innovative and for its developers to try more experimental things. On the other hand, he wants Debian to reinforce its position “in the center of the Free Software ecosystem” where it acts as the main intermediary between upstream Free Software projects and their users. In this way, he wants Debian to take a more active role towards upstream projects. Nussbaum also wants to make it easier for developers to contribute to the Debian Project.
The DPL is elected annually, using the Condorcet method. Detailed election results are available on the project’s 2013 election page.