So you want to be a DPL?
DPL is the Debian Project Leader. It's a time-consuming sucky job, but critical to maintain the health of the project. In the external function, the Debian Project Leader represents the Debian Project to others. This involves giving talks and presentations about Debian and attending trade shows, as well as building good relationships with other organizations and companies.
Internally, the Project Leader manages the project and defines its vision. They should talk to other Debian developers, especially to the delegates, to see how they can assist their work. A main task of the Project Leader therefore involves coordination and communication.
A DPL necessarily needs experience and a good understanding of how the project works, but what is the journey like? There's no recipe to become a DPL, but this page looks at what previous DPLs have experienced on their journey. The information on this page is mostly assembled from the Debian Vote page where previous DPL candidates shared their platform.
Typical questions on the platform
- Who am I?
This is a general introduction. Focus on your Debian related activities - and remember, you have to be a Debian Developer (DD) to qualify as a candidate - but add anything you feel relevant or interesting.
- Debian activities
This is where you get specific about your contributions. What type of a Debianite are you? What teams are you passionate about, do you maintain packages? In what ways have you been involved in DebConf?
- The Debian Project Leader in 2019
- The future
- My part as DPL
- Time commitment
DO NOT underestimate the time it takes to be a DPL. By some accounts, more than the equivalent of 45 full working days.
- Do you need to resign from other roles to serve as DPL? Are there conflicts of interest to declare?
E.g. according to the Constitution:
The Project Leader's Delegates […] may make certain decisions which the Leader may not make directly, including approving or expelling Developers or designating people as Developers who do not maintain packages. This is to avoid concentration of power, particularly over membership as a Developer, in the hands of the Project Leader.
The secretary and the chair of the CTTE cannot be DPL, and neither can a DAM.
Some big questions that have been featured
As DPL candidate you are not expected to have "the" answer to these challenges, and being very confident will likely count against you. But you do need to illustrate a good understanding of the facets that make this a challenge, knowledge of what has happened around the challenge in the past, and have an idea how you would approach it, at least. DPL is not a technical role, but a leadership role and you need to illustrate a good grasp of that.
- How to overcome all the challenges a distribution like ours faces, how to adapt to the ever faster changing world?
- How to become more attractive for all the commercial entities that are currently chosing to ignore Debian but select a derivative?
- How to become more attractive for developers?
- How to renew our tools to some more modern workflow? A common wish being to modernize the BTS (web interface anyone?). Or uploads with a git push.
- How to be more diverse? (Look at this years nominees…)
- How to make large-scale changes in Debian simpler?
- How to deal with the "curl | sudo bash" mentality of newer languages and their environment? How to, usefully, include those languages?