La Salle Debain

It's that time time of the year again when the Debian Project gathers to elect a new leader. This year there are a record seven candidates. I just spent a couple of hours reading their platforms and a lot (not all, my eyes glazed over after a bit) of the discussions on debian-vote and these are my initial impressions.

Jeroen Van Wolffelaar: Jeroen seems to have a good grasp of where the bottlenecks in the Debian system are. He supports the project Scud idea which has not really worked well so far (as far as I can see) but claims he knows what is wrong and how to fix it. He is young and still a student which might hamper his ability to travel which is a big part of being DPL. Astutely notes that Debian needs to stand out from the crowd more.

Zeke the Cat: Does he have the balls to be an effective leader?

Steve McIntyre: Not really high profile within the project as far as I can tell. Will he be able to "herd cats"? His platform is mainly about reforming Debians' social structure so this is a real concern. The idea of imposing some level of performance standard on developers is intriguing but he is rather short of details on how it is supposed to happen.

Anthony Towns: Anthony is heavily involved in such roles as ftpmaster and release manager. It would be a shame if being DPL actually meant he would have less time for that sort of thing. He claims to be running mainly to introduce some new ideas. So hopefully he won't mind if we keep him in the boiler room instead of, um, athwart the foc'sle?

Andreas Schuldei I like the idea of frequent face to face meetings. Andreas is a good fundraiser so if anyone can make this happen, he can. But in the absence of support from an eccentric billionaire is this really feasible? Also a member of project Scud.

Johnathan 'Ted' Walther: Retar-ted.

Bill Allombert: Also suffers from being relatively unknown (IMO.) A bit low on ideas and basically wants to maintain the status quo as far as social issues go. I can't consider him a viable contender.

At the moment I'm leaning towards voting for Jeroen but Andreas and Anthony are still in the running. The IRC debate should be interesting.