Interview: Debian Project Leader Martin Michlmayr

The one reason that any distro I have ever tried had to do with Debian is some fashion was because it was always striving at being just a little easier to use than the other guy. Today, you get to read through a recent interview with the Debian project leader to get his thoughts on the future of Debian, plus a peak at the next release.

In this interview, Martin Michlmayr, the Debian project leader, talks about Sarge, the next release of Debian GNU/Linux. One of the most significant improvements in Sarge over Woody, the last stable Debian release, is in the new user-friendly installer. Others include the addition of Apache 2.0.52, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.2, and XFree86 4.3.

Debian supports 11 hardware architectures. According to Michlmayr the system is very stable, and only some infrastructure issues need to be addressed before the release.

NewsForge: Introduce yourself and tell us a little about your work in Debian GNU/Linux.

Martin Michlmayr: My name is Martin Michlmayr and I’m 25 years old. I’ve participated in a number of free software projects and I joined Debian several years ago. I’m mainly involved in quality assurance as well as various coordination activities. In March 2003 I was elected Debian Project Leader and I’m in my second term now. Debian is a very large and complex project with around 1,000 developers and over 10,000 packages, and the project therefore needs lots of coordination.

I’ve also been involved in other areas in Debian. For example, I’ve been helped porting our new debian-installer to various MIPS sub-architectures, such as Cobalt machines. In addition to my work on Debian, I’m a PhD student at the University of Cambridge investigating quality management in free software and open source projects. The aim of my research is to further improve quality found in free software projects.