What does a DPL lead mean?

Raphaël: I mostly agree with your post. Having something closer to a steering committee seems saner than having a single leader for projects such as Debian, due to a single person not able to fully follow everything such a large and diverse mass of people works on. I was among the supporters of Project Cabal^W^Wthe DPL team experiment, and of our 2IC role. However, you state that a release should determine the time a DPL team (call it committee, cabal or whatnot. I like the title, in fact: “I am an Elected Member of the Whatnot of Debian”. Whee!) - I disagree on this one. Like the fact DPL is not chosen for technical but for political work - The DPL (and so should the team) mediates between parties, brings order (controversial, sometimes) to discussions, pushes forward some controversial decisions, reports on the general status of the project - That should be the Whatnot Team work (hmmm… Should I file for trademark on that name?). In any case… Were we to change our model towards this formal DPL team thingie, I advocate slow changes over strong ones - I prefer a board like this one to be replaced one person at a time, at rates not more frequent than one month, and having them there for a fixed amount of time. Of course, this would lead to a mess on managing the voting, and each vote being less important for the developers. Besides, we have had DPL elections with as little as two candidates, and topping at seven IIRC - Do we have enough people interested in being responsable for our administrative chores? Would this scheme work? Or would it lead us closer to administrative stagnation? Quoting our not-very-beloved-but-anyways-wise dictator (for the 1876-1910 period) Porfirio Díaz: “If I want something done, I do it myself. If I want it to take some time, I appoint a delegate to do it. If I don’t want it ever done, I form a committee”.