A total of 378 developers out of 1003 voted in the election which was held over the last two weeks. Hartman, who is blind, was declared elected based on the Condorcet method which the project uses.

Hartman's term began on 21 April and will end on 20 April 2020. He has been a maintainer of the Kerberos software for Debian for many years.

In his election manifesto, Hartman said he would like to keep the project as a fun place to be a developer.

"Debian is not fun when we face gruelling, long, heated discussions," he said. "It is not fun when we are unable to move a project forward because we cannot figure out how to get our ideas considered or how to contribute effectively.

"Debian is not fun when processes or tools are cumbersome. When key teams break down or get stuck, Debian is not fun either for the members of those teams or for those who depend on them. Debian is not fun when it isn't safe – when we are not respected, when we are harassed, or when we (rather than our ideas) are judged. I support our Code of Conduct."

Hartman has said he supports the idea of a team carrying out the responsibilities of the DPL.

"I think a team could help me in the following areas," he said. "The mediation work is big enough that we need to spread it across multiple people.

"The responsibility of representing Debian at conferences could be split across a team. I would like to spread some of the ongoing financial work to a team.

"I'm open to using teams in other areas where the job proves to be bigger than we expect."

Debian is the only free software project that has an elected leader. The project puts out what is arguably the best GNU/Linux distribution which caters to the widest range of architectures and has served as the base for many other distributions, including the most popular one, Ubuntu.