For the past several months I've been talking closely with a member of the WebGUI community Ernesto Hernandez-Novich (aka SquOnk). He's been maintaining Debian packages for WebGUI for years, but recently decided to up his efforts and try to get WebGUI into Debian's official apt repository.

Here is our most recent conversation on IRC:

This means that WebGUI will be an official part of the Debian Lenny distribution which is coming out later this year. And this is the reason that Ernesto is nominated for the WebGUI Contributor of the Year award.

You may be asking yourself, what's all the fuss about? Plenty really. First, if you're a Debian user it means you'll be able to install WebGUI just by typing:

apt-get webgui

Which is a pretty amazing feat in and of itself. Second, Debian is somewhere in the top 5 (depending upon the survey data you look at) most popular Linux distributions in the world. That means means there are potentially millions of additional people that might see WebGUI through Debian that otherwise would have never seen it. And third, Debian is the source of dozens of other Linux distributions, including current golden-boy Ubuntu. Many of those distributions pick up the packages from Debian and include them in their repositories. Which again means potentially millions more people see WebGUI that otherwise might not have.

It is a good day for WebGUI.