Introduction to the Kernel Team 🐧
Hello Kernel Team,
I don't believe I've introduced myself yet, although I've interacted with many of you on select occasions. It would also be good for me to elaborate on what my priorities are so you know where I fit in the team.
[My name's John](https://wiki.debian.org/JohnScott), I'm a new Debian Maintainer (DM), and I've been working on a wide variety of areas within Debian, but what you need to be concerned with is my efforts to work on not only packaging free firmware, but on doing things right to Debian's quality standards. I maintain the two flagship libre USB wireless firmware projects in Debian: open-ath9k-htc-firmware, and carl9170fw [(in NEW)](https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html). Both of these packages are firmware, so they're Arch: all binaries that are built using cross compilers. ath9k_htc requires a custom Xtensa toolchain, which means GCC and Binutils patches are necessary. carl9170 just uses a standard plain SuperH toolchain, which I've packaged as binutils-sh-elf and gcc-sh-elf with the Electronics Team. (The custom Xtensa toolchain for ath9k_htc gets built on-the-fly and doesn't deserve a package, as it's useless for building anything besides ath9k_htc.)
These packages are special because they truly get built from source. Right now firmware-linux-free ships prebuilt blobs, and I want to fix that. [That issue is tracked by bug #890601](https://bugs.debian.org/890601). It is my dream that someday firmware-linux-free will be just a metapackage depending on different binary packages tracking the upstream sources of various firmware projects, and that all of the necessary cross compilers will be packaged in Debian. Except me, I don't know of anybody working on this effort.
To further the aim of being able to build firmware, I'm working on salvaging Newlib (embedded ISO C library) and pulling it under the Electronics Team umbrella, which will have a ripple effect on all packages (about 10 or 20 of them I think?) that use the bare-metal ARM toolchain to build firmware.
I know everybody's already got big fish to fry, but these packages are installed by default: they're too important to have a bus factor of one. Thus I would like to teach more folks (primarily non-DDs) how to maintain them and what the guidelines for packaging new firmware are.
Also I lurk a lot on IRC, feel free to say hello! My nick is pert
# Here is what I need from the team
- I would like upload rights for open-ath9k-htc-firmware. I'm in the Debian keyring now, so I just need to be granted the privilege. We can deal with carl9170fw later; I don't even know that it's possible for you to give me uploading privileges before it clears NEW. Although until now you folks haven't been sponsoring my uploads (non-kernel folks have), it's in your namespace (sort of), so I'm asking you.
- I want someone (I poked Ben on Salsa) to gauge if it would be appropriate to backport the Recommends: firmware-ath9k-htc newly added to firmware-linux-free to Debian Stable. The fact that firmware-ath9k-htc wasn't installed by default was always an oversight, and if someone from the team gives me the green light, I'll be happy to prepare a new upload and take care of getting it approved by the Release Team.
Thanks all and happy hacking,<br>
John
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Homepage: [johnscott.me](https://johnscott.me)<br>
Contact info: [as a vCard](https://johnscott.me/me/me.vcf) and [as an LDAP directory entry](ldap://johnscott.me/CN=John%20Scott,DC=johnscott,DC=me)
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