I recommend to accept Ole Streicher as a Debian Developer. 1. Identification & Account Data -------------------------------- First name: Ole Middle name: - Last name: Streicher Key fingerprint: BAFC6C85F7CB143FEEB6FB157115AFD07710DCF7 Account: olebole 2. Background ------------- Born 1966 in Berlin/Germany, PhD in physics 2000, currently working at Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics (AIP) Potsdam. My first Linux experiences date back to 1993, where we started to use Linux machines for data acquisition and analysis. With the Debian ecosystem, I started to work in 2005 when Ubuntu came out (Ubuntu is still my primary desktop system). Since 2009, I started to create packages; first for local use only, and since 2011 I contribute to Debian, getting maintainer status in 2012. The primary goal here is to make Debian a valuable system for Astrophysicists: Although many software in this field is written for Linux, the installation and maintenance of computers in astrophysics is quite hard: many packages are old, partly unmaintained, difficult to install. Having a good base here would be definitely a plus. The work which goes there does not just improve Debian, but the whole astrophysics software community: other systems are not too different in their requirements. A good Debian package is also a good base to work on a Fedora package, or on one of the MacOSX repositories (and vice versa). Having agreements across distributions about package (and dependency) structure, naming and directory structure conventions etc. would make life easier for us astronomers. And, a joint request helps that upstream authors can be convinced about todays software requirements, be this a clear (and free) licensing, handling of convenience copies or other topics. A final point is that good software packages, even for quite special purposes, enable others to step into the data processing of existing astrophysical observations. This helps on one side to make the scientific progress in this field more transparent, on the other side this enables scientists that have no access to the large observatories (the European Southern Observatory as an example here) to use these data for own scientific investigations, helping to lower the gap to the developed countries. This mainly describes my motivation and primary areas of interest. The contributions I made so far are mainly packaging (for a complete list see my DDPO page, http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian%40liska.ath.cx). The most complicated package there was saods9, which needed a quite large restructuration in order to fullfill the policy, including the packaging of ~10 other dependencies and subdependencies, and a longer discussion about licensing with the (independent) upstream authors of the dependencies. The major package that is in development yet is python-astropy, where I am in close contact with the upstream authors. work with them since they started the project, and so the communication is very good. Cheers, Santiago
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