Hi to all parties involved ;)
"I believe that Michael has the technical skills needed to maintain Debian
packages. I support his application to become a Debian maintainer, because..."
many things:
I've got to know Michael through the common interest in packaging of
neuroimaging software (FSL at that point in particular) for Debian few years
ago. And he became the one who took the burden to package and maintain that
quite complicated piece of software to be readily available for Debian (thus
also Ubuntu users).
If he only worked on that single package, I would be already inclined
to advocate him for the DM, since he manages to provide
- up-to-date releases of the package(s)
- backports to a variety of debian and ubuntu releases
- timely reaction to the submitted bug-reports
- exposure of packaging in publicly available VCS
- very good knowledge of DFSG, policy and generic comprehension of a variety
of FOSS licenses
- advocacy of FOSS whenever it is possible and/or appropriate
- good communication skills (monitors and participates in various discussions
across various Debian's mailing lists and blogs)
As Michael has mentioned -- FSL is not the only package he maintains -- there
is quite a few of them. I have been sponsoring most of them, and I must admit
that I barely ever rejected some of the tentative packages. I merely provided
additional comments on how to improve the package (it is always easier to
suggest than to do the actual work ;-) ). We have troubleshooted few of the
sever bugs in few packages together to provide upstream with a solution, and
none of bugs iirc was left without Michael's attention.
I must confess that besides all mentioned above we are good friends (I hope
qualification is mutual ;-)), scientific collaborators (few papers are out),
co-founders of Debian's "Experimental Psychology" packaging project [1],
and co-developers of the PyMVPA project [2].
If it would be up to me, I would grant him DD status without thinking
twice. But as Michael has mentioned -- NM mission was not accomplished to the
time constraint (PhD PhD PhD), thus, the least "Debian" can do for Michael is
to grant him DM status, so packages do not wait half of the day to be
sponsored by me ;-)
With best regards,
[1] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-exppsy/
[2] http://www.pymvpa.org/
On Wed, 07 Jan 2009, Michael Hanke wrote:
> Hi,
> I hereby want to apply to become a Debian Maintainer.
> I have read the Social Contract, Debian Free Software Guidelines and
> Debian Machine Usage Policy and agree with all of them.
> I maintain a number of packages (mostly neuroscience-related, plus a few
> more general ones), e.g. arno-iptables-firewall, dicomnifti, fslview,
> hcluster, kbibtex, nifticlib, pymvpa, pynfiti, qlandkarte, ...
> The full list is here:
> http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=michael.hanke%40gmail.com
> I am also in NM, but did not manage to finish T&S2 over the past year due to
> time contrainst. I have to admit that I pretty much massively downweighted the
> importance of NM in favor of package maintenance, as soon as I faced the
> situation of a limited amount of time that I could devote to Debian.
> Although I very much like the peer-reviewed approach of packaging with a
> sponsor, I am nevertheless applying for DM in the hope to be able to
> take some burden off the shoulders of Yaroslav Halchenko (my main
> sponsor).
> Thanks for your consideration,
> Michael Hanke
--
.-.
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