New Maintainers
This is a summary of the AM Report for Week Ending 14 Sep 2003.
7 applicants became maintainers.
Jon Bernard <jbernard@debian.org>
Well, my name is Jon Bernard. I live in Blacksburg Virginia.
I am a CS Graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University (VA Tech). I started using GNU/Linux as
an undergraduate CS student. My story is probably similar
to many, free software seemed to make perfect sense to me. I
decided to learn as much as I could and write as much free
software as possible. I really want to see free software
succeed and be widely distributed and used. To that end, I
decided to become a debian developer so that I could help
lift Debian to a new level of free software excellence. As a
developer, I intend to maintain the packages that I currently
have, package software that isn't included in debian yet,
write new free software, and be a substantial advocate for
free software and the debian project. This fits in directly
with The Social Contract.
Jon maintains e16keyedit, e16menuedit, libfam-ruby,
libimlib2-ruby, and xfonts-knickers
Jesus Climent <mooch@debian.org>
I have been using Linux for almost 8 years. Started at the
university, installing a computer with Linux to provide email
accounts to the student guild (At that time only univ staff
had email).
I have been actively using and administering Linux systems
since that time, getting more and more involved with the
Linux community by actively sending bug reports, and testing
different pieces of software in exotic hardware.
I was co-founder of PoLinux, the Linux Association at my
university, and I have bees volunteering my free time to
administer the server and improve the web pages (which I
rewrote during a weekend due to a frustration when I was
trying to change an image in all the pages).
One year ago I joined HispaLinux, the Spanish biggest Linux
UG. since I joined, I have been administering the main
servers, using Debian and learning about the packaging system
and tricks.
My distribution of choice is Debian, after being a Slackware,
RedHat and Mandrake devotee.
But so far I feel my effort has been focusing on providing
feedback and helping others to get closer to Linux, while I
believe now I want to give the effort back to a project
based entirely on volunteers, thus being able to give back
what I have received.
Jesus maintains abcde, mcplay, pconsole, rssh, and
co-maintains spamassassin
Jamin Collins <jcollins@debian.org>
I've been working with Linux since mid-1999. After a short
time using it, I was convinced that I could make a full
switch to it from Windows. Since early 2000, I've used Linux
as my only OS at home and my main OS at work (Windows is
still needed for some proprietary tools).
I've tried many different distributions and even began work
on one of my own (based on Crux). As I neared completion of
my first attempt at an install-able and usable install, a
user of my firewall script questioned my reasoning behind
building my own distribution. During the course of our
discussions, he encouraged me to give Debian another try. I
had previous examined Debian but was turned off by the
relative age of some of the packages (I didn't at that time
grasp the functionality of the three tiered release).
I use quite a number of different Open Source packages and
wanted to give something back to the community. After
finding Debian (the second time) and having a better
understanding of it's goals, I'm convinced that Debian is a
good fit.
Jamin maintains jabber, jabber-aim, jabber-msn, jabber-muc,
jabber-yahoo, mediamate, moviemate
Andrés Roldán <aroldan@debian.org>
The reason for I want to become a Debian maintainer is
simple. Debian is the main distribution that contributes and
applies the free software and open source thoughts showing how
powerful could be a good maintained GNU/Linux distribution.
Moreover, Debian had help me becoming a GNU/Linux lover and
a fellow of the phrase: "the knowledge must belong to the
world".
I want to contribute to this great project, and currently, I
love to.
Andrés maintains lilo, mtop, netstat-nat, prelink, and valgrind
Matthias Urlichs <smurf@debian.org>
OK... the first work I did with Unix was in the context of
Apple's old A/UX Unix, which was a cobbled-together hybrid of
Sys5 and BSD networking. I wrote a driver for an ISDN card
for it. It became apparent really fast that debugging such a
thing without access to open source code (meaning, it's not
enough to be able to look at the code -- I need to make
modifications, and recompile) the task becomes impossible.
Anyway, after not making the system stable enough for
production use I then switched to Linux/i386 and ported the
code to the new environment. At the time, Linux 0.99.whatever
had no usable internal queueing and no Internet-ready network
code, so I took some not-quite-legal Streams code, the NetBSD
networking core, the rest of the kernel, and hooked
everything together. ;-) That worked (rather well, in fact),
but the main lesson I leaned from this is that programming
alone is a Bad Thing, and being unable to share your code is
even worse in a couple of major ways.
These days, I use Debian on i386, ARM and PPC machines; I
intend to mainly do QA-related things (i.e. "find out why
this code doesn't work on PPC", "here's the changes to get
that code to cross-compile smoothly") work, and help with
prodding people and maybe NMUing stuff (like the blocked
Perl 5.8 and Python 2.2 moves from Unstable into Testing).
On the programming side, my major strengths are debugging,
and protocol / systems design.
I want to share my time because, pragmatically, if I want the
code running on my systems to have some feature or other, and
nobody else coded them into the programs I'd like to use,
then obviously I'll have to do the work myself ;-) Sharing
this work with other people means that (a) they have more
time to work on other nifty features, and (b) ideally my new
feature and their new feature co-exist nicely --
re-integrating a change into every new upstream release is
not my idea of productive work.
Matthias maintains datafudge, fdflush, festival,
festival-doc, festlex-cmu, festlex-poslex, festlex-kallpc16k,
festvox-kallpc8k, festvox-kdlpc16k, festvox-kdlpc8k, kforth,
python-docutils, speech-tools, videogen, festlex-oald,
festvox-ellpc11k
Florian Weimer <fw@debian.org>
Oh. At the moment, I'm studying mathematics at the
University of Stuttgart. I'm mainly interested in
representation theory, but currently attending other courses
to get my diploma.
Besides this, I work at the computing centre of the
university, in the security team (RUS-CERT). I currently
focus on the development of new services and fake network
security. In addition, I regularly write articles for our
security news service
(<http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/ticker/>).
I'm an Ada enthusiast, and hope to abolish buffer overflows
by (slowly) rewriting critical software in Ada. ;-)
I intend to work mostly on Ada-related packages, and on
security policies (e.g. Debian's approach towards X.509
browser CAs, or the measures to be taken after the inevitable
first big Debian security compromise). And I'm going to
package a few Perl modules which we need at work.
In quite a few cases, I will be able to help with concrete
security issues, I guess. But there's an obstacle: I won't
participate in hiding information from users, because I
believe this is morally wrong. However, I respect that the
Debian Project doesn't share my view at the moment and
interprets the Social Contract differently, and I intend to
make sure that this will not result in a dilemma, neither for
the Debian project, nor the Security Team, nor for me.
Debian is an important tool, both at work and for my home
network. I don't expect this will change during the next few
years, so I better make sure that Debian remains such a
useful tool. And it's only fair if I give back some of the
time Debian helps me to save on system administration.
In addition, it bugs me that we can't recommend Debian
officially at RUS-CERT. Relying on Debian introduces many
risks. Some of them are inherent to the project, some can be
mitigated. By becoming more involved with Debian, I hope to
better understand the internal procedures, and contribute
improvements and/or document the risks, so that we can
recommend Debian one day.
Florian maintains ada-reference-manual, xml2rfc
Graham Wilson <graham@debian.org>
I have packaged two applications for debian already, which
have already been sponsored (xmlto by Christophe Barbe and
kernel-patch-ck by David Kimdon).
I have an ITP out for cog, and and ITA for transformiix,
which is stalled because of its insane build process. I am
also thinking about adopting gadfly.
Graham maintains bsdmainutils, colordiff, pgpdump, and xmlto
Thanks to Pascal Hakim for compiling this listing.
--
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com
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