New Maintainers
This is a summary of the AM reports for week ending October 1st 2006.
8 applicants became maintainers.
Paul Wise <pabs>
I am 26, I live in Perth, Western Australia. I've a BSc, majored in
Biotechnology and Environmental Science. At university I was
interested in genetics/bioinformatics and ecology and geographic
information systems.
[…]
My contributions to debian so far have been reporting bugs, sending
patches, packaging, adopting orphaned packages, helping a little bit
on #debian and less on debian-user. I've also done a bit of qa work
and some helping people on debian-mentors with packaging issues (and
contributed to the FAQ). I've contacted some people who had made
packages but didn't try to get them into debian in order to
encourage them to do so. I also wrote a patch for debtags support on
packages.d.o that jvw applied to his svn repo. I'm part of the
debian-gis, python-modules, pkg-synfig and pkg-fonts co-maintenance
teams. I am/was also part of the aborted pkg-xchat team.
My primary areas of interest are NM/sponsoring, QA and to a lesser
extent developer and other infrastructure. I plan to work on QA, NM
and sponsoring. I also plan to establish a debian-flash group at
some point. As far as packaging goes, that will generally be i18n,
gis, indymedia and flash related, although I do have a long list of
URLs of upstream projects I think should be in debian. Other than
that, I'll see where debian takes me and where it intersects with
real life.
More links of my contributions and plans can be found on my wiki
page: http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
Mohammed Adnène Trojette <adn>
I am 24 years old. I have been living near Paris for 6 years, as a
student at Ecole Centrale Paris, a French engineering school and now a
student at Institut de Sciences Politiques de Paris.
When I was 17, I once tried to install RedHat on my family's box,
but I was so afraid to erase precious data that I stepped back seing
cfdisk ;-). I then came back to Linux in 2002 at Centrale Paris, in
VIA - Centrale Réseaux's organisation, which is in charge of the
campus' network. All the Linux boxes were using Debian, so I decided
to install it on my personnal machine and enjoyed it.
In 2004, I decided to have a deep look at what I could do to help
the community back by contributing to Debian. Thus I began to work
with the l10n-french team and on packaging p7zip, I registered to some
mailing-lists.
Step by step I tried to be more in more involved in Debian's l10n.
I am also maintaining some packages and am willing to help on Quality
Assurance (especially the MIA "team").
Matthijs Mohlmann <matthijs>
Norbert Preining <preining>
I studied mathematics at the University of Technology, Vienna, and did
use computers only for academic work, as I didn't have one at home. When
it was time to write my thesis I bought my first computer and Alex
Zangerl, who studied with me - at this time already a seasoned PC
hacker (in the good sense) helped me getting linux running in the first
place. At this time it was AFAIR SuSE Linux 5.something.
[...]
So more than a year ago first plans started to use the TeX live internal
package management concept to generate Debian packages for TeX live.
Well, nothing more about this, it is a long story, but something like
one month ago these packages made it into Debian/experimental for now
(see http://www.tug.org/texlive/debian.html for more details).
In the course of the development of these packages I have actively
participated in the development of the TeX Policy
(http://people.debian.org/~frank/Debian-TeX-Policy/), the tex-common
package, and general teTeX development. Furthermore, I have taken over
the long quasi-orphaned texinfo package, and spinned off the cm-super
package from the pts-tetex-cm-super package (with Maintainer approval)
to get teTeX3 compliance. Furthermore I updated together with Florent
Rougon the lmodern font pack which was orphaned. Finally I initiated the
forming of a Debian TeX Task Force which should pool our forced for the
support of TeX in Debian.
I guess you got the idea about what area I am interested in, it is TeX,
TeX and friends in Debian.
Plans I want to accomplish: Puhhh, well ATM I have enough work to
prepare packages of TeX live for upload to unstable ;-) Let's put it
this way: I want that Debian has the most up-to-date and complete TeX
support of all the distributions, and this is not `per se', but for me
tha ability to read and write in my native language - and especially if
it is *not* written in ASCII, not latinX - at least TeX documents,
should be possible in Debian.
Bas Wijnen <wijnen>
When I was about 7 years old, I think), my father was one of the first people
who bought a (commercial) computer, a commodore 64. As was usual back then,
he got a book with it which explained how to program it (in BASIC). I did
some programming at that time, but mostly played games on it. A few years
later, we got an MSX computer, and I was becoming more interested in
programming. After some time playing around with BASIC, I learned Z80
assembly. At that point I began doing low-level things, and I started
building some electronics to interface.
Years passed, and the IBM (and compatibles) became bigger. All that time, I
stayed happily with my MSX, because even though the IBMs had more MHz, I felt
they were still severely handycapped compared to the MSX.
When I entered university in 1997, they had some SGI Indys there. I learned
to use them, and someone told me that there was a similar system for the IBM,
called "Linux". I tried it, and I realised that the handicaps of the IBM were
actually mostly in the software (MS Windows).
I started with using Slackware, then for a short time SuSe, and at some point
I found Debian. During this time, I learned about GNU and free software, and
very much liked the idea of free software being the standard instead of
something special. I want to help to make this a reality, and license all my
programs under the GNU GPL for that reason. Distributions being the entry
point for most people to free software, I think it is an important task to
package (and document, and improve) programs. I think I can do that within
Debian.
At some point I tried Gentoo, but I dropped it again
because they don't make a clear distinction between free and non-free software
(for example, you can install Pine without noticing that the license isn't
very nice).
For some time I'm interested in the Hurd kernel, and I'm discussing about its
design and occasionally writing some code for it. This is the "new" version
of the Hurd, not the "usable" one which is distributed by Debian. I'm very
enthousiastic about this version, and would gladly help to ship it with Debian
when it's ready for that. But that will certainly take some time.
Last year (2005), I went to FOSDEM with the Hurd people, and met some Debian
people as well. Since I was thinking about applying to be a Debian member for
some time, I talked about that as well, and not so long after that I did.
I am currently maintaining pioneers (formerly known as gnocatan),
gfingerpoken, and z80asm. The latter is written by me, the others were
originally written by others, but I took over upstream from them (in the case
of pioneers together with several other people). I'm thinking of adopting
some packages related to embedded computing and driving external home-made
electronics, such as crasm, an assembler for some microprocessors (among which
the one in the Psion organiser II, which I have). Also, I might become active
within emdebian, the subproject to make running Debian on embedded systems
possible/easy.
I moved the maintainance of Pioneers to the Debian Games Team, where I am
most likely the one who mostly takes care of it. I might do other things in
the games team as well.
Hidetaka Iwai <tyuyu>
I'm a student of the medical department of Hokkaido university. There
are three things I want to do for Debian.
1. introduce interesting applications in Japan to the world In
Japan, there are still many interesting applications which are not
well-known to the world, partly owing to lack of documents,
considerations to non-Japanese languages, etc. I want to work
together with upstream authors of them to solve these problems, and
introduce them to other people.
2. make Debian more useful for the Japanese people
There are works which the Japanese people must do, such as Japanese
Imput method and Japanese fonts. Compared with othe distributions
in Japan, Debian has still much room for improvement. I want to
make Debian more useful for the Japanese, especially the Japanese
beginners.
(...)
3. make Debian more useful for medical staffs and researchers
I think there is a need of free environment for medical issues to
prevent a waste of the national budget for health and welfare on
silly things, such as useless original standards of vendors', and
Debian is the good environment for it. I want to make Debian more
useful for medical staffs and researchers. At present, I do what I
can do now - translate Debian-Med webpages as a Debian JP Projects
member.
My first contact with free software is with GNU Emacs. I used
MS-Windows when I entered the university, and I was looking for better
email clients than Microsoft Outlook, and I met GNU Emacs and Mew, a
mailer written in elisp. Now Debian runs on all of my computers, and
I'm satisfied with Debian. I want to give back to free software and
Debian.
Alexei Nikolov <clown>
I'm 33 y.o. citizen of Russian Federation living at Saint-Petersburg. I
work/live in IT for 15 years, mostly as system administrator. Looking for
community I have start participating in local FIDOnet branch as node
(2:5030/249) and adopted ideas of freedom and opennes. Later, I realized that
there's software much more stable that MS-based-world, providing much more
ways to acquire results, to explore technology etc (and suitable points of
view). At last it all (well, pretty all) is based on voluntary efforts,
"internally honest", and reflects my personal attitude, mostly opposite to
the commercial mainstream and its obscure way. Surfing Linux-based
distributions I have choose Debian project for its constitutional anarchic
system and goal to remain free for all declared in its Social Contract. Also
I like its non-retentive concept covering more that only Linux-based systems.
Currently I advocate Debian GNU/Linux for several years, do
bugreporting/patching, debianize software of interest.
Alexis Sukrieh <sukria>
I've been using GNU/Linux since 1998 at the university where I was
studying Computer Science. From that moment I never stopped using
this operating system which I found exciting and interesting.
I've been working in the computer science industry since 2000 and always
worked in GNU/Linux environments. My skills are mainly around
developement (Perl and Bash mostly) and I also have a good knowledge of
the GNU/Linux system.
--
adn
Mohammed Adnène Trojette
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