How to become a maintainer

[Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>]

Hi, I am a Japanese and participate in Debian JP which, I hope you
all know already, is the supporting team of Debian in Japan and
makes great efforts to internationalize Debian.
Several members of Debian JP are also official Debian developers.

I reported the bug of dvi2tty package (with the patch!) almost
a year ago, but the bug is not fixed yet. So I am thinking about
becoming a official maintainer and fixing it by myself.
I also have several packages in Debian JP which I want to upload
for Debian itself.

As indicated in documents, I subscribed
"debian-devel@lists.debian.org" successfully and also I registered
my PGP key in the public key server.

But there remains BIG problem left.

According to "developers-reference", you impose us as our
real-life identity a PGP key signed by any well-known signature
or alternatively to send copy of any formal documents certifying
our identity (such as a birth certificate, national ID card,
U.S. Driver's License, etc.), but in Japan there are no national
ID card, especially if it is needed to be written in English.

Also I have not met any Debian developer in real life and
have not U.S. Driver's License yet.

And I heared also that after sending e-mail to
"new-maintainer@debian.org", the staff will make a telephone
call to us, perhaps at deep midnight in Japan, and make conversation
short on substance mainly because of our lack of ability in English.

These situations of Debian are against internationalization and
prevent foreign people, especially Japanese people, to be Debian
developer.

So I want to ask if you can accept the following.

You accept, for example, Japanese Driver's License as our
real-life identity but you may feel uncertainty because it is
written in Japanese and you can not understand it naturally.

So you send copy to some Japanese official Debian developer
at random or whom the staff thinks reliable, and request him to
check if he can identify us and also to make a telephone call
to us at daytime in Japan.

Then he can check Japanese certification well and also we can
make much more efficient and substantial conversations to identify
us in Japanese of course.

After this, the selected Japanese official Debian developer
must report the results to the original staff by e-mail.

Don't you think that this is much more efficient method than the
current method ?

You should consider that
* there are many other Japanese maintainers in Debian JP who
can be official maintainers of Debian soon if the above method is
accepted, and also
* the above method is not relaxing conditions, but make it
more practical, I believe.

Thanks in advance.
				1999.5.5
--
 **************************
 Atsuhito Kohda
 Dep. Math., Tokushima Univ.
 kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp