Report for new developer applicant Soeren Sonnenburg <debian@nn7.de>:
1. Identification & Background
------------------------------
Check with keyid 0xD1E2B16F:
ID check passed.
Output from keycheck.sh 0xD1E2B16F
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
pub 1024D/D1E2B16F 2001-11-28
Key fingerprint = 5993 1AE5 007C D2BC A157 4AD0 FE1F 5E2F D1E2 B16F
uid Soeren Sonnenburg <sonne@nn7.de>
sig! 0A327652 2007-06-03 Thomas Schmidt <tschmidt@debian.org>
sig! F61F73F8 2007-06-03 Bastian Venthur <venthur@cs.tu-berlin.de>
sig! 29F19BD1 2007-06-08 Michael Meskes <michael@fam-meskes.de>
sig! BC7D020A 2007-06-14 Alexander Wirt <formorer@debian.org>
sig!2 C4CF8EC3 2004-03-22 Torsten Werner <twerner@debian.org>
sig!2 94C09C7F 2005-01-08 Peter Palfrader
sig!3 73647CFF 2005-01-01 Nico Golde <nion@debian.org>
sig!3 D8480F2E 2005-01-01 Jan Luebbe <jluebbe@lasnet.de>
sig!3 1BF8DE0F 2005-01-02 Roland Stigge <stigge@antcom.de>
sig!3 AC583520 2005-01-29 Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org>
sig!3 BD8B050D 2007-06-03 Roland Rosenfeld <roland@spinnaker.de>
sig!3 D1E2B16F 2004-03-17 Soeren Sonnenburg <sonne@nn7.de>
uid Soeren Sonnenburg <debian@nn7.de>
sig! 0A327652 2007-06-03 Thomas Schmidt <tschmidt@debian.org>
sig! F61F73F8 2007-06-03 Bastian Venthur <venthur@cs.tu-berlin.de>
sig! 29F19BD1 2007-06-08 Michael Meskes <michael@fam-meskes.de>
sig! BC7D020A 2007-06-14 Alexander Wirt <formorer@debian.org>
sig!2 C4CF8EC3 2004-03-22 Torsten Werner <twerner@debian.org>
sig!2 94C09C7F 2005-01-08 Peter Palfrader
sig!3 73647CFF 2005-01-01 Nico Golde <nion@debian.org>
sig!3 D8480F2E 2005-01-01 Jan Luebbe <jluebbe@lasnet.de>
sig!3 1BF8DE0F 2005-01-02 Roland Stigge <stigge@antcom.de>
sig!3 AC583520 2005-01-29 Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org>
sig!3 BD8B050D 2007-06-03 Roland Rosenfeld <roland@spinnaker.de>
sig!3 D1E2B16F 2004-03-17 Soeren Sonnenburg <sonne@nn7.de>
uid Soeren Sonnenburg <Soeren.Sonnenburg@nn7.de>
sig! 0A327652 2007-06-03 Thomas Schmidt <tschmidt@debian.org>
sig! F61F73F8 2007-06-03 Bastian Venthur <venthur@cs.tu-berlin.de>
sig! 29F19BD1 2007-06-08 Michael Meskes <michael@fam-meskes.de>
sig! BC7D020A 2007-06-14 Alexander Wirt <formorer@debian.org>
sig!2 C4CF8EC3 2004-03-22 Torsten Werner <twerner@debian.org>
sig!2 94C09C7F 2005-01-08 Peter Palfrader
sig!3 73647CFF 2005-01-01 Nico Golde <nion@debian.org>
sig!3 D8480F2E 2005-01-01 Jan Luebbe <jluebbe@lasnet.de>
sig!3 1BF8DE0F 2005-01-02 Roland Stigge <stigge@antcom.de>
sig!3 AC583520 2005-01-29 Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org>
sig!3 BD8B050D 2007-06-03 Roland Rosenfeld <roland@spinnaker.de>
sig!3 D1E2B16F 2003-05-19 Soeren Sonnenburg <sonne@nn7.de>
sub 2048g/9F0516FC 2001-11-28
sig! D1E2B16F 2001-11-28 Soeren Sonnenburg <sonne@nn7.de>
Let's test if its a version 4 or greater key
Key is ok
Applicant writes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
| I have a long term computer history. It all started now already more
| than 15 years ago. Around 1995/96 -- being an ex amiga user -- I met
| frank ronneburg (who wrote the german debian user guide
| http://debiananwenderhandbuch.de/ ) who basically talked me into trying
| linux and I suddenly became a volunteer at the 3rd linux congress in
| berlin (linux 2.0 was just available as a pre-release). I then studied
| computer science at the humboldt university in berlin. Only around when
| I finished I started to exclusively use Debian GNU/linux (potato or
| woody at that time). Since then I am tracking sid reporting bugs I
| stumble across (via bugreports@nn7.de - not debian limited). I then
| became a phd student at the fraunhofer institute first (homepage
| http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/~sonne ) and there took care of the 20-50
| linux machines of our group for two years. In this process I converted
| the whole group to using debian/linux and became familiar with the
| standard unix tools. As the work I do at fraunhofer is focused around
| machine learning ( cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning )
| my mission is to make open source software for machine learners -- both
| in using and producing -- more attractive. To this end I co-organized a
| workshop on machine learning open source software (MLOSS) at NIPS (one
| of the biggest machine learning conferences
| http://mloss.org/workshop/nips06/) and am co-leading a inititiative to
| make MLOSS publishable
| http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/v8/sonnenburg07a.html . I also helped
| setting up http://mloss.org (not yet publicly announced) as a community
| portal for MLOSS. To put it short, my goal is to get all the good MLOSS
| into debian (and there is already some: lush, libsvm, torch,...). My
| hope is that this way we will have much improved spam filters, ocr,
| image segmentation etc etc applications in the near future.
|
| As the main author of the shogun machine learning toolbox
| (http://www.shogun-toolbox.org) I am involved in relatively big OSS
| project. I also wrote a small gnome applet (cpufire-applet). I have been
| working with my sponsor Torsten Werner and otherwise quite busy doing
| actual research in bioinformatics. Otherwise googling for Soeren
| Sonnenburg has the full details and should bring up like 25 pages of
| hits with all the things I am doing.
|
| I like debian, as its strength is the clean upgrade path (early and
| clean FHS implementation); the fine tuned separation into many small /
| independent packages limits risks of breaking unrelated packages
| often a problem with other linux distributions.
|
| Most importantly it is volunteer + community (bottom-up) driven. This
| IMHO makes it relatively independent of certain issues appearing in
| top-down organized projects. For example I consider debian's "when it’s
| ready" principle, as well as not using the latest but the greatest
| (stability over features) approach a big big advantage. However I think
| communication ``why it is not yet ready'' could be improved a lot (by
| some status page listing the criticial things that block next release
| with some kind of estimated target date based on the number of current
| bugs...
|
| Apart from bug-reports I contribute to debian by maintaining a number of
| packages (cvxopt, dsdp, shogun - all machine learning related and I hope
| there will be more of this kind here) and cpufire-applet.
3. Philosophy and Procedures
-----------------------------
Soeren has a good understanding of Debian's philosophy and procedures
and answered all my questions about the social contract,
DFSG, BTS, etc. in a good way. He committed to uphold the SC and DFSG
in his Debian work and accepts the DMUP.
4. Tasks and Skills
-------------------
Soeren has a good understanding of the technical side of Debian.
He mostly maintains packages related to machine learning and optimization
software, and he is the upstream author of some of them (shogun,
cpufire-applet).
Soeren also answered my other questions regarding T&S without problems
and he has provided patches for several bugs.
5. Recommendation
-----------------
I recommend to accept Soeren as a Debian Developer.
Account: sonne
Ana
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature