I recommend to accept Paul Mathijs Gevers as a Debian Developer. 1. Identification & Account Data -------------------------------- First name: Paul Middle name: Mathijs Last name: Gevers Key fingerprint: 5F8293EE5207FE0C526D4A971CD52D7BAAFE086A Account: elbrus 2. Background ------------- I am Paul Gevers from the Netherlands. I am Development Engineer at ASML. I studied Applied Physics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. During my study together with a friend I set up a server for the Dutch Student Alpine Club, which is running Debian. The aim of the server is to use commonality between the different Student Alpine Clubs (each university has at least one). Therefor I developed quite some specific solutions, like integration between the web-interface for sharing photo's and webdav/Apache upload facilities. The website platform was Zope. The later package has had some difficulties in Debian, that is how I got involved into fixing packages. First for our server and then I thought why not contribute to the world, instead of only to climbing students. As I was doing my work on the University in LaTeX, I figured the wnpp bug about MiKTeX [3], a package manager for LaTeX, was an interesting goal for me. Unfortunately, that was not a very clever choice, as it does not scale very well with Debian packages, and as it contained several changed convenience copies and encompassed several libraries. So I moved on. I think this is the time that I found the Winff [4]. I packaged that and got it successfully into Debian. Some small initial bugs, but otherwise pretty nice going. Because of my work, I also got commit rights upstream. When Winff was quiet, I started looking around for something new and decided that I wanted to do some QA instead of introducing new packages. That is when I found that Nedit was orphaned. Although I am an emacs user myself, I decided that I could do some work on Nedit. The main thing I found out in that time was that most Nedit bugs in Debian and Ubuntu were due to lesstif. As that was not getting any attention but has a high popcon, I decided to give that some love [5]. This was a huge project, which led me via difficult discussions about removal or improvement of lesstif in Debian, cooperation with the Fedora maintainer of lesstif and commit rights to upstreams repository for a fresh point release to an update of lesstif in Debian. Since the update, hardly any unknown bug has surfaced, although I found out that lesstif still needs someone to work on it (but I am no programmer) [6]. Then there was a request for help on the dutch Debian list of a blind person that wanted to listen to talking books [7] on a Linux system. I decided to help looking how to get it done. Together we found daisy-player, also written by a blind person. I got it packaged to satisfaction of the original user and finally got it into Debian. In the process I really had to help upstream to get his code into shape. As to why I do this? I don't really know, but I want the world to be a better place and I don't like the commercial side of it. I believe that Linux distributions should be such an ease for end-users to install and use. Although I really don't like the vendor-locked-in Apple things, they seem to be able to create a proper user experience. I think that Ubuntu, build on top of Debian, has made some interesting progress with respect to getting users to use Linux, although I am no fan of Gnome (or their follow-up Unity). My goal with Debian is to improve this great distribution. Do my small contribution where I can, e.g. I recently became member of the cacti maintainer team. That is it for now. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Elbrus [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Elbrus/PerPackageUploaderApplication [3] http://bugs.debian.org/481606 [4] http://bugs.debian.org/485481 [5] http://bugs.debian.org/522157 [6] http://bugs.debian.org/551853 [7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-dutch/2010/07/msg00006.html -- Eugene V. Lyubimkin aka JackYF, JID: jackyf.devel(maildog)gmail.com C++ GNU/Linux developer, Debian Developer
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