I recommend to accept Florian Schlichting as a Debian Developer. 1. Identification & Account Data -------------------------------- First name: Florian Middle name: - Last name: Schlichting Key fingerprint: 30B23C8B4E6A3B09EAA6B65212973B6E72DC07B5 Account: fsfs 2. Background ------------- ---- I'm a 36 years old sysadmin-developer working with Debian and Perl at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. I first came in touch with Linux in the late 90s, when a fellow student at my hall of residence gave me a set of Suse 5.2 CDs including a mighty manual. But I quickly postponed my enthusiasm for Free Software when I failed to get it to work as a new file server for a small Windows network after two nights trying. The next attempt followed in 2001, when I got a new laptop with a big enough hard drive that could hold more than one OS, this time Suse 6.4 from a local library. Using it as an alternative desktop system was a lot easier, but I became annoyed when I found out that there were packages to upgrade, but they had to be downloaded and applied manually and one-by-one, and when I stopped halfway through, lots of applications would segfault on startup. And then I heard about this Linux system that didn't come in a fancy box but included a magic 'apt-get' command that would just do everything automatically to keep the software current and secure. So I downloaded a set of CDs and installed potato, and a few months later upgraded to woody, and when I saw that it "just worked" and didn't just apply security fixes for the OS but cared for all the user-facing applications as well, I made arrangements to make the "alternative" system the default. Soon I wanted even more current software and switched to testing, subscribed to mailing lists, found and reported bugs, and slowly learned about Debian and Free Software. And while I always thought that not just being a "passive" user and bug reporter, but actively contribute to the development of Debian and "give back" by maintaining packages "of my own" would be a cool thing to do, it took many years (and a career change into IT) before I found a piece of software that I needed but wasn't in Debian. I was fortunate to be introduced to pkg-perl at a time when an online packaging tutorial coincided with a switch from svn to the familiar git, and since then I have found that packaging a new Perl module or upgrading an existing package can be a leisurely activity to finish a day off with. Besides pkg-perl, I have taken over maintainership of two packages, vpnc and irssi-plugin-xmpp, which I use myself and where the previous maintainer didn't have enough time to stay on top of upstream developments, let alone Debian bugs. While I think I've made a dent on the bug count, I always feel a little guilty when postponing work on the remaining "difficult" bugs in favour of some easy and quickly-rewarding pkg-perl work. More recently, I've started to meet Debian people in Berlin at key-/beersigning and BSP events, adding a welcome social dimension to my Debian activities. Regarding goals, I think I'm quite happy the way things are now and I mainly hope I'll be able to keep up the level of activity I've held over the last year. ---- Ansgar
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