I recommend to accept Russell Stuart as a Debian Developer. 1. Identification & Account Data -------------------------------- First name: Russell Middle name: - Last name: Stuart Key fingerprint: DF08380A8FA9E29511F4C9DF966EAACACDE97281 Account: ras 2. Background ------------- For my thesis at Uni I helped port Bell Labs Unix V7 to a new platform. I developed a fondness for Unix back then. After graduation I did what could be loosely called computer programming, loosely because the industry was not so stratified back then. It might be called "dev-ops" today, although dev-ops doesn't usually include building hardware. Commercial realities meant I all my programming on Windows after graduation. That changed a couple of decades later, when I took up the opportunity to work for a company that used Linux on their servers. Not long after that Linux User Group brought Linux Conference Australia to my home town, Brisbane. The energy and playfulness I felt there brought back memories of my Uni days, so I joined the LUG. I remain a regular attendee, and have held various positions on the Executive. Working professionally with Linux inevitably means you come across this don't work or are irritating. In other words there were lots of itches to scratch. This lead me down a path I think many follow - I ended up carrying a lot of patches which made the value of pushing them upstream and my distributions packaging system very evident. Contributing upstream for the most projects was easy, as most projects were keen to accept bug reports and new features. The one notable exception was Debian. Getting code into Debian via any path other than submitting a bug and waiting for the maintainer to do something with it was impossible without becoming a DD. But merely presenting Debian with evidence that you were competent at packaging was not good enough (I did several ITP's with URL's to the package I had already done). To become a DD you had to join a Debian social clique - in other words find a group of DD's that were happy to allow you to indenture yourself to them, so they could observe you. This isn't compatible with people like me who operate as lone wolf's. I had to content myself with creating a public Debian repository, containing all the packages created or back ported. It turns out if you contribute for 10 years someone does eventually notice, and I am indebted to the DD that did. If my DD application succeeds I will continue to do what I have always done - scratch the occasional itch. The main motivation for becoming a DD is so I can contribute those scratches to Debian without spending hours begging someone to accept them. -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage.
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