Advocacy for Johannes Schauer
Hello,
I advocate Johannes Schauer to become Debian Developer, non-uploading.
Advocacy text:
Johannes came to my attention initially on the Debian-embedded list, adding a multistrap wrapper 'polystrap', so allow rootless usage. Then I worked closely with him as his mentor for a GSOC project in 2012. He was an outstanding student, doing very good theoretical and practical work analysing Debian's dependency tree and writing (ocaml) software to help this analysis for the bootstrap process. He was able to make this his MSc work so could continue it duing the academic year.
Those scripts have developed into 'botch': https://gitorious.org/debian-bootstrap/botch, and the results made accessible to all developers via https://bootstrap.debian.net/
He has presented his work at FOSDEM and Debconf(13), where I got to meet him in person. This is tricky stuff that not many people have the skills to do (I couldn't do it :-).
He came to Debconf13, which I think is an excellent sign of full involvement with the project.
He wrote/improved/updated patches for dpkg and apt to support Build profiles (https://wiki.debian.org/DebianBootstrap) and the Spec page which defines the implementation: https://wiki.debian.org/BuildProfileSpec.
He did a great job of upstreaming those patches into dpkg, which was a long and somewhat frustrating process, requiring discussion on debian-devel, and several iterations of the patches. He remained polite and diligent throughout, and is thus exactly the sort of person we want in the project (smart _and_ polite :-)
He is initialy looking for just DM upload rights to upload a couple of packages, including botch (although it's stalled waiting for a new release of the underlying dose library right now), but bootstrap work is fundamentally a cross-archive artivity for which full DD-ship will be useful, so once he is comfortable with the mechanics of archive uploads it makes sense to make him a DD.
To be honest given his work to date, I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending him for DD-ship. He's already a valuable member of the project, this is pretty-much just a formalisation of that.
Wookey (via nm.debian.org)
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