Report for 'Debian Developer, uploading' applicant Alexander Chernyakhovsky
Hello,
I recommend to accept Alexander Chernyakhovsky as a new Debian Developer, uploading.
The account name is achernya.
* Applicant background
My first experience with GNU/Linux was around 1997 with Red Hat
Linux. Both of my parents were computer science graduate students at
the time, and needed a computer that had a similar environment to the
UNIX machines they had in lab, which were various SPARC workstations
at the time, with a select few Linux workstations.
Over time, I learned the strange computer interface---everything from
logging in at the console and running "startx" to starting up the ppp0
link with the modem and using ssh. I was astounded that such a system
could be Free, and wanted to contribute. I learned to program in C,
C++ and Java, and started working on my own toy projects, but lacking
access to the OSS community in the suburbs of Ohio, I didn't know what
to do next.
It wasn't until much later, with the introduction of the modern Fedora
project that I started reporting bugs into the bug trackers, sometimes
with patches attached. However, my contributions to F/LOSS projects
remained limited until I became a student at MIT in 2010, where I met
many Debian and Ubuntu contributors through SIPB, MIT's student
computing club.
At a Debian Bug Squashing Party in January 2011, I complained about
byobu-2.80-1 failing to install on squeeze to lfaraone and paultag,
who quickly looked it up in the PTS, turned around and said to me:
"hey, byobu is orphaned, want to adopt it?" Not quite sure what this
meant at the time, I agreed, and prepared an SRU that fixed the
packaging, and eventually became the maintainer for byobu. I have
since become a DM, contributing to config-package-dev, hesiod; running
testing and reporting bugs, and in general learning the Debian way.
I continue to be a Fedora user, and am also a Fedora Packager. I am
the maintainer of mosh and rubygem-mysql2 in Fedora, as well as a
maintainer of the mirrors.mit.edu, which is an official Fedora
mirror. (We're currently working on adding mirrors.mit.edu to the
Debian mirror list as well. It appears that we forgot to actually
finish the process, despite mirroring Debian since the beginning.)
I'm also a maintainer of Debathena, a Debian derivative specifically
tailored for the MIT Athena computing environment. Debathena is a set
of add-on packages available for Debian and Ubuntu that make it easy
to use a computer with Athena resources by automatically configuring
services such as OpenAFS, Kerberos, and Zephyr.
I'm interested in keeping Debian up-to-date with new packages and the
latest versions of existing packages. As a part of this, I'm more than
happy to interact with our counterparts in Ubuntu, porting packages
that only exist there back to Debian, as I currently do with
Byobu. I'm also interested in reproducable builds amd the related
infrastructure; I am currently working with the other Debathena
maintainers on a set of scripst that will allow us to build
from-scratch (bootstrap) Debathena against a new suite of
Debian/Ubuntu, while also doing bookkeeping in our git repositories. I
believe the tools we're working on may be of use to the general Debian
community.
Regards,
Eugene V. Lyubimkin
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