New Maintainers
This is a summary of the AM report for Week Ending 18 Jan 2004
7 applicants became maintainers.
Moray Allan <moray>
I'm currently a PhD student at Edinburgh University, doing research on
probabilistic models. As an undergraduate I studied theology at Cambridge
University.
I was first introduced to Debian by Chris Rutter, with whom I shared an
interest in the ARM architecture. In more recent years that interest has
led me to work on free software for handheld computers; I am a developer in
the GPE project, which provides a free GUI palmtop environment, using X and
GTK. I'm already maintaining Debian packages for several GPE components,
and intend to package more components as they become ready.
Moray maintains gpq-julia, gpe-taskmanager, gpe-todo, libdisplay-migration,
libtododb, teleport
Andreas Barth <aba>
I live in the city of München (Munich) in Bavaria, Germany, Europe,
and work as a Software Engineer. Before working for money, I studied
Mathematics.
I started using Linux in 1996. My first Linux-system was Slackware,
which I transferred home on a lot of floppy disks. After that, I tried
RedHat, and started using Debian in 2000. With Slackware, and also
with RedHat, I had to compile a lot of updates by myself, which was
not too comfortable. Furthermore, I started to connect my computers
more often to the internet, so I needed reliable (and easy-to-use)
security updates. This was one major argument to try Debian, and now
I'm really happy with it.
It was always normal for me to share patches and fixes with the
community. So it was just logical that I reported bugs via the BTS,
wrote patches for them and tried to get my fixes really in. Debian
(the distribution) is very useful to me; so it's also normal to give
something back. For both reasons I became maintainer of a few
packages, and also did some polishing work, e.g. the closing and
re-titling of old WNPP-entries. Though I did enjoy the work outside my
own packages, I have now enough open bugs at my hands to just work on
my packages for the next time. After fixing the bugs, I'll do some
more work outside my packages again.
Andreas maintains dpkg-sig, libapache-mod-dav, mgetty, netpbm-free
Jarno Elonen <elonen>
I'm a programmer and have done mostly computer game development - in
a very broad sense - for living. I'm pretty fluent in wide variety
of aspects in software development and have had a chance to do
pretty much anything from sound and graphics design to scripting,
GUI programming, webmastering, video codec design and project
management.
Even after having been a founder in two companies, however, I still
dislike business world in principle. In addition to being greedy and
competitive by definition, it all feels kind of shallow: do boring
and questionable things to get a product sold for a couple of months
and then just forget about it - keeping all the copyrights and code
for yourself, "just in case" or "to protect the owners'
value". While I like the work itself, I loathe wasting and
competition. A human life is short and I know I can contribute more
that that. Until the business culture changes radically or I give up
IT for something completely different, "Sustainable Software" on my
free time is the way to go about it.
Some of my activities:
+ Finnish translations of a few programs
+ Packaging and fixing applications (KDE apps,
OpenOffice, video and graphics stuff)
+ Upstream development: http://agistudio.sf.net/
+ Open *Content* projects like
http://sanakirja.sf.net/ (an ambitious Finnish<->English lexicon
project)
Creative Commons @ Finland (discussing, maybe scripting, coming up)
+ Webmastering EFFI.org (Electronic Frontier Finland
+ Debian specific development:
http://elonen.iki.fi/code/dpkg-merge/
http://elonen.iki.fi/code/parse-apt-files.inc
Jarno maintains agistudio, imediff, nagi.
Steinar Gunderson <sesse>
I am a 20 year old student from Norway, currently studying for a
master degree (second year, of five) in communication technology at
the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU),
Trondheim. I came to Linux in 1997 (I think), after having read a lot
about it (using Linux as only operating system on my machines since
1999). My first installation was of Slackware 3.4, but after a few
years I heard about this Debian' thing and saw it in action, being
particularly impressed by their packaging system (then only
controllable via dpkg and dselect :-) ), leading to a switch (or
rather, a gradual migration) to Debian.
After a while, I understood how much work was put into the packaging
and integration of these systems, and wanted to give something
back. Thus my intent to become a DD. :-) (Also, it's usually a lot
easier to get problems fixed if you can do it yourself :-) )
Steinar maintains mozilla-locale-no-nb, as well as amoeba, and amoeba-data
Isaac Jones <ijones>
I am a professional software developer working in Columbus, Ohio. I
recently graduated from Ohio State with a degree in Computer Science.
I have never flipped over a car in a riot.
(http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/Midwest/11/25/columbus.disturbances/index.html)
I have experience in a variety of programming languages including
professional experience in C, C++, Java, and Haskell. I also have a
great deal of interest in compilers and artificial intelligence. I
currently work for an A.I. development firm and do a lot of Haskell
programming.
Isaac maintains haskell-mode, hat, hugs98, xppaut
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig>
I'm Frank Lichtenheld, a twenty-four years old student of physics at the
University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Besides my studies and my engagement in
Debian I'm very active in student politics as member of our student
parliament and as member of the students representation at our faculty.
Before I came first in contact with Linux at the University about three
years ago, I had mostly used Windows 9x (and before that MS-DOS) and had
only basic programming experiences in Pascal and C. My main skills are now
programming in Perl and text editing (LaTeX).
I came to Debian in spring 2002 when we had to replace a Windows/Mac OS
network of Desktop PCs at our students representation with something that
works... After only having some experiences with SuSE I got quickly
impressed by Debian's stability and superior package management. While
learning to use Debian I also learned how to improve it and so I got
involved. I started translating websites, adopted some packages and am
currently searching my place in doing QA work.
I maintain lincvs and doc-linux (the latter together with Colin Watson).
I'm also very active as German translator and editor for the Debian
Website.
Göran Weinholt <weinholt>
I'm a student of computer science and engineering at Chalmers University
of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden. I'm also the system administrator at AB
Strakt where I take care of mostly Debian boxen. I've used Linux since
1997, and I've been learning C for almost as long.
I want to volunteer my time to Debian because it's a free operating system,
and I think that is a very nice thing to be working on. It's also very fun.
I intend to maintain a small set of packages that I care alot about, and
then mostly do QA work. I'd like to make the list of RC bugs smaller, and
being able to NMU packages myself would really help alot.
Göran currently maintains aterm (previously sponsored by Jordi Mallach) and
giftcurs (previously sponsored by Robert McQueen, his advocate).
Thanks to Pascal Hakim for compiling this listing.
--
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com
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