New Maintainers
This is a summary of the AM reports for July 2006.
Six applicants became maintainers.
Charles Fry <cfry>
After obtaining a B.S. in Computer Science at Brigham Young University,
I worked for two years doing distributed systems software development
for the WhizBang! Labs. When they closed their doors, I worked for two
years at Carnegie Mellon University where I again developed distributed
systems software, while pursuing an M.S. in Electrical and Computer
Engineering. Now I am a full-time Ph.D. student, working with Mike
Reiter in CMU's ECE Department. My focus is, yet again, distributed
systems. Unlike most of my colleagues, I am married and we have two
young daughters, ages three and six; my family is certainly the most
interesting part of my life, but perhaps less relevant to my work in
Debian. :-)
Growing up in Wyoming, I never encountered Linux until I got to college.
I was first introduced to RedHat, and then progressivly worked my way
through a number of other distributions until I finally found Debian,
which was a perfect fit for my personality and needs. Since then I have
longed to contribute in a significant way to Debian, but my
inexperience and lack of free time successfully foiled these plans until
this summer when I did an internship in the same room as Joshua Kwan,
who helped me complete my first set of packages.
The contributions that I have made to Debian so far are primarily
focused on the introduction of new packages, and the development of
standard Pear packaging tools and best practices. The new Java package
which I added to the archive is bouncycastle, a Java cryptography
library.
The PHP packages which I have added are php-cache-lite, php-pager, and
php-simpletest. The last of those was initially non-free, but I was able
to work with upstream to get it released with a more appropriate
license. These PHP packages are all Pear packages, which were not
previously handled in a uniform way inside of Debian. I worked with
those on the debian-webapps mailing list to come to an agreement on best
packaging practices for PHP Pear packages, which was first integrated
into dh-make-php, and now into a new CDBS class pear.mk (pending
acceptance by CDBS).
I also have a small handful of adopted packages, most notably
libhtml-mason-perl which had previously fallen a bit out of date, as
well as xasteroids, wmfire, and libclass-container-perl. Finally, I am
co-maintaining awstats, a package which I long ago filed an ITP for,
only to lose the package to another developer.
While I am quite interested in ensuring that programs that I use
regularly are both packaged and well-maintained in Debian, I also would
like to become more involved with improving some of the common
development tools. My current ploy is to patch dpatch, adding support
for standard .patch files, in addition to its custom .dpatch patch
files. This would facilitate its use with the simple-patchsys of
CDBS, which currently lacks patch editing/creation tools with the
flexibility of those provided by dpatch.
Erinn Clark <erinn>
There once was a woman named Erinn,
Co-founded Debian Women, she was darin'
She put video games on a plane
-newmaint bios caused her pain
And hot pink she always was wearin'
Thijs Kinkhorst <thijs>
I'm Thijs Kinkhorst, a 25 years old student in Medical Computer Science.
I live in the city of Utrecht, in the centre of the Netherlands. My
first encounter with Linux was when I installed Slackware 3.0 on my home
computer around 1997. After some time of using RedHat and getting more
acquainted with the OS, I tried Debian and loved the system, especially
the way things 'just work' for an administrator.
I became involved with Debian Development through the 'squirrelmail'
package. I've been an upstream developer for SquirrelMail for quite some
years now. In the summer of 2004, the Debian package of our webmail
client was undermaintained and the maintainer MIA. This bothered me, and
I turned to my friend Jeroen van Wolffelaar, who is a DD, and together
we put a lot of work to get the package back into shape. The combination
of someone with upstream knowledge and someone with Debian experience
turned out very well.
Currently I co-maintain this package with Jeroen, plus the 'phpbb2'
package. I'm also the maintainer of 'signing-party' (containing tools
such as gpg-key2ps and caff) and Common Test Node ('ctn'), a medical
imaging package that was orphaned. More recently I picked up the
orphaned package 'iprint' (a small utility), and I'm now working on a
good cleaning up of the package 'dutch' (Dutch dictionaries and word
lists). I've a package in preparation for phpGedView which awaits some
copyright issues to be cleared up before it can be uploaded. This one is
done together with Charles Fry. I believe co-maintenance is almost
always preferable over maintenance by a single individual.
One of my goals within Debian is of course to maintain packages, as I'm
doing now. But I believe Debian needs people that do more than just
maintaining packages. Different parts of the infrastructure, quality
assurance and various other functions need people to help out and I'm
certainly planning on getting involved there too. The Debian-Med project
has my attention, and I hope to be useful for that Custom Debian
Distribution aswell.
Outside of Debian, my interests are graduating from my study,
(vegetarian) cooking and eating, the Dutch language, volunteering for my
study association, local history, being a board member for our tennants
association and using my Themepark De Efteling season ticket. I'm still
trying to acquire a racing bike.
Daniel Baumann <daniel>
I am a 23 year old computer science student of the ETH Zurich, living
near Solothurn, north-western Switzerland.
In late 1999, the Free Software movement found me at my hometown. Since
Potato, I am a very satisfied Debian user. The real discover of Debian
took place in 2002 with Woody as I began to make my own packages. First,
I build them for my personal usage, in 2004 I started to maintain some
packages in the official repository. Recently in 2005, I founded
debian-unofficial.org where I provide additional packages enhancing
Debian GNU/Linux.
Currently, my work for Debian consists simply of packageing. On the one
hand, I would like to focus in future on both the Q&A work and on l10n
(as long as I have the time to train myself better in Esperanto). On the
other hand, I would like to be a quick and transparent sponsor for
maintainers which are not/not already developers.
In my spare time, I enjoy listening to the music of Prokofjew,
Rachmaninov and Shostakovich as well as reading books of Isaac B. Singer
and Isaac Leib-Perez.
Ian Wienand <ianw>
I started with Linux after accidently dialing into a BBS which
was unlike any I had seen before. After figuring out it was
running Linux, I acquired a very early Slackware distribution and
started playing. I became a Debian fan after I worked to fix bug
#119176; I was hooked on the iterative process where everyone
works to create something better.
I came to my current job at Gelato@UNSW
(http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au) via hanging out on the local
Linux users group lists. Now I work full time as a programmer
working on IA64 Linux -- we are a Debian shop through and
through.
My goals with Debian are currently IA64 related. I maintain a
few packages and otherwise make IA64 enhancments, and becoming a
DD will allow me to stop bugging sponsors to do uploads and such.
Ludovic Brenta <lbrenta>
I am currently a software engineer at Barco Avionics (currently
co-writing the firmware for a cockpit display, 99% Ada and 1% assembly
of course). I live in Brussels. I am a member of Ada-Belgium and of
the Brussels GNU/Linux user group; I participate in copy parties once
a month. I also do karate. My fiancée and I are expecting our first
baby in January.
--
adn
Mohammed Adnène Trojette
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