This is a summary of the AM reppot for Week Ending 28 Sep 2003. 7 applicants became maintainers.
Nicolas Bertolissio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I'm an air traffic controller (one of the guys at the top of the tower at the airport). Computer has been at home for a long time (1983/84). I started with a TI/99, this switched to an Atari ST. With this one I learned 68k assembler and a bit of C (but a give up this C). About 5 years ago, my father bought a Mac, 68k, so I went on 68k assembler. Then he changed for a g4 and MacOSX so I totally give up with this as I had not enough time. I bought my own PC 3 years ago, a 2 x Celeron, when Linux started to emerge in France, with the aim of installing Linux on it as I have never worked on window$ computers and colleagues had lots of trouble with it. I failed with a Slink, so I put a Mandrake. Then I switched to Potato as I had dependency troubles with the rpm system. Now I'm on Sarge (with chrooted sid and woody to compile/test my package). I Totally stop coding until I discovered Perl (see below) which is now the only language I am able to do something from. As you can see, my first aim at installing Linux had nothing to do with open source and free software, it was just a way to look at what dual-processing could be. So I read the docs, and discovered what free software was and I agreed with this philosophy. When I installed my Potato, I had no time to do something in return of what I had received as I had my final exams at school. Then I discovered the l10n-french list and thought I may have time to translate for Debian. I started with reviewing already translated documents and never start translating as I was already spending a lot of time with reviewing. At that time Michael Bramer (Grisu) started to flood the list with packages description to review. And they _really_ need reviewing. The mail format was not really convenient so I made a first Perl script to automate sending review to translators. But this was not enough for me and was only available for French translation. So I've contacted Michael to ask him whether I could develop a review process for the DDTS. He agreed, so I made it, and the DDTS has now a review process available for all languages. This was for me a way to give something to Debian for all the good thinks I received from it. I also developed an administration part for the DDTS as the growth of translators and reviewers made necessary to be able to easily modify single things as email addresses, to orphan translations, and so on. Once the review part of the server was fine, I started rewriting my script for reviewers, I improved it and make it deal with translation and bug tracking messages so it became a console-base client for the French DDTS team. I advertised a bit for it on the DDTS coordinators list and received bug reports/questions from people who were not translating into French, so I thought it could be a could idea to have it available as on official Debian package. But for the really first versions, it has always been available as a (unofficial) Debian package, so people had just to install it in the usual way and use it, preventing installation error from a .tar.gz, and introduction of instability with a non-i.deb thing in the system of possible newbies. Making it available as an official Debian package should encourage people to help l10n project, starting with short descriptions may be easier than translating the Developers' Reference from scratch. Nicolas maintains acheck, acheck-rules, acheck-rules-fr, and ddtc. Romain Francoise <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I'm 22 years old, I live in Lyon, France. I'll graduate in July from INSA de Lyon, an engineering school I've been attending for the past 5 years, the last three being a 100% CS course. After that I'll start working full time for a network security company here in Lyon, for which I have been working part-time during the last 18 months, mostly doing kernel hacking (Linux) and other security-related activities. My first contact with GNU/Linux was in 1998 during my first year at INSA, we had a machine free for all students to use and I quickly began hunting around, out of curiosity, reading docs and learning about the system. I first installed GNU/Linux on my home computer in mid 1999 with the help of a friend, and spent a lot of time playing with it. It was the then newly released Debian 2.1 (Slink). In the following months, I upgraded to the unstable distribution (potato) and broke my system a fair number of times, but I was hooked by then. In the following years, I tried almost all GNU/Linux distributions out there, used FreeBSD for a few months and finally returned to Debian in late 2001, not for its technical excellency but more for the project's commitment to Free Software, which (I had learned by then) is the essential part in the whole GNU and Linux success. My activities in the Free Software world include sending patches for software I use (see #189597, #189605 in the BTS for recent examples), writing documentation (emacs-w3m's for example), writing buggy Elisp programs, and general hacktivism (I helped create a LUG at INSA in 1998 and was Secretary in 2001-2002). All the systems I use at home run Debian, and more and more systems at work switch to Debian, including a distributed compilation farm I helped build. The work I plan to do within Debian mostly consists of maintaining packages: I already have one package in the Debian archive (tcc), sponsored by my friend Cyril Bouthors, who is the previous maintainer. He basically decided to package tcc at my request, and did a good job with the package but wasn't really interested in it since he wasn't using tcc at all. In early 2003 I decided to take over the package and start the NM process since Cyril didn't have the time to give tcc all the attention it deserved. I reworked and improved the package, closing most of the bugs and working closely with the upstream maintainer, and I want to continue working on tcc while at the same time gradually package more software for Debian. I'd also like to help the release process by doing NMUs and participating in BSPs, the goal being to have more frequent releases (several years of reading -devel have taught me that everyone would like that--I just want to help). Finally, I want to volunteer my time for Debian simply because I have been using the system for years and it's time I give something back to the Project, it's the way Free Software works. More specifically, as I have said above, I want to give my time to Debian because I believe in the values it defends and its commitment to Free Software. Romain maintains tcc. Jochen Friedrich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Jochen has written free software for a while now. He is very active in the Debian IPv6 sub-project, and has contributed plenty of patches to many upstream packages including the kernel. Jochen is the doing most of the work on the IPv6 project at the moment, both on the packaging end, and working on the infrastructure, by doing such work as keeping the archive back-end updated. Jochen maintains darkice, libsnmp-session-perl, and sup. Kalle Kivimaa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I decided to apply for a DD when I last ran into serious problems trying to install something on my laptop running Sid (aptitude was depending on something that was not in Sid but was in Woody). I hang around in an IRC-channel with Lars Wirzenius and when I once again complained about quality control he basically said "either put up or shut up" so I decided to put up. I also would like to get JSPWiki (http://www.jspwiki.org) into Debian as I find it a very good Java-based WikiWiki-engine (and I'm involved in its development). I've been using Debian exclusively since 2001 (before that I used Debian in 1998 and 1999 but decided to change to SuSE because I wasn't satisfied with the quality of stable/testing/unstable for personal desktop usage) and I find it a very good choice for server usage. I would like to help making it even better as a server platform and a good contender for various more desktop-oriented distributions. Couldn't I do all that without being a DD? More or less yes. I could file bug reports (with patches) and try to find sponsors (Lars seems to agree to sponsor C software) for various orphaned packages. On the other hand, as a DD I could start to figure out with Lars how to make testing distribution a viable choice as a desktop platform (security issue being the biggest problem in my opinion). I have been more or less exclusively Linux user since 1994 (used Windows mainly for games and some work-related issues) but I haven't been too active in the actual free software community. Me and a couple of others started Patchbot project last spring but it sort of fizzled out. Currently I'm involved in developing JSPWiki and trying to create a sort of SourceForge type of environment for creating and running various (live-action) roleplaying games (Ropemylly, using JSPWiki as the engine). Kalle maintains ispell-fi, and libgnu-regexp-java. Robert Larson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Professionally, I'm a system administrator for several AIX, Solaris, and Linux systems, as well as being in charge of the network hardware for a couple of hundred systems. Besides one of my desktop systems, the only Debian system at work is currently the firewall for the two hundred systems. (I hope to get more.) My main responsibility for the past decade as been System Administration, before that I was a programmer. (Basic variants, C, PL/1 variants, and some obscure stuff.) I've had experience with a variety of systems at work. At home, I've been using Debian for almost two years. Before that I had a Red-Hat system, but it was not sufficiently reliable or usable to replace my Sun/Solaris system as my primary system. Between RH 4.1 where I started with it and 7.0 which I tried and rejected, I felt RH was going in a different direction than I wished to. I had been loading some applications from the RH 4.2 cds that they dropped on the later versions, and they were no longer compatible with 7.0. When I started looking at other distributions, I found Debian had the applications I wanted including cnews and olvwm. Once I had experienced updating with Debian, I was very impressed. (It is better tested and integrated than any commercial unix I've ever used. That's paying thousands of dollars a year for support.) At a local Linux conference, SCALE, I wound up running the Debian booth most of the day, letting people know about Debian, giving out 20 cds, and selling T-shirts. Since I take advantage of other peoples generosity, I feel obligated to help make the world a better place in ways that suit my skills and temperament. Debian is such a project that I feel I can contribute to in a relatively small way by maintaining a few packages, contributing temperament does not fit that of being a DPL, and I don't want to invest the time needed to maintain a major package like GCC or Xfree86.) I've been contributing free software for many years, none of which got me fame. Hinfo (see below) and mod_access_rbl for apache are the currently useful ones. I also publish my own DNSbl, BlarsBL. (aka block.blars.org) Robert maintains hinfo, and suck. Joseph Nahmias <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I was first introduced to Linux at college, while studying for my Bachelors in Electrical Engineering. Back then, we were using Red Hat 4.2. As I got to know Linux better, I tried different distros including Slackware, Suse, and some others that don't exist anymore... I finally tried Debian slink, and shortly after potato was released. The relative smoothness of the upgrade from slink to potato hooked me, and it's only gotten better since! So ended my quest for a Linux distribution. :-) Since then I've been enjoying the fruits of other people's labour and I decided it's time for me to contribute back to Debian. When I join Debian, I would like to join the listarchives team. Recently, I have been working with Josip Rodin and Matt Kraai to close some of the long outstanding bugs, and I hope to continue doing this. I also would like, time permitting, to help out the d-i team get the installer in shape. I just got a machine that I can fool around with, so I will probably start testing the daily builds of the net install shortly. Of course, I would like to continue to maintain my current packages, and package software that I feel will be useful to many Debian users (as opposed to packaging something just because I use it / think it's cool). Joseph maintains vtprint, fceu Makoto Ohura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Makoto maintains okumura-clsfiles, apt-show-source, preview-latex, ptex-jisfonts Thanks to Pascal Hakim for compiling this listing. -- Martin Michlmayr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
