This is a summary of the AM report for Week Ending 20 Nov 2005. 7 applicants became maintainers.
Russ Allbery <rra> I am a senior systems administrator and technical lead for Unix infrastructure services at Stanford University, from which I also have master's and bachelor's degrees on computer science. My day to day responsibilities include running the campus Kerberos authentication servers, web authentication servers, and Usenet news servers and assisting with, overseeing, or otherwise fiddling with the campus e-mail, AFS, and web servers among others, as well as doing technical strategic planning, projects, and tools development. [...] I currently maintain eleven packages for Debian and co-maintain four more with Sam Hartman. My initial goals for my involvement in the Debian project are to contribute back to Debian those packages that we needed at Stanford but were not already in the archive (provided that they're generally useful) and to help improve the AFS- and Kerberos-related packages in Debian. I am also very interested in (and very impressed by) the core Debian packaging infrastructure and would like to help improve it, particularly in the areas of package checking (lintian, linda) and the qa.debian.org tools. I've submitted one additional check to lintian and some improvements to debarchiver so far and hope to find time to do considerably more. Given my experience with porting random Unix software, I'm also planning on helping with orphaned packages and general bug squashing. Sebastien Delafond <seb> I graduated from ENSTB, a french engineering school, with a major in CS and networks. I got started with linux while I was in school in 1998, and actually never seriously used any other distribution but Debian: I tried a few others to get a taste of them, but never found anything quite as convenient to administer and use than Debian. After initially being attracted to Debian by the stability, ease-of-use, and wide range of applications available, I was also later seduced by the idea of Free Software and the GNU public license. [...] I would also like to maybe take on a few more "higher-importance" packages, probably through co-maintaining or bug-fixing to begin with; I really would like to see my time beneficiate to as many Debian users as possible, and I think taking care of the more important packages is one way of achieving that. Then, in the longer term, I think I'd enjoy being able to contribute to Debian's assets management team: I know that very few people are trusted to do some administration on the various debian servers, but I believe I could start by maybe contributing ideas and taking parts to discussions regarding services, machines, source-control systems, release tools, etc... My main area of interest being networks and systems security, I guess that's where I'll be most interested in helping out where needed. Simon Huggins <huggie> I'm 25, live in the UK and I'm half of www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk a UK based ISP that amongst other things holds domains for SPI such as debian.org. Black Cat use Debian and Free software almost exclusively and even have our own internal Debian packages of our systems that I help maintain. I'd like to help with the packaging of Xfce 4 (as you'll know :)) as I've been doing this since the beginning of March now. Once I get through NM hopefully we'll setup a more cooperative effort on alioth with a mailing list etc to discuss all the issues/coordinate efforts. My work with this so far has fulfilled the social contract including conversing with upstream about bugs/features in Xfce 4. Michael Koch <mkoch> I the past I worked on KDE for some time. Then I switch my focus because of job and moved to java and the java community. I try to improve several free java projects, like GNU classpath and GCJ. In debian I wanna improve the packages using Java. Lately I'm a little bit active on debian-edu as they need Java too. I hope I can help to make Java more popular and easy to use by providing a free java platform. Margarita Manterola <marga> I came to GNU/Linux through my husband (Maximiliano Curia, also in the NM process) in 2000. He was the one that introduced me to the Free Software philosophy, and I became involved immediately, not because of a technological point of view, but because of the philosophical aspects. During 2002 we founded a LUG in our university, forming an awesome group of people, most of them Debian Fans. After some time, we installed our own gforge server and started generating our own software, eventually encouraging all us to give more and more time to free software. For a long while, I didn't think I wanted to be a package maintainer, I considered myself a "Debian Bug Reporter", I reported lots of bugs, and many of my friends got used to reporting their bugs to me, so that I reported them back to Debian, I was a "Bug Reporting Proxy" :). But after being at Debconf4 I realized that the only way to help improve Debian and make it really better was to become part of the Developer team. Also, I had not been interested in maintaining packages, mainly because everything that I used was already packaged, and I found it silly to package a useless package just to say "Hey, I'm a package maintainer". But one day I found that a package that I really needed was not being cared enough by its maintainer and ended up adopting it. Package maintaining acquired a complete different meaning for me after that day. My main goal in working for Debian is to help the whole project fulfill the "Our Priorities are Our Users" part of the Social Contract. The whole phrase is "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software", and while the "Free Software" part has a lot of people working on it, the "Our Users" part seems to be of less importance. So, what I want to do is not just maintain packages, but make Debian packages work as the users expect them to work, make sure the packages a user wants to be installed are installed by the default tasks, make sure everything is properly translated (I can do Spanish translations, but I'm talking about encouraging other languages as well, and also making sure that all the locales are properly set when installed), make sure the documentation is ready to use in an easy way (/usr/share/doc seems not to be a very "intuitive" location for newbies), etc. All of this is QA work, that has to be done in coordination with the debian-installer and the debian-translation teams. I realize that I can do all this without actually being a DD, but also I know that being a DD will aid me a lot in achieving these goals. Kevin McCarty <kmccarty> I am a fifth-year graduate student. Specialty is experimental neutrino physics, although I am thinking of leaving academia after finishing my degree. In the course of my thesis work I use Debian GNU/Linux almost exclusively, both on my laptop and on a small computer cluster for analysis that I sysadmin for my group. This has led to some frustration with the current state of open source physics software [1]. I also have hobbies ranging from coin collecting to amateur astronomy, as well as (naturally) programming. My ongoing Free Software projects include StarPlot, a 3-D star mapping program [2]; wmapp, a C++ GUI framework for creating Window Maker "dockapps" [3]; and WMakerConf [4], which I took over as upstream recently with the blessing of the original author. Debianizing [5] the huge Cernlib codebase [6] counts as a project of its own. [1] http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/physics-software-rant.html [2] http://www.starplot.org/ [3] http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/wmapp.html [4] http://www.starplot.org/wmakerconf/ [5] http://borex.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ [6] http://cern.ch/cernlib/ I wasn't really aware of Linux until I used it regularly (RedHat 5, I think) while working at an MIT particle accelerator during the summer of 1998. A friend put my first GNU/Linux installation on my PC (Debian, in fact!) that fall, my junior year at college. But I didn't play with it much until I installed an "easier" distro (Caldera OpenLinux 2) myself later that year. Having it rooted by an exploit in the automount daemon made me more aware of security issues, and when re-installing, I switched back to Debian, permanently this time. That was when I really started to appreciate the Free Software movement. I've been learning more about Debian and Free Software ever since. I want to volunteer my time in order to give something back to the community: making things work when they are broken (having filed a fair number of bugs [7], many with patches); dealing with licensing issues (having convinced the author of cfortran to release it under LGPL [8]); and improving infrastructure and quality of Free Software, especially physics-related, so that it works the Right Way(TM). I confess to also having the more selfish motives of being recognized as a person one can turn to for help with Free Software, understanding better how software works, and enjoying seeing my name in changelogs. [7] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?which=submitter&data=kmccarty%40Princeton.EDU&archive=yes [8] http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/c/cfortran/cfortran_4.4-5/cfortran.copyright Frederik Schueler <fs> I am 30 years of age, live in Hamburg and earn my living doing network and system administration at a small software company, running Debian on both the servers and developer workstations. [...] So what do I want to do for debian? There are currently two things I am doing and why I decided to apply as a debian developer, first my involvement in the amd64 port, writing patches and submitting bugs to help make the distribution of even better quality than it already is, and second my work on the amd64 kernels and the debian kernels itself together with the debian kernel team wich I am a member of. [...] To sum this up: I want to help improve debian and take an active role in the decision making process of the developers comunity. I think being a developer will make some things more easy to deal with, in the amd64 porting team as well as in the debian kernel-team. Marc -- BOFH #89: Electromagnetic energy loss
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