It has been a tumultuous decade of involvement with Debian for me. I
had been on the mailing list since mid 1994, but I was reasonably
happy with my SLS system (installed using 40 floppies, including about
a dozen for just X11 alone), and while I found Debian intriguing, I
was not about to go through the pain of a brand new install until I
felt that the new project was viable in the long term :-)
I actually jumped ship in the spring of ‘95 and installed 0.93R5. The
next step came with
Bug 1766, my very first bug report:
Bug in script checksecurity in package cron
, on 25 Oct 1995.
Once in, I rapidly went to the next phase: Here is the sum toto of the
NM process I went through: my
Hello, World mail. Those
were the days :-). There was nothing between my ITP and the
upload.
My first significant package was
kernel-package, since I
was always missing something in the
series of steps
needed to build a kernel, and I started getting into it in the summer
of ‘96. This is where the second part of my apprenticeship started –
even though I had 3-4 packages in the archive, my kernel images were
not yet trusted; so I sent my images to my
sponsor
(Hi Simon),
who then uploaded the images to master.
Somewhat later, I also was involved in the early design stages
of apt, and the dependency sorting algorithms.
While I was fairly silent during the whole DFSG/SC debates (to the
extent I was labelled a mindless follower of Bruce –heh), I took an
active part in the constitution debates (possibly due to the fallout
of the
beach story. Anyway, I seemed to want to
get us a
constitution, after it had seemed stalled for months.
It is interesting to note how the technical committee was initially
setup, there was a
proposal, and then Ian Jackson responded
by saying he wanted to appoint the ctte members, since he had been
around for a while and was also the DPL. The earliest data I can find
is from
June of ‘98, as seen in a mail later that year, when
the initial list of committee members was created (I also seem to
recall I was not on the list initially, but I was added in the early
days, before the committee was actually formed).
I was interested in the technical policy fairly
early, taking
a stance that policy was more than just a bunch of ignorable
guidelines. Eventually, a [thread that tried to reach a
compromise][other] gave us something like the views we (well, I) hold
today – including what happens when packages
do not follow
policy, and about policy
editors. And
abuse of power. About this time, the policy Czar resigned,
burned out, and hounded by accusations of delusion of power.
So I first
proposed the whole policy editor and consensus
approach to letting policy evolve, which eventually led to
a formal
delegation recently.
Brian Basset was our very first secretary. My first
involvement with things that would lead on to the secretaries job
started with trying to do
voting for policy. Then,
around 2000, our the secretary and treasurer Darren Benham went MIA,
and Raul, as the chair of the technical committee, had to take over
and run the DPL election for 2001 – and forgot that DPL elections are
supposed to be secret ballots. Ben Collins tapped me for the
secretaries position mid-2001, as I recall.
It is hard, in a decade or so, to find anything I have not touched –
but NM is one such area. Apart from an early pre-current-NM
mail,
I have not been very involved in NM. Or the Debian installer. Or
Debconf. Hmm. I seem to have drifted away from things that Joey Hess
is involved in, which is a pity, he is high on the list of people I
respect in the project, and this lack of interaction with as time goes
on irks me.
thanks to lucas & his
trainees, we're seeing archive rebuilds & tons of new RC bugs again.
besides that, there are still some patches in the BTS.
here goes my list of recently worked on bugs; most of them in the
pkg-perl group
Out of curiosity, and because it is Sunday morning and I have a cold and
can't get my brain to do anything tricky, I counted the number of
candidates in each year's DPL elections.
Continuing from where we