I received the email yesterday and was like wow, I m in . I would like to thank:

• Raphael Hertzog and Roland Mas who motivated me to contribute to the Debian project in the first place.
• Sandro Tosi, who taught me a lot while I have been working on Reportbug.
• A huge, huge thanks to Piotr O arowski, who patiently sponsored all the packages I asked him to review.
• Xavier Oswald who allowed me to start the NM process.
• And finally a huge thanks to Martin Zobel-Helas and Holger Levsen who were my application managers.

Sorry for the other readers who will find this post boring, but it means a lot to me

A few months after starting the NM process, I have just been accepted as a Debian Developer. My account name is simply: julien I have been a Debian user for about 10 years now, and have begun contributing to Debian in 2005. I have then been accepted as a Debian Maintainer in 2007. This post is mainly to thank:

• all my sponsors: Christoph Haas (haas) , Lo c Minier (lool), Free Ekanayaka (freee), Maximiliano Curia (maxy) and Micah Anderson (micah),
• my advocate: Matthijs M hlman (matthijs)
• my AM (who actually make it happen in a really short time frame, thanks a lot to him): Xavier Oswald (xoswald)
• all people who helped me during the process, to name a few: Christoph Berg (myon), Enrio Zini (enrico), Peter Palfrader (weasel)

Also thanks to all people who have already sent their congratulations, it makes me very proud!

I'm just back home after Paris mini-DebConf. I'm happy, excited, and exhausted almost as if it had been a full fledged DebConf. That's enough in my book to consider the event a complete success. As far as I know, it has been the first mini-DebConf held in Paris and about 150 people have come to attend the event from all over Europe. Off the top of my head I've met friends from at least: Spain, UK, France (obviously!), Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Greece. I'm still very much impressed by such a diverse attendance. Initially, I had planned the first "DPL strike" ever (i.e. not doing anything DPL-related) for the duration of the conference, in order to take part into the BSP. That agenda has been pretty much subverted by a last minute emergency, by chatting with loads of people, and by actually finalizing the Debian Sprint Program, which had been at the top of my Debian TODO list for quite a while now. Nonetheless, I've managed to advance a bit on a couple of RC bugs, which belong to the "annoying/pointless/but-still-valid" category. They are not solved yet, but I hope to have good news to share soon. Bottom line: I loved the event. and I've even managed to avoid getting killed by my (local) family for taking part in a Debian-weekend after an almost full week of Debian traveling, which is another success on its own right Closing advice: beside some last minute legwork, I did essentially nothing to organize this mini-DebConf, your kudos should be better directed to Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy for the organization. Other gifts such as bug fixes can be directed to the speakers, sponsors, and loads of other helpers from Debian France and not in particular Xavier Oswald, Valessio Brito, Tanguy Ortolo, Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Luca Capello, Stephane Glondu, and others which surely I'm forgetting to mention here (sorry about that). Kudos folks ... let's do it again next year! (SCNR)

Dpkg got rid of Perl Let s start with the interesting part and the great news: dpkg 1.15.8 (to be uploaded soon) will no longer need perl! After my changes to rewrite update-alternatives in C, Guillem recently pushed the rewrite of dpkg-divert/mksplit in C. Please test it out (binary package for i386 or .dsc). This is rather exciting news for those who would like to use dpkg in embedded contexts. And it s great to see this completed in time for Squeeze. In Squeeze+1, we might go one step further and merge cdebconf, the C replacement for debconf. I got rid of some recurring administrative tasks I have been administrating the Alioth server since its inception (see the announce I sent in 2003) but I m no longer enjoying the day-to-day administrative work that it represents. That s why I just retired from the team. We recently recruited Tollef Fog Heen so the number of admins is still the same (that said, Alioth could benefit from some more help, if you re a DD and interested, drop a mail to admin@alioth.debian.org or come to #alioth). Same goes for the collab-maint project. I have dealt with hundreds of requests to add new contributors to the project since it s the central repository where all Debian developers have write access and where they put the VCS for their packages that do not belong to a more specialized team. The new administrator that will approve the requests is Xavier Oswald and he s doing the work under the umbrella of the New Maintainer s Front Desk. The future I will continue to spend the same amount of time on Debian, the time freed will quickly be reallocated to other Debian and free software related projects. In fact, I even anticipated a bit by launching Flattr FOSS last week but that s a relatively simple project. The other projects that will never all fit in the freed time: I want to spend more time working on dpkg. I do plan to blog more often too, but I m sure you ll notice that yourself soon. I would like to see my Debian book translated into English (another post coming on the topic sometimes soon). In my dreams, I could even start yet another software project, I have some ideas that I really would like to see implemented but I don t see how that could fit in this year s planning unless I can convince someone else to implement them! Maybe I should blog about them. 5 comments Support my work

Today, the founding members of the Debian France non-profit met during the RMLL in Vandoeuvre-l s-Nancy; we signed the required papers and proceeded to the election of the board. We’ve been working on setting up the Debian France non-profit for the past months, discussing the idea and drafting the legal documents. Now we need to incorporate, this is the last big step :-) We’re all very happy now, and very excited to complete the last steps needed before we can open the membership and start to lobby more efficiently, among other things ;-) The 12 founding members are :

• Julien BLACHE (DD)
• C dric DELFOSSE (DD)
• Laurent FOUSSE (DD)
• Aur lien G R ME
• Pierre HABOUZIT (DD)
• Rapha l HERTZOG (DD)
• Aur lien JARNO (DD)
• Sven LUTHER (DD)
• Xavier OSWALD (Debian-edu, Skolelinux-fr)
• Olivier PENINGAULT
• Ludovic RESLINGER
• Thierry STAUDER (Debian-edu, Skolelinux-fr)

Unfortunately, not everybody could make it to Vandoeuvre today. A big thank you to all the people who helped in the process, and continue helping today!