I left you 2.5 months ago with the last question asked by my
applicaiton manager, Martin Michlmayr : "Please tell me about about yourself and what
you intend to do for Debian".
Interesting question to revisit now, indeed. Here is what I answered:
About myself first.
I'm a 40 year old project manager and system administrator working in French
National Aerospace Research Center. My best definition of my skills in
computing is "Know more or less about a Lot of Things and be a Specialist of
Nothing"...:-). I'm definitely not a programmer, nor a real system
administrator, nor a RDBMS administrator, nor a personal workstation
designer, though I do all of these daily. I think I'm perfect for finding
the good person for having a defined job done.
Besides this, I'm a genealogist for several years now. This is what finally
decided me to apply for becoming a package maintainer : there are some quite
good free genealogy software for Unix, though for various reasons they are
not used very widely, even Unix geeks (my main software for genealogy still
runs on Another Operatin System and is evertythig but free).I think that I
can bring something here to the Free Software World, by helping some of
these good programs in getting into the best Linux distribution I know....
For me, this is a mean for giving back to the free software movement what I
gives to me since I discovered Linux 6-7 years ago.
My very first intention as soon as I get my way into the Debian Developers
Heaven is adopting the Geneweb package currently maintained by Brent
Flugham. I'm in close contact with the author (who happens to be french,
which helps) as well as a daily user of it. The current package which is in
the distribution is already my work for a great part. I gave it to Brent,
the current maintainer and we both agreed that it would be better for me to
apply to becoming anofficial maintainer.
I also contributed to the package for lifelines, another genealogy software.
The last version of the package is also 80% my work, acknowledged by Javier,
the official maintainer. Concerning that package, I do not have "plans" for
adopting it (we didn't discussed of this with Javier, and I'm not sure I
could bring him that much things).
I came to Linux thanks to a great friend of mine, Ren Cougnenc. Ren opened
my eyes to the free software world when I still thought that it was only a
variant of free beers.
I got really involved into Linux when I forced me to remove any other
Operating System from my computer at work and tried to do my daily job with
Linux.
I have now succeeded at ONERA in getting free software to be accepted as a
credible alternative for important projects. At this time, especially for
server and network-related projects.
I absolutely cannot tell why and how I came to be a Debian user. I simply
don't remember. But I know why I am still a Debian user : this is a
distribution which is controlled by only one organisation--->its users. And
I want to be part of it.
Finally, I did not mention above the somewhat "political" nature of my
personal involvment into free software. Except for the physical appearence,
I think I mimic RMS on several points (though he probably speaks better
french than I try to speak english....which does not help for expressing
complex ideas like the ones above!).
As anyone can see, I was already very verbose when writing, sorry for
this. Funnily Martin summed this up in one paragraph when he posted
his AM report about my application. From what I see, also, my English
didn't improve that much since then. It seems this is a
desperatecause, I'm afraid.
Anyway, all this was apparently OK for Martin and, on July 21st 2001,
he wrote and posted his AM report and, on July 30th 2001, I got a mail
by James Troup:
An account has been created for you on developer-accessible machines
with username 'bubulle'.
bubulle@debian.org was born. Now I can more easily destro^W contribute
to my favourite Linux distro.
Indeed, I don't remember that much about the 2001-2003 years. I was
probably not that active in Debian. Mostly, I was maintaining geneweb,
for which I polished the package to have it reach a quite decent
state, with elaborated debconf configuration. Indeed, at that time, I
was still also deeply involved in genealogy research and still
contributing to several mutual help groups for this. This is about the
time where I did setup
my web
site (including pages to keep the link with our US family, which
we visited in 2002).
I think that the major turn in my Debian activities happened around
september 2002 when Denis Barbier contacted me to add support in
geneweb for a new feature he introduced in Debian : po-debconf. At
that time, I knew nearly nothing about localization and
internationalization. Denis was definitely one of the "leaders" in
this effort in Debian. During these years, he did a tremendous job
setting up tools and infrastructure to make the translation work
easier. One of his achievements was "po-debconf", this set of tools
and scripts that allows translation debconf "templates", the questions
asked to users when configuring packages.
All this lead me to discover an entire new world : the world of
translating software. As often when I discover something I like, I
jumped into it very deeply. Indeed, in early January 2003, I did my
very first contributions to debian-l10n-french and began working on
systematic translation of debconf templates. Guess what was the goal :
100%, of course! Have ALL packages that have debconf
templates...translated to French.
We reached that goal.....on June 2nd 2008 in unstable (indeed
"virtually" : all packages were either 100% translated...or had a bug
report with a complete translation) and on December 21st 2010 for
testing. Squeeze was indeed the first Debian release with full 100%
for French. Something to learn with localization work: it's never
finished and you have to be patient.
So, back in 2003, we were starting this effort. Indeed,
debian-l10n-french was, at that time, an incredibly busy list and the
translation rate was very high: I still remember spending my summer
holidays translating 2-3 packages debconf templates every day for two
weeks.
Meanwhile, my packaging activities were low: only geneweb and
lifelines, that was all. Something suddenly changed this and it has
been the other "big turn" in my Debian life.
After summer 2003, I suddenly started coming on some strange packages
that were needing translation: they were popping up daily in lists
with funny names like "languagechooser", "countrychooser",
"choose-mirror", etc.
I knew nothing about them and started "translating" their strings too,
and sending bug reports after a decent review on debian-l10n-french.
Then, Denis Barbier mailed me and explained me that these things were
belonging to a new shiny project named Debian Installer and meant to
replace the good old boot-floppies.
Denis explained me that it would maybe be more efficient to work
directly in the "D-I" team and "commit" my work instead of sending bug
reports.
Commit? What's that? You mean this wizard tool that only Real Power
Developers use, named "CVS"? But this is an incredibly complicated
tool, Denis. Do you really want me, the nerd DD, to play with it?
Oh, and in this D-I development, I see people who are close to be
semi-gods. Names I read in mailing lists and always impress me with
their Knowledge and Cleverness: Martin Michlmayr (my AM, doh), Tollef
Fog Heen, Petter Reinholdtsen and so many others and, doh, this
impressive person named "Joey Hess" who seems to be so clever and
knowledgeable, and able to write things I have no clue about.
Joey Hess, really? But this guy has been in Debian forever.
Me, really? Work with the Elite of Debian? Doh, doh, doh.
Anyway, in about two months time, I switched from the clueless guy
status to the status of "the guy who nags people about l10n in D-I",
along with another fellow named Denny "seppy" Stampfer". And then we
started helping Joey to release well localized D-I alphas and betas at
the end of 2003 (the release rate at the time was incredible: Sarge
installer beta1 in November 2003, beta2 in January 2004).
I really remember spending my 2003 Christmas holidays hunting
for....100% completion of languages we were supporting, and helping
new translators to work on D-I translation. Yes, 8 years ago, I was
already doing all this..:-)...painting the world in red.
All this leads up to the year 2004. Certainly the most important year
in my Debian life because it has been....the year of my first DebConf.
But you'll learn about this....in another post (hopefully not in 2.5
months).
Some time ago I met Colle from the CCC who told me she could create Debian stickers like the ones 