Stuff I do for Debian

What do I do for Debian?

I've been a Debian developer since February 2001. I haven't been involved as much as I wanted to be, but that's mainly because of my own lazyness. Oh well. Things I've done include:

• Packaging work, as every good Debian Developer does (at least once):
  • Linux Gazette packages. Too many to list them all, but you can find my name in, e.g., the lg-issue77 changelog. I gave that up now, since it became so much work that I lost the motivation to properly do it -- and I don't really read them anymore anyway.
  • The userland NBD support packages. These include the client and the server. They're not great magic, although they do need some love and improvement. I have also become the upstream maintainer of this software in the mean time.
  • hotswap, a program meant to facilitate hotplugging IDE hardware which supports doing so. You could also do this using hdparm -U and hdparm -R, but hotplug is (quite) a bit more user-friendly. I gave it up because the laptop I used it for was my employer's, and I left that job.
  • The Dutch translation of the LDP HOWTO's. At first, only the HOWTO's; later on, the dutch manpages were added, as both upstreams merged. Unfortunately, it appears they are no longer active...
  • Tlpr, the Trivial LPR Client. I created this by way of picking up C again, but never really finished it the way I would like it to be. The upload to the Debian archive was made in a sense of misplaced grandeur; for that reason, I requested its removal from the archive, a request which has been honored on August 14, 2004.
  • LogTool, a package which will apply regular expressions and colorization to ones syslog-style logfiles. Little work, nice upstream.
  • RegExplorer. I took this up when Raphael Bossek temporarily disappeared. It's a cool package, which has helped me on a few occasions to debug regular expressions; however, its upstream is no longer active, and my C++ skills have diminished since I learned it at school. For that reason, I decided to orphan it.
  • Belpic, the supporting software for the Belgian electronic ID card. I was working on these as Sarge was about to release, being only a week or so too late to get it still in... anyhow, it's in sid now, and I might provide backports soonish.
  • EMILE, an m68k mac bootloader. This is obviously closely correlated to my m68k work (see below). Its first (and currently only) upload was done in early 2006.
• Apart from packaging work, I've been involved in Debian's m68k port since I was a Debian developer for less than half a year. As it happened, I was just at the right place at the right time to become involved. In this function, I have
  • Maintained a number of buildd hosts. I probably don't remember all of them, but let's try:
    • Arrakis, owned by Ingo Juergensmann. This was the first one I was the admin of, and the one that I did the longest of all of them; however, arrakis is no longer a Debian buildd host because of a vendetta between Ingo and James Troup.
    • Quickstep, my own box. It used to build unstable, too; but it's Debian's (only) buildd for experimental right now.
    • Kiivi, owned by Meelis Roos. This is the only functional one which I'm the admin of at the moment, but that's okay.
    • A4000, owned by Goswin von Brederlow. A4000 was never an official buildd host, but it helped us m68k porters when the tide was high (and the backlog huge).
    • ska, my MVME box. This was only a temporary setup when the backlog was too high. I'll probably shut it down again some time soon...
    That's about it, I think...
  • Started off the m68k port of debian-installer, the next generation installation software for the Debian distribution. It must be noted, though, that I did only a tiny bit; Stephen Marenka, basing his work on mine, did most of it, and got it actually to work. I only fixed some outstanding VME issues, which he did not have the hardware to test.
  Since this work helped me understand how wanna-build and buildd work, and since these were much of a black box to my fellow Debian developers, I wrote some documentation on the whole process. This documentation seems to be quite helpful, as many people use it as a reference. Which is a good thing, of course ;-)
• Since september 2005, I've also become involved with an upstart Big Endian ARM port. Most of the dirty work was already done when I became involved; I used the working setup to install and configure buildd on two of the debonaras machines, and am now maintaining them: bob and wendy.
• Next, I've also represented Debian at some occasions. One was the Linux@work European roadshow where I, together with Frederic Peeters, fellow Debian Developer and maintainer of the ethereal Debian packages held a booth; I also organized the Debian presence at FOSDEM 2004, 2005 and 2006, and will do the same thing for the 2007 edition.