Twenty years of Debian

Ten years ago, I reflected on the fact that -- by that time -- I had been in Debian for just over ten years. This year, in early February, I've passed the twenty year milestone. As I'm turning 43 this year, I will have been in Debian for half my life in about three years. Scary thought, that.

In the past ten years, not much has changed, and yet at the same time, much has. I became involved in the Debian video team; I stepped down from the m68k port; and my organizing of the Debian devroom at FOSDEM resulted in me eventually joining the FOSDEM orga team, where I eventually ended up also doing video. As part of my video work, I wrote SReview, for which in these COVID-19 times in much of my spare time I have had to write new code and/or fix bugs.

I was a candidate for the position of DPL one more time, without being elected. I was also a candidate for the technical committee a few times, also without success.

I also added a few packages to the list of packages that I maintain for Debian; most obviously this includes SReview, but there's also things like extrepo and policy-rcd-declarative, both fairly recent packages that I hope will improve Debian as a whole in the longer term.

On a more personal level, at one debconf I met a wonderful girl that I now have just celebrated my first wedding anniversary with. Before that could happen, I have had to move to South Africa two years ago. Moving is an involved process at any one time; moving to a different continent altogether is even more so. As it would have been complicated and involved to remain a business owner of a Belgian business while living 9500km away from the country, I sold my shares to my (now ex) business partner; it turned the page of a 15-year chapter of my life, something I could not do without feelings one way or the other.

The things I do in Debian has changed over the past twenty years. I've been the maintainer of the second-highest number of packages in the project when I maintained the Linux Gazette packages; I've been an m68k porter; I've been an AM, and briefly even an NM frontdesk member; I've been a DPL candidate three times, and a TC candidate twice.

At the turn of my first decade of being a Debian Developer, I noted that people started to recognize my name, and that I started to be one of the Debian Developers who had been with the project longer than most. This has, obviously, not changed. New in the "I'm getting old" department is the fact that during the last Debconf, I noticed for the first time that there was a speaker who had been alive for less long than I had been a Debian Developer. I'm assuming these types of things will continue happening in the next decade, and that the future will bring more of these kinds of changes that will make me feel older as I and the project mature more.

I'm looking forward to it. Here's to you, Debian; may you continue to influence my life, in good ways and in bad (but hopefully mostly good), as well as continue to inspire me to improve the world, as you have over the past twenty years!

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