A notorious ex-DD decided to post garbage on his site in which he links my name to the suicide of Frans Pop, and mentions that my GPG key is currently disabled in the Debian keyring, along with some manufactured screenshots of the Debian NM site that allegedly show I'm no longer a DD. I'm not going to link to the post -- he deserves to be ridiculed, not given attention.

Just to set the record straight, however:

Frans Pop was my friend. I never treated him with anything but respect. I do not know why he chose to take his own life, but I grieved for him for a long time. It saddens me that Mr. Notorious believes it a good idea to drag Frans' name through the mud like this, but then, one can hardly expect anything else from him by this point.

Although his post is mostly garbage, there is one bit of information that is correct, and that is that my GPG key is currently no longer in the Debian keyring. Nothing sinister is going on here, however; the simple fact of the matter is that I misplaced my OpenPGP key card, which means there is a (very very slight) chance that a malicious actor (like, perhaps, Mr. Notorious) would get access to my GPG key and abuse that to upload packages to Debian. Obviously we can't have that -- certainly not from him -- so for that reason, I asked the Debian keyring maintainers to please disable my key in the Debian keyring.

I've ordered new cards; as soon as they arrive I'll generate a new key and perform the necessary steps to get my new key into the Debian keyring again. Given that shipping key cards to South Africa takes a while, this has taken longer than I would have initially hoped, but I'm hoping at this point that by about halfway September this hurdle will have been taken, meaning, I will be able to exercise my rights as a Debian Developer again.

As for Mr. Notorious, one can only hope he will get the psychiatric help he very obviously needs, sooner rather than later, because right now he appears to be more like a goat yelling in the desert.

Ah well.