Benda Xu

I am Benda Xu, a particle physicist working at the University of Tokyo and Tsinghua University. I started using GNU/Linux since 2003, starting from Mandrake and Redhat, but soon settled down with Debian Woody. I wanted to try GNU/Linux because it was more challenging and tech-savvy than other consumer grade operating systems, and more customizable and friendly to programmers. After I joined experimental physics, GNU/Linux and my system administration skills helped me enormously for managing and analyzing huge amount of experimental data.

I made my first contribution to Debian just before I went to university in 2005, as the simplified Chinese translator of Sarge Release Note. I have also helped with the translation of Etch Release Note.

In my professional and daily life, Debian is my main driver. All my desktops, laptops and servers I own are running Debian. I have crafted my style around Debian, and have improved it whenever I see fit. I have re-/introduced new packages like openrc, a clean, small, C/hell-based service management system; casacore, a professional radio astronomy framework; scim-pinyin, a Chinese input method I use. I participated in maintaining packages like oss4, the sound system; babeld, the RFC6126 routing daemon; stumpwm, a common lisp tiling window manager; sysvinit, the classic init system. I have participated in troubleshooting bugs of many packages such as tinc and unison.

I believe in free software, and I relate the spirit of free software to the original motivation of science: to understand the universe, to hack the universe, and to share the joy whereof. Since becoming a Gentoo developer in 2011, I contributed actively in Gentoo Prefix, toolchain, scientific and high performance computing areas. My major contribution, Gentoo Prefix runs Gentoo by normal user privilege on shared clusters, a by-product of which being a GNU userland to be installed on Android devices without chroot.

I would like to make sure the set of software I use are well-maintained in Debian. I believe being a DD will facilitate that. I will also explore integration of Debian and Gentoo by having dpkg and portage understand each other's package databases, so that we will have the best of two worlds.