Rylie Pavlik

I have been contributing to free and open-source since before 2005, and using Linux for longer: Slackware, Ubuntu, then Debian, which has been my main distro for roughly 13 years. My first contributions were to the AbiWord project, including two GSoC positions with the project in 2007 and 2008. During my time in academia, I worked to open-source as much of my software development as possible, both for advancing the state of the art as well as in the interest of reproducible research. Since then, I have been employed by two different companies to take a prominent role in developing open-source virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and related software (collectively called XR). I am also presently the Specification Editor, and by extension, the de-facto software maintainer, of the Khronos OpenXR standard.

My packaging experience likewise begins with AbiWord, maintaining a PPA and working to help improve upstream AbiWord packaging starting back in 2008. Since I work in XR, I often need very new packages for personal use, so I have had a lot of experience manually backporting Debian packages. I also packaged a number of VR software systems during my time in academia, often in a PPA.

In my current role, I have worked with several existing DD's and been encouraged to work directly in Debian, rather than just maintaining a downstream PPAs and private Debian repos. As such, I maintain three XR-related packages, grouped in the "xr-team" group on Salsa. I have also had the chance to spend time on Debian packages that I use but don't act as the lead upstream maintainer of, such as SolveSpace, MeshLab, and click-man. I aim to achieve a very high package quality, aided by the excellent Debian QA tool suite and the Salsa Pipeline tools, plus software like cme, reuse, and my own spdx-to-dep5. I have been fortunate to find collaborators not only in coworkers but also in the Debian-Science team, which team-maintains many of the non-XR packages that interest me from a development point of view.

I chiefly use my personal domain name for Debian related contributions, while other (mainly non-Debian) contributions use my work address (at Collabora). Note that my work prior to about two years ago is under an obsolete email/identity. Key transition statement is available at https://ryliepavlik.com/personal-key-transition-2023-11-17.txt . Most packages I contribute to have been updated to replace the obsolete identity.