Antoine Le Gonidec

I have been using Debian for more than a decade, after a couple years on Windows then Ubuntu. I liked the ability to experiment with all parts of the system, and that led me to spend a lot of times breaking then fixing things. I gradually became some kind of expert on apt/dpkg… mostly because I did break them in every possible way in my first Debian years.

I soon joined mutual aid forums, and spent time as an user then moderator (then administrator) in most French-speaking Debian forums out there. Lately I had to scale down a bit my involvement, and I can still only be found as a user/moderator/administrator on Debian-Facile, the forum with the biggest focus on welcoming newcomers to Debian or even to computers use.

Debian is the environment where I learned software development too, and my first software is a .deb packages generator for commercial video games, similar to game-data-packager: https://wiki.debian.org/Games/PlayIt This is thanks to the development of this software that I started meeting more people involved in Debian, especially emorrp1 who did most of the work to get it included into Debian repositories. After several years maintaining this package themselves, they guided me to take over the maintenance under the umbrella of the Debian Games team.

I can be seen lurking (a lot) and sometimes asking for help or sharing help myself on a couple Debian IRC channels, especially #debian-games and #debian-mentors. This IRC activity is what got me curious enough to start following discussions on mailing lists over a great variety of topics.

I gave talks in many Free Software events, usually around the thematic of video games and DRM. Most of these interventions are in French, but I got invited to give one at the MiniDebConf Online #2 "Gaming Edition": https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2020/MiniDebConfOnline2-Gaming/play-it-a-packages-generator-for-drm-fre.webm

By applying to become an official Debian Maintainer, I have multiple goals in mind. The first one is a bit egoistical, as it would be to have more latitude to maintain the software I work on in Debian repositories. But I don’t want to stop at that, and I’d like to populate the repositories with more libre games and related tools (where, this time, I would not be the upstream). With time, I hope to be able to share more experience with newcomers, especially on the packaging side of things.

And there is the personal side of things: I have been spending a lot of time in the last years exchanging with many people in the Debian project, and it feels like a team I would love to be a part of. I learned most of what I know related to computing thanks to Debian, and got several jobs thanks to that, so now I would love to be given the opportunity to give back.