Advocate

This page collects statements of advocacy for Timothy Pearson <tpearson@raptorengineering.com> to become a Debian Maintainer.

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See here for details about advocating someone to be a Debian Maintainer. You should be familiar with their existing work within Debian and believe it to be of a sufficient standard that they can be trusted with upload rights to the packages they maintain.

Please be verbose if you can. You may want to write the advocacy in a proper text editor and paste it in the form when you are happy with it.

Note: An email with your advocacy message will be sent to the debian-newmaint public mailing list.

This requirement has been approved by Housekeeping Robot <nm@debian.org> 2 years ago.

This process has been closed by noodles on 2023-01-24: no further modifications are possible.

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For nm.debian.org, at 2023-01-13:
I support Timothy Pearson <tpearson@raptorengineering.com>'s request to become a Debian Maintainer.
I have worked with Timothy Pearson on chromium packaging for 8 months and I consider them as having sufficient technical competence.

Timothy's company focuses on POWER9 systems due to its openness, and presentations he's given along with interviews make it clear that he's passionate about free software and open hardware (examples: https://www.opensourcevoices.org/24 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvey2Nsc3oY , and https://peter.czanik.hu/posts/power-timothy-pearson-raptorcs/ ). Timothy filed a bug 11 months ago on the chromium package asking me to incorporate a set of ppc64el patches into it. At the time I wasn't in a position to do that, but a few months later I began working with him on getting some of those patches upstream. When it became clear that upstream wasn't willing to accept most of the patches, we came to an agreement that we'd include the ppc64el patches in debian's chromium as long as he kept them updated for every new release. For the past 3 months, he's been doing just that. In addition, he's been very helpfully preparing and testing some of the chromium security updates.

He clearly has the technical and social ability to maintain packages and work within the debian project and with our upstreams; as a very recent example, the last chromium upload built for amd64 but the v8 javascript engine would crash during the build on ppc64. He did a bunch of debugging and discovered that the register stack had an off-by-one error. He committed the fix to chromium's git repo on salsa, and then submitted the fix to upstream v8 (which upstream chromium will then pull in at some point): https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/v8/v8/+/4163419 . He then tested it and found ANOTHER crash at runtime in libdav1d, which was fixed in upstream libdav1d's git but not yet fixed in chromium. So both of those fixes are now in debian's chromium packaging.

He's been reliable and responsive in my communication with him. I think he'd be a huge asset to the debian project.

I have personally worked with Timothy Pearson <tpearson@raptorengineering.com>
(key 6E58CA48BEAEF11C0345205EEC3C80BC57319B7E) for 8 months, and I know Timothy Pearson can be trusted to have upload rights for their own packages, right now.

Signed with key 5005 24F9 7D58 8932 23B3 5F6A 645D 0247 C36E 7637

dilinger

2023-01-13

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Log

Date	Author	Action	Content	Public
2023-01-13 08:12	dilinger	add_statement	Added a new statement	yes
2023-01-13 08:12	nm@debian.org	req_approve	New statement received, the requirement seems satisfied	yes