Advocate

This page collects statements of advocacy for Francesco Ballarin <francesco.ballarin@unicatt.it> to become a Debian Developer, uploading.

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This requirement has been approved by Housekeeping Robot <nm@debian.org> 1 day, 17 hours ago.

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Re: support for Francesco Ballarin's application for Debian Developer. 12/5/2025.

I support Francesco Ballarin <francesco.ballarin@unicatt.it>'s request to become a Debian Developer, uploading. I have worked with Francesco Ballarin on fenics-dolfinx, petsc and other python and numerical packages for 17 months or more and I consider them as having sufficient technical competence.

Through my pre-existing connection with Francesco via the FEniCS project, I invited Francesco to directly support the Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) packages for FEnICS by applying to become a Debian Maintainer. He already had an established record as an upstream developer and professional mathematician, and as Debian Maintainer he has amply confirmed his competence by patching and making uploads of packages, both the fenics packages and other packages for the wider python and numerical community. He has even prepared new packages (pyvista, and his own pusimp). He has worked with me going through the process of preparing library transitions (petsc 3.22), and has now independently (apart from the new package upload) prepared petsc 3.23 for transition after the trixie release. Francesco has also demonstrated his readiness to work as an independent Debian Developer by asking me to give him DM permissions to patch and upload a package I had never even heard of myself (togl). Francesco has shown a good readiness to communicate respectfully with other teams and package maintainers. He has passed his "apprenticeship" swimmingly, is ready now in my estimation to work confidently as a full Debian Developer, and I have no hesitation in supporting his application.

Signed with key 23C9 A93E 5858 19E9 126D 0A36 573E F1E4 BD5A 01FA

dparsons

2025-05-12

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For nm.debian.org, at 2025-05-12:
I support Francesco Ballarin <francesco.ballarin@unicatt.it>'s request to become a Debian Developer, uploading.
I have reviewed and uploaded several versions of gmsh package, prepared by Francesco
last year and I consider him as having sufficient technical competence.

I have communicated with Francesco Ballarin <francesco.ballarin@unicatt.it>
(key 1B5D04B1E507BBF03669E2B801F35FC33E73AF8C), and I know Francesco Ballarin
can be trusted to be a full member of Debian, and have unsupervised, unrestricted upload rights, right now.

Signed with key BBBD 45EA 818A B86F F67E 7285 D3E1 7383 CFA7 FF06

gladk

2025-05-12

[view raw]

Log

Date	Author	Action	Content	Public
2025-05-12 20:55	dparsons	add_statement	Added a new statement	yes
2025-05-12 20:55	nm@debian.org	req_approve	New statement received, the requirement seems satisfied	yes
2025-05-12 18:46	gladk	add_statement	Added a new statement	yes
2025-05-12 18:46	nm@debian.org	req_approve	New statement received, the requirement seems satisfied	yes