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This page collects statements of advocacy for Ben Westover <me@benthetechguy.net> to become a Debian Developer, uploading.

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This requirement has been approved by Housekeeping Robot <nm@debian.org> 1 week, 4 days ago.

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For nm.debian.org, at 2025-09-21:
I support Ben Westover <me@benthetechguy.net>'s request to become a Debian Developer, uploading.

I know Ben primarily through his work on packaging the MakeMKV application. Several years ago I had begun that packaging work; since it hasn't yet entered the Debian archive (an ITP does exist[0]), I had been hosting the debs on my personal apt repo for others to use. About 3.5 years ago I agreed to let Ben take custody of the MakeMKV packaging, which he has done using salsa.d.o to host two git repositories[1]. He currently hosts the debs on his website[2].

Since then he has consistently done a good job keeping the packaging up to date, adjusting to upstream changes, and performing manual rebuilds when a dependency (such as ffmpeg) changes in the Debian archive (something that would automatically be covered by a binNMU normally if the MakeMKV packaging was in the archive). He has demonstrated good understanding of both technical packaging details as well as Debian Policy.

In both personal and public interactions with Ben, I have found him to be knowledgeable, willing to accept advice on how to improve his packaging work, and polite.

I trust Ben's packaging work; perhaps the greatest demonstration of this is that I have installed and used the MakeMKV packages he produces on my personal machine.

Given my observations of Ben in the wider Debian community and our interactions around the MakeMKV packaging work over the past ~4 years, I know Ben Westover can be trusted to be a full member of Debian, and have unsupervised, unrestricted upload rights, right now.

Mathias

[0] -- https://bugs.debian.org/1003815, https://bugs.debian.org/1005075
[1] -- https://salsa.debian.org/BenTheTechGuy/makemkv-oss, https://salsa.debian.org/BenTheTechGuy/makemkv-bin
[2] -- https://apt.benthetechguy.net/

Signed with key 0A34 55B7 CCDE 5C53 4374 7321 C0BA 812C 6C4D CB2E

gibmat

2025-09-21

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Log

Date	Author	Action	Content	Public
2025-09-21 12:59	gibmat	add_statement	Added a new statement	yes
2025-09-21 12:59	nm@debian.org	req_approve	New statement received, the requirement seems satisfied	yes