Advocate

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

You must be logged in to submit a statement of advocacy. See the Single Sign-On page for details and https://sso.debian.org/ to obtain a suitable client certificate.

See here for advocacy tips, and here for some more rationale.

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> 1 week, 5 days ago.

Signed statements

Statement

Uploaded by

Upload date

Actions

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

[view raw]

For nm.debian.org, at 2025-10-21:
I support Ben Westover <me@benthetechguy.net>'s request to become a Debian Developer (with upload privileges).
I have worked with Ben Westover on libquazip1-qt5, xmrig, pmbootstrap, and NEW prismlauncher.
for 2.5 years and I consider him as having sufficient technical competence.

Ben's contributions were always of hight quality and he usually establishes working with upstream for
maintaining a package. I found him to be polite and responsive. He was quick to apply my remarks.
So I am happy to advocate him.

I have personally worked with Ben Westover <me@benthetechguy.net>
(key 3869DA72A461754E9E366B45C311C5F54E89B698) for 2.5 years, and I know Ben Westover
can be trusted to be a full member of Debian, and have unsupervised, unrestricted upload rights, right now.

Signed with key 2861 2573 17C7 AEE4 F880 497E C386 0AC5 9F57 4E3A

bage

2025-10-21

[view raw]

Log

Date	Author	Action	Content	Public
2025-10-21 18:50	bage	add_statement	Added a new statement	yes
2025-10-21 18:50	nm@debian.org	req_approve	New statement received, the requirement seems satisfied	yes
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