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Advocacy statement for James Montgomery in the context of nm.debian.org, at 2026-05-19.

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I fully support James Montgomery’s request to become a Debian Maintainer. While it is still too early to truly vouch for the quality of their packaging work (sorry James, I have not checked your work on libgdiplus, and in the end we went for a very minimal upload with mono), I am already convinced they are succeeding at the hardest part of being a good Debian member: communication.

Our exchanges have been really pleasant, and I have seen them behaving nicely with upstream too. This makes working with James nicer than with many actual Debian Developers ;)

I have no doubt we will soon be able to validate their packaging work too, but I see no good reason to work for that. When a friendly human being adopt orphaned high popcon packages, is serious about feedback they get (even when it means dropping stuff they obviously spent time on), and get in touch with upstream just to introduce themselves (not waiting for problems to arise), I see an opportunity for Debian that should not be missed.
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