Advocate

I have personally worked with Leo Singer <1879E9CC> for 1.5 years
within the Debian Astro Team. I could sponsor some of his packages
(healpix-java, reproject, pytest-mpl), and then gave him DM right on
those packages. He also has DM right on python-astropy and
python-astropy-helpers, to maintain backports of these packages. All
this worked very well, without any problems. I therefore support his
application as DD to get full, unsupervised, unrestricted upload to
the archive right now.

Leo just asked if I would possibly want to support his transformation
to a full developer status. And I can only say, his advocation is
a privilege, and not so because of his fancy nasa.gov email address.
Debian ad astra! Leo has worked without me for the internal repository
in the LIGO consortium, then shortly with me for sponsoring some
lower-level packages for Debian, and then without me again as a
Debian Maintainer for a few years and with the Debian-Astro Blend
of ours.  There is little more we can possibly expect. Leo was also
always friendly enough to suffer through all my bad jokes about
astronomers having difficulties to get key signatures on their
mountain tops.  On the more serious side, some IT-savvy scientific
disciplines like bioinformatics are pretty much crowded with Debian
developers that you basically run into on any larger meeting.  Not
so in astronomy - yet. But astronomy turned out to be much more
data intensive than bioinformatics and we as a community should
stay close to them as these special demands will help our distribution
and ourselves to develop. And our infrastructure on packaging,
dependencies, reproducive builds and continuous integration also
helps the scientists. Please let Leo in.