For nm.debian.org, at 2020-10-16:
I've been appointed as Helge Deller's AM last November about a year ago.
Helge is a Linux kernel developer since 1999, in particular, PA-RISC (hppa)
Linux kernel and Debian-ports arch maintainer. His knowledge and expertise of
architectures, of the kernel and about Development is far beyond my own and I
was quite impressed about his contributions to Debian with palo.
That being said, I was at first a bit apprehensive about his application.
Undoubtedly, Helge understands the Debian Philosophy and the way the project
works, but only maintains one package, and has a dozen uploads, which seems a
bit low for becoming an uploading Debian Developer.
Nevertheless, there was no reason I should not go with him throught this
process, as I don't think hard requirements for packaging is the sane way to
go. Helge is around since at least 2013, and his expertise would still benefit
Debian.
So I decided to handle his application with an extra excercise for him to do: a
NMU or QA Upload, just to make sure that he was aware of the implications on
working on packages he does not maintain, and more specifically, on something
else than palo.
Helge decided to take care of multiple issues with the rbootd package, which
got orphaned a year ago, and to adopt it, which seemed appropriate, as it's in
his field of work with parisc and still close to a QA Upload (the only
difference being that it's not one because he adopts it). We also took some
time to make tweaks on palo.
The whole process took quite some time. Between Helge's busy schedule, some
failures on my side (sorry again for that), and the COVID19 situation, many
delays in mail exchanges were met. But it's not really something that bothers
me in an application, and it helped me to see that Helge is not in a rush about
becoming a Debian Developer, and, generally quite patient and thorough, which
are great qualities when working in Debian. It also gave me some time to
interact with him on his work to have rbootd maintained again.
As I already said to him in private, I'd be glad to mentor him a bit more
through packaging questions should he feel the need, as his experience is
mostly with old-style packages (not using debhelper or other tools), but having
gone through the AM process with him, I agree that Helge Deller can and should
indeed be a Debian Developer, uploading.
I think he'll be a great added value to Debian!
Signed with key 9AE0 4D98 6400 E3B6 7528 F493 0D44 2664 1949 74E2
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peb |
2020-10-16 |
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