.I’ve finally finished packaging keytouch, and gotten approval for it by my sponsor. It’s currently in NEW, and probably won’t make it to etch, because of the freeze. Kind of a shame, since I could have finished a little earlier and it would have gotten in.
Well, can’t have everything.
I did manage to upload a new version of sawfish, which finally documents how to prepare the source tarball. sawfish has so many old bugs I’m at a loss as how to handle them. I’ll be RFHing it soon, to see if someone can help me triage. But still, with upstream almost dead, it’s hard to think of a good approach.
This looks like a ‘planet-acceptable’ meme. My most often executed commands:
$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10
56 cd
49 ls
37 less
35 gnuclient
33 man
32 find
28 apt-cache
25 sudo
24 nice
13 dpkg
So, it seems I spend my time moving from place to place and seeing what’s there. Maybe I should play nethack more often.
I have two pending ITPs, and about 40 bugs in an adopted package. And, what have I been doing for the last hour? Reading up on Wikipedia about subjects ranging from geology trhu climatology to history of the roman empire.
Must. Stop. Procrastinating.
So, how does one go about becoming a DD? Well, one reads the new maintainer section of the debian website, of course. And then?
The path I’m going to travel is that of being a maintainer for some packages. It’s supposed to be possible to enter Debian by being a translator or a documentation writer, but my skills are not there, and so that’s not what I’ll try.
I had previously started packaging pubtal, a website builder that I use for my company’s site. But I hadn’t tried to get it into Debian. When talking about this at DebConf Santiago Ruano offered to be my sponsor for that package.
Quite frankly, my fist packaging attempt was horrible. debhelper is a wonderful thing, but some brain is needed behind it, anyways. And then I managed to start all this right in the middle of the python transition.
Eventually, with my sponsor’s guidance and some lintian and linda and piuparts runs later, I got the package into proper shape and thus the journey started.
Hi there!
Ever since I learned about free sotfware, I’ve always intended to give something back to the projects I’m benefitting from. But I had always allowed something or other to get between me and my good intentions. And then DebConf came to us. And I just so loved the people there and the way they work and play together that I finally got over my excuses and got working.
And so, this place is born. I intend to leave here a trace of how I’ll get to be a real free software advocate, developer and community member. I don’t expect this to be a nice path. There’s much to learn, much to do, much to overcome. Outside and (most importantly) inside myself. Hence the name of the place. This is my bleeding edge. The one with the bruises and scars.
I will dig in. See you on the other side.
BTW. I want to thank Gunnar for inviting me to the planet. I’ll do my best to stop whining.