I have been packaging for Debian for a few years now. My first “serious” package was Wt back in 2007, but I had been backporting for Ubuntu for at least 2 years already, which means I have been doing .deb packaging for about 5 years (!).
Last week I decided it was about time stop nagging my sponsors (Vincent Bernat, Thomas Girard and Sune Vuorela) every time I wanted to update the packages I maintain (witty, ace and libmsn), and I finally started the Debian New Maintainer process.
The main reason I had not applied for Debian Maintainer yet was it requires some bureaucracy and, well, I’d rather spend my time coding or packaging than doing paperwork 🙂
I sent my Declaration of Intent and soon after, Thomas and Vincent replied and supported my application with very very nice and kind words. Thank you, guys! I’m flattered! 🙄
Had I known I would be buttered up so much, I would have certainly applied a long time ago! 😀
But you know what is the best part of this? It shows how open source projects take advantage of all the tools and communications channels we have (IRC, mailing lists, sprints, conferences, etc), and make distributed development work very well: here we have a 900-developers project in which two French guys are praising an Spanish guy they have never, ever met face-to-face (only e-mail, occasional IRC, and the most important of all: code review). Meritocracy at its full extent. Have you ever seen that in a traditional 100,000 workers company with hundreds of developers working in a single project?
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Maybe you should become a DD instead.
Good! Be careful to use the same email address for your applicaton and for your later uploads, as the upload checks are based on the email address. Also note that the “New Maintainer process” means “becoming a DD”, not “becoming a DM”, so you are using the wrong term…
@foo: DM is nowadays almost a mandatory step to become a DD.