NOTE: I am in the NM process and as of this update (2008-08-22) my
Application Manager Francois Marier recommended me to the DAM. Hence I
don't intend to update this page anymore, but I will leave it here for
the benefit of people getting into the NM process in future.
In this page, I intend to (partially) maintain documentation
necessary for applying to be a Debian Developer through the Debian New
Maintainer (NM) application process and should make things easy for me
and an Application Manager (AM). This page should not be considered as
exhaustive/complete in description, it is illustrative and sort of a
"placeholder", so ask if you need details :-).
I am interested in working on packages for programmers &
developers (Debian and non-Debian, C/C++ and a bit of Python), those
that are networking & web protocols related, useful in digital
photography workflows, for mobile devices etc.
I applied for being a Debian developer. A link to my New Maintainer page is here. Moritz Muehlenhoff (jmm) and I
work together on the elinks package set and he has agreed to be my
advocate.
- I uploaded my GPG key (1D389887) to public key servers. It can
be extracted from one of the keyservers.
-
Current Debian developers signed my GPG key.
$ gpg --list-sigs 1D389887
pub 1024D/1D389887 2006-04-08
uid Y Giridhar Appaji Nag <giridhar@appaji.net>
sig 3 1D389887 2006-04-08 Y Giridhar Appaji Nag <giridhar@appaji.net>
sig 6A9F3C38 2006-08-08 Ramakrishnan M <rkrishnan@debian.org>
sig 30825345 2007-08-08 Erik Schanze <schanzi_@gmx.de>
sig C0143D2D 2007-12-06 Christian Perrier <bubulle@kheops.homeunix.org>
sig 29499F61 2007-12-07 Sam Hocevar <sam@zoy.org>
sig 88F88F8F 2007-12-07 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net>
uid Y Giridhar Appaji Nag <appaji@ibiblio.org>
sig 3 1D389887 2006-04-08 Y Giridhar Appaji Nag <giridhar@appaji.net>
sig 6A9F3C38 2006-08-08 Ramakrishnan M <rkrishnan@debian.org>
sig 30825345 2007-08-08 Erik Schanze <schanzi_@gmx.de>
sig C0143D2D 2007-12-06 Christian Perrier <bubulle@kheops.homeunix.org>
sig 29499F61 2007-12-07 Sam Hocevar <sam@zoy.org>
sig 88F88F8F 2007-12-07 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net>
uid [jpeg image of size 6417]
sig 3 1D389887 2006-08-05 Y Giridhar Appaji Nag <giridhar@appaji.net>
sig 30825345 2007-08-08 Erik Schanze <schanzi_@gmx.de>
sig C0143D2D 2007-12-06 Christian Perrier <bubulle@kheops.homeunix.org>
sig 6A9F3C38 2007-12-06 Ramakrishnan M <rkrishnan@debian.org>
sig 29499F61 2007-12-07 Sam Hocevar <sam@zoy.org>
sig 88F88F8F 2007-12-07 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net>
sub 2048g/73EAF0B5 2006-04-08
sig 1D389887 2006-04-08 Y Giridhar Appaji Nag <giridhar@appaji.net>
-
I also
self-signed a scanned copy of my photo ID (driving license) and attached
it to my GPG key.
Philosophy
Debian Social Contract
- I have read and I understand the Debian social
contract.
- Convinced the author of splint to release the documentation under a DFSG free
license (CC-BY-SA 3.0).
Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)
Procedures
Working with the Bug Tracking System
I am quite familiar with the Debian BTS and I have used it
extensively
- Reporting new bugs with the right severity etc.
- Closing, following up and tagging bug reports.
- Recording the forwarding of a bug upstream.
- Changing ownership, merging and manipulating bugs.
- Subscribing to bugs (Usually those that I raised).
See "Participating in Debian activities" and "Step 4: Tasks and
Skills" for examples.
The Debian release process
I understand the Debian release processes, and in particular:
- The existance of stable, testing, unstable, experimental and
oldstable.
- experimental - large changes, testing ground for ABI, API
etc. incompatibility, not installed without pinning even if in
sources.list. Autobuilt.
- unstable - packages uploaded here by most maintainers.
- testing - packages move to testing from unstable after a
fixed number of days (depending on the priority of upload) if there
are no RC bugs.
- stable - testing released as stable when it is ready i.e. no
RC bugs, the release goals that were set are met.
- The "when it is ready" philosophy. However, with some broad
release goals and a target date in mind later.
- Architecture qualification: Porting machines and maintainers,
buildds, security support, package recentness and coverage in archive
etc.
- Definition of release critical, specifics like
release-ignore tags in BTS (e.g. GFDL with restrictions in
main for etch), LSB, UTF8 etc.. Release team.
Internationalisation and localisation
I read the Debian internationalisation and localisation manual.
Reading the relevant documentation
- Debian Policy
- Developers' Reference
- Done, but examples like the above, here?
- New Maintainers' Guide
- #454233:
Read NMG and converted axel to use debhelper.
Participating in Debian activities
- Fixing release critical bugs
- #318539:
grub: FTBFS: Invalid storage class for function
- #326007:
imapfilter: Immediately aborts with "*** glibc detected *** corrupted
double-linked list: 0xb7d84218 ***"
- #367753,
#367760,
#367762,
#367727,
#348263: must
use invoke-rc.d (policy v3.7.2)
- #307602:
exim: postinst scripts complains about db3_update
- #320270:
brutefir: FTBFS: Invalid lvalues in assignments
- #316664:
icon: FTBFS with new dpkg
- Bug squashing party, NMUs
- Attended a BSP, which was when I patched some of the RC bugs
listed above.
- I know the protocol for NMUs (See #315182 and #316664).
- Listed myself on the LowThresholdNMU
page.
- Helping package maintainers resolve bugs
- See my followups posts to bugs on reportbug, splint, axel,
mozilla-thunderbird, icedove, pdnsd, meld, xxdiff etc.
- Helping people on debian-mentors
- See "Step 4: Tasks and Skills" (Package Management) for
examples.
- Bring in useful patches from Ubuntu
- #423414:
axel: segfaults on HTTP 404
- #451432:
ifplugd: FTBFS on amd64: Conflicting types for loff_t
- Help in classifying debian-devel mails for SPAM removal.
- I used to hang around on #debian on irc.freenode.net to help
folks using Debian.
Debian Machine Usage Policy (DMUP)
I have read and understood the Debian Machine Usage
Policy. Also, in my work with the LDP for over three years:
- Used my account on ibiblio.org only for the project (sending LDPWN, modifying en.tldp.org etc.).
- Used the CVS account on cvs.tldp.org only within acceptable
limits (authoring, editing etc.).
- Forwarded email from appaji@ibiblio.org to my personal email
account.
Package Management
- Maintain Debian packages
- qa.debian.org overview of the packages that I maintain.
- splint
-- A tool for statically checking C programs for bugs
- elinks
-- advanced text-mode WWW browser
- axel
-- A light download accelerator - Console version.
- xxdiff
-- A graphical file and directories comparison and merge tool
- libdaemon -- lightweight C library for daemons
- ifplugd -- A configuration daemon for ethernet devices
- #459325:
ITP: clang -- A C language family frontend for LLVM
- Menu entries and /etc/alternatives
- #315182:
multi-aterm does not provide x-terminal-emulator/install alternatives
and menu entry.
- #316164:
xfce4-terminal: doesn't update x-terminal-emulator and
x-terminal-emulator.1.gz alternatives.
- #426853:
gworldclock: registers a menu entry to find it in Apps/Hamradio.
- preinst, postinst, prerm, postrm hooks in packages
- #278391:
installing doesn't setup toms/toix links (see: 'flip -h' and 'man
flip'). See second patch.
- #360588:
hibernate: prerm renders package uninstallable with a read-only
/usr/local
- debian/control headers Depends:, Suggests: etc.
- #311078:
wdg-html-validator: should not 'Depends:' on wdg-html-reference.
- Helping people on debian-mentors
Documentation
- Wrote the reportbug.conf(5) manpage. See #437473: reportbug: man
page for reportbug.conf.
- Reviewed and submitted a few corrections to the "i18n and l10n in Debian" document.
- Reported and submitted patches for a bunch of bugs related to
examples, man pages, package descriptions etc.
- #248292:
Incorrect syntax in the sample imapfilter config file
/usr/share/doc/imapfilter/examples/sample.config.lua
- #316168:
Updated the xfce4-terminal(1) page to reflect its state in Debian.
- #276527:
The language 'Telugu' is mis-spelled in
/usr/share/i18n/locales/te_IN.
- #377576:
libvcp-perl: In package description, "diring the transfer" should be
"during the transfer".
- #315725:
aterm-ml doesn't have appropriate documentation or manual page.
- Author and maintainer of the popular BSNL DataOne ADSL
HOWTO. Has a section on Debian specific information.
- One
of the authors for the LDP weekly news for over 2.5 years.
Improved it vastly during that period of time.
- Credited with providing content for DWN (20070703,
20030429).
Debugging, Testing and Patching
- #450523:
reportbug: says it's trying packages.debian.org, it's really trying
incoming.debian.org
- #448874:
reportbug: Please CC secure-testing-team@lists.alioth.debian.org in
case of security issues in testing
- #434989:
linda: please adopt new menu policy
- #302103:
reportbug: Silently terminates/exits with status 1 with no error when
no net connection available
- #274987/#297293:
mozilla-thunderbird: Can't copy message to Sent folder with IMAP
- #287842:
mozilla-thunderbird: Add an option for "check for mail in all folders"
- #396856:
libimage-exiftool-perl: Cannot write signed values to
Nikon:WhiteBalanceFineTune
- #309353:
mutt: segmentation fault (core dumped) while Fetching message
headers...
- #331682:
meld: Support for 'Save As' in the File menu and Toolbar
- #357678:
ifstatus: Fails with error "/usr/sbin/ifstatus: line 3: exec:
ifplugstatus: not found"
- #408401:
wml: href breaks xhtml -- creates a 'border="0" attribute' for images
- #293623:
jack: rename_num doesn't exist anymore
- #298837:
jack: target filename not displayed when files cannot be renamed
- improper error message
Moritz Muehlenhoff (jmm) and I work together on the elinks package
set and he has agreed to be my advocate.
Meanwhile, a few Debian changelog credits to my name: axel, gnudip, reportbug, libimage-exiftool-perl, grub, jack, jack again and xfce4-terminal.
