swirl

Debian is an open community project to create a free software operating system. I've been involved in the project to one extent or another since around 2001 and I became an official project member (Developer) in 2009. (See my timeline for more information).

In the early days of my involvement I was mostly focussed on either packaging individual pieces of software or thinking about the integration of small collections of related software. Nowadays I am more concerned withA distribution-wide concerns and I'm trying to move away from package-centric thinking.

Current projects

Debian Wiki Revamp. A technically-required switch of wiki software is a long-overdue opportunity to revamp other aspects of the Debian Wiki. I'm working to ensure the new wiki has a clear, DFSG-compliant content license, scaffolding to support a community of editors and maintainers on the wiki, and to present the best Wiki content we have as well as we can.

The Chronicles of Debian (issues) I threw together this site/service in a real hurry to restore some material that the web team had deleted from https://www.debian.org/. This service should not exist: there is ample evidence that there is interest in preserving the material in the project, and the natural place for that would be the website. But the webteam disagree and have closed down further discussion on the matter. It seems to me the respectful thing to do was to honour their take on the issue and create Chronicles instead. However, this may have been a strategic mistake: it has emboldened further deletionism. For now, Chronicles lives on.

Potential future work

  • pre/postinst scripts: survey what is done in them; can we move more of that logic to declarative? Can we move some/most/all of it to non-root?
  • policy: I moved the list of virtual packages to a structured format (YAML) as a pre-cursor to doing something more useful with it. Could we extend policy to describe what behaviours some alternatives should provide? E.g., package providing alternative foo must register an alterantive for /usr/bin/foo

Historic

Games

From some time around 2005-2006 until November 2011 I worked on improving the quality of games within Debian, with particular emphasis on Doom. In that time I was the primary maintainer of prboom, chocolate-doom, freedoom and deutex. I also developed game-data-packager to aid injecting commercial Doom data into the Debian package ecosystem. game-data-packager then grew to support other games including Quake and Quake 3, Rise of the Triad and Wolfenstein 3D. I helped new maintainers to get their packages for zdoom, doomsday and vavoom into the archive.

external links

Pages tagged 'Debian':

Blog posts tagged 'Debian':