Now A Debian Maintainer

Update Sep 14, 2010 - Yipee !!! My packages python-twisted-calendarserver and calendarserver have been accepted into squeeze after some persuasion from Guido and myself to the release team ;). And this is my QA page.

For more than a decade, I have been associated with free and open source software. I think I got introduced to it in my first year of engineering college. There has been no looking back since then.

I have always wanted to contribute back something significant to the open source community. While I have already been contributing in small ways (articles, guides, patches, spreading knowledge about Linux), I believe my first major contribution has come today.

For the past couple of years I have been working on debian packaging as part of the product I am working on currently. And I realized that one of the debian packages (calendarserver) and its dependency (twisted-calendarserver) which I was working on had not been updated for quite a while in the debian repository. I contacted the debian maintainer for theses packages, Guido Gunther, and he told me that he was no longer maintaining these packages and that he'd be happy if I took over the maintenance. Thus came about my first opportunity to contribute to open source in a significant and visible way.

Following my initial contact with Guido, there were a lot of mails which were exchanged and a lot of suggestions/enhancements which Guido asked me to do. After all that, I finally handed over the packages to Guido, which he eventually uploaded to sid distribution. And today, 29 July 2010, my first debian package, twisted-calendarserver (version 8.2.0.svn27622) with myself as the maintainer has got uploaded to the Debian GNU/Linux sid repository. The main calendarserver (version 2.4.dfsg) package would soon be uploaded as well.

This marks the beginning of my contribution to Debian GNU/Linux and free software in general. Though the next Debian stable release codenamed squeeze has been frozen, I am hoping that these packages will be accepted by the release team as there are significant improvements in the latest version of the calendarserver which I have worked on. I sincerely hope I have the time in the future to maintain many more packages in Debian :).