Okay, maybe that was a bit too on-the-nose. I mean, we do know that he's been there 16 years, but I would prefer to know a bit more. Being a member of the community for 16 years doesn't necessarily mean you're involved for the whole time. Is he the lead maintainer of some packages or the only guy working on certain things?
-- "Is that really true?"
"I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @10:56PM
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday November 08 2014, @10:56PM (#114141)
I think he's pretty important. I've seen his emails on the Debian mailing lists for a long time. He also maintained some important packages. That's why his email says "Note that this also constitutes an orphaning as upstream of debhelper, alien, dpkg-repack, and debmirror." Alien is a very important piece of software for those of us who deal with old Linux software, especially old commercial Linux software that comes packaged in shitty formats like RPM.
I once made a Debian package and debhelper was a godsend. (Not that I'm insinuating mr. Hess is divine BTW).
If you think about it, the number of different programs in the Debian distribution depends on the number of prospective Debian Developers that didn't find it too complicated, tiresome, or awkward to make a Debian package of some Linux program they liked.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday November 08 2014, @10:41PM
Okay, maybe that was a bit too on-the-nose. I mean, we do know that he's been there 16 years, but I would prefer to know a bit more. Being a member of the community for 16 years doesn't necessarily mean you're involved for the whole time. Is he the lead maintainer of some packages or the only guy working on certain things?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @10:56PM
I think he's pretty important. I've seen his emails on the Debian mailing lists for a long time. He also maintained some important packages. That's why his email says "Note that this also constitutes an orphaning as upstream of debhelper, alien, dpkg-repack, and debmirror." Alien is a very important piece of software for those of us who deal with old Linux software, especially old commercial Linux software that comes packaged in shitty formats like RPM.
(Score: 1) by mverwijs on Saturday November 08 2014, @11:49PM
He is, amongst other things, the core developer of the Debian Installer....
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 09 2014, @12:25PM
Arguably debhelper is more important
(Score: 1) by fritsd on Sunday November 09 2014, @11:22PM
I once made a Debian package and debhelper was a godsend. (Not that I'm insinuating mr. Hess is divine BTW).
If you think about it, the number of different programs in the Debian distribution depends on the number of prospective Debian Developers that didn't find it too complicated, tiresome, or awkward to make a Debian package of some Linux program they liked.
17567 source packages in "Wheezy" (May 2013).