15th Anniversary of My First Debian Upload

Time flies! 15 years ago, on 2010-03-18, my first upload to the Debian archive was accepted. Debian had replaced Windows as my primary OS in 2005, but it was only when I saw that package zd1211-firmware had been orphaned that I thought of becoming a contributor. I owned a Zyxel G-202 USB WiFi fob that needed said firmware, and as is so often is with open-source software, I was going to scratch my own itch. Bart Martens thankfully helped me adopt the package, and sponsored my upload.

I then joined Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña as a cron maintainer and upstream, and also worked within the Debian Python Applications, Debian Python Modules, and Debian Science Teams, where Jakub Wilk and Yaroslav Halchenko were kind enough to mentor me and eventually support my application to become a Debian Maintainer.

Life intervened, and I was mostly inactive in Debian for the next two years. Upon my return in 2014, I had Vincent Cheng to thank for sponsoring most of my newer work, and for eventually supporting my application to become a Debian Developer. It was around that time that I also attended my first DebConf, in Portland, which remains one of my fondest memories. I had never been to an open-source software conference before, and DebConf14 really knocked it out of the park in so many ways.

After another break, I returned in 2019 to work mostly on Python and machine learning libraries. In 2020, I finally completed a process that I had first started in 2012 but had never managed to finish before: converting cron from source format 1.0 (one big diff) to source format 3.0 (quilt) (a series of patches). This was a process where I converted 25 years worth of organic growth into a minimal series of logically grouped changes (more here). This was my white whale.

In early 2023, shortly after the launch of ChatGPT which triggered an unprecedented AI boom, I started contributing to the Debian ROCm Team, where over the following year, I bootstrapped our CI at ci.rocm.debian.net. Debian's current tooling lack a way to express dependencies on specific hardware other than CPU ISA, nor does it have the means to run autopkgtests using such hardware. To get autopkgtests to make use of AMD GPUs in QEMU VMs and in containers, I had to fork autopkgtest, debci, and a few other components, as well as create a fair share of new tooling for ourselves. This worked out pretty well, and the CI has grown to support 17 different AMD GPU architectures. I will share more on this in upcoming posts.

I have mentioned a few contributors by name, but I have countless others to thank for collaborations over the years. It has been a wonderful experience, and I look forward to many years more.