Hallo, Planet Debian!

Hi!

I just created this blog and asked to get it aggregated to the Debian Planet, so first things first -- in the initial post I wanted to say Hallooooo! to the people in the community and to talk about my work and interests in Debian.

Probably most of you never interacted with or even heard of me before. I am contributor/Maintainer since ~2010 and Developer only for ~2 years, and most of the things that I worked in or packages that I maintain are "low profile" or unintrusive, except perhaps for work in aptitude and SDL libraries, if you happen to be interested in these packages or others that I [co-]maintain.

More recently, during 2014, I was helping to bootstrap and bring to life a new architecture, OpenRISC or1k. Perhaps I should devote a future post to explain a bit more about the history, status and news --or, lately, lack thereof-- about this port. This is one of the main reasons why I thought that it would be useful to have a blog -- to register activities for which it is difficult to get information by other means.

Apart from or1k, as it often happens with porting efforts in Debian, the work done also helped indirectly other architectures added last year (mips64el, arm64, ppc64el). Additionally, a few of my NMUs were directly targetted to help ppc64el to get ready in time for the architecture evaluation. None of the porters working in ppc64el were Debian Maintainers/Developers and some of the patches that they created did not benefit directly the other ports, so in the packages without active maintainers, the requests were not getting much attention in the crucial time before the evaluation. In some cases, these packages were in the critical path to build many other packages or support important user-case scenarios.

So I was very pleased when I learnt that arm64 and ppc64el will be in the next stable release --Jessie-- as officially supported architectures. They came without much noise or ceremonious celebrations, but I think that this is a great success story for these architectures and for Debian, and even for the computing world in general. Time will tell. In the meantime, congratulations to all people involved!

In addition to porting packages within Debian, I also sent some patches upstream to get the packages that I maintain compiling in the new architectures, and sent upstream patches needed to support or1k specifically (jemalloc, nspr, libgc, cmake, components of X.org...).

Enough for the first post.

Just to finish, let me say that after about a decade without a personal website or blog (the previous ones not about Debian or even computing), here I am again. Let's see how it goes and I hope to have enough interesting things to tell you to keep the blog alive.

Or, in other words... “To infinity… and beyond!”