Attempting to join the cult of the swirl

Several people have encouraged me to become a Debian maintainer, mostly so that I can package my own code when it's ready and not have to deal with stale packages managed by others. Plus, it'll let said other people off the hook so they can do more useful stuff. Bdale finally convinced me and so my life as a minion of the swirl begins.

The new maintainer queue took a mere 6 weeks until my name bubbled to the top and I was assigned to a application manager. Turns out the hard part of the application process is just answering a few questions about how to create debian packages and deal with the arcana of the debian bug tracking system.

I'm through the Policies and Procedures, and now have to answer a list of 30 some questions on Tasks and Skills. Towards this end, I've finished up the debianizing of nickle. Making that pass both automakes 'distcheck' and debians 'lintian' tools (without warnings) was a bit of work, but not impossible. DanielS has promised to check out the package and upload it to usable if it works.

Tomorrow, I get to spend a bunch of time answering the questions and hoping that my AM is happy with the results. If so, I may actually get my tatoo in a month or so. We'll see.