Most of the money you see in and around Free / Open Source Software, Hardware and other projects is in the hands of large companies, groups and self styled organisations, with little or none reaching the actually contributors/maintainer/developers of your favourite projects who actually do the day to day work.
If you wish to support my efforts, please click on the image below to donate.
If you wish to use MiniDLNA on Debian using the distribution provided package, please be aware of the following.
Due to the poor maintenance and overall quality of the package a serious issue remains unresolved. The systemd service file provided by the package does not wait for network connections to be ready before it attempts to start. It should really wait for network-online.target before starting.
You can always edit the service file and fix this issue if you wish to use the package.
Apologies for little activity recently. Severe pain stemming from my spinal stenosis in my neck and fybromyalgia enhancing that pain, it has not been a good time for me. Any future disappearances are likely due to this.
After the wiring loom was changed in my brand new electric wheelchair, it is now working correctly - fingers crossed.
Enterprise Linux has always been my primary place of contribution, though some may think that it was Debian, it wasn't. Over and above other work, I am looking to get more astronomy packages through to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) from Fedora. Be patient as this is a slow process and a little more strict with EPEL 10 and point releases.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) does not contain certain packages that have been previously available such as LibreOffice. This makes Enterprise Linux (EL) 10 a hard option to promote for desktop/general use. I am currently digging to see if this and other packages are to be built for EPEL or would it take a rebuild project such as Alma Linux with appetite to build it and make it available to users.
One musing of mine of late, should Canonical break free of merging packages from Debian and maintain it's own code base of packages. Starting with a tier system, begin with a set of core packages and then take sole control of other packages their customers need as part of their standard user and enterprise offerings.
I have other things that I shall get into later - Mainly EL related.
Another night of broken sleep and have woken to many emails expunging me from Debian with my packages being orphaned and requests to remove me from "Uploaders" on others. This task fell to Tobias Frost to do and is an end to the discrimination and bullying I have suffered for the past year or so.
Anyone sponsoring or given public support to the Debian Project, I would ask them to think about withdrawing it.
With my blocking from the Debian Community and its infrastructure, I have setup a Mantis bug tracker instance at Kathenas Tracker to track the upstream and GNU Linux Distribution projects I have an interest in.
You may wish to help, so feel free to create an account and let's do our little bit for these projects.
I am no longer affiliated with the Debian Project. This decision is after continuously finding out the project has no idea about fairness, standards and that the project fails to answer for itself to groups or individuals about its operation and decisions.
The project speaks of diversity, but has none.
The project speaks of equality, but has none.
Culture of zero responsibility.
My contributions if to Debian packages in no way means I support the project and its poor practices and rules.
Sponsors of Debian events and conferences need to pause and ask themselves if they wish to be associated with such a project.
Update: 2025-10-03
Peaceful protest against the project and stating I will contact sponsors has me now banned from certain parts of the Debian infrastructure and community.
This only hurts projects I worked on. Banning me from Salsa is childish and shows you exactly how Debian is run these days. Time for change.
My Debian activity currently is restricted to the packages I do maintain and those I choose to maintain. I am here to support new and existing upstream projects I have built great working relationships with over years. I would feel extremely bad if I abandoned these good people.
Debian Mentors was a great passion. I was privileged to mentor and assist in other ways, new contributors and those building up their reputation within the project as a whole. I am sad to say that I shall not be returning to Debian Mentors while I see bullying and discrimination by a minority within the Debian Project. I can only apologise to those who will now wait months for any help within Debian Mentors.
I do contribute to the Debian Project, but I do not align myself with the project, I am independent.
graphviz is a large mature project primarily coded in C. Sadly the current maintainer is not using the graphviz Salsa repository that already exists in the debian group.
This current situation is restricting any chance of collaborative development/maintenance of the package. This really needs to be rectified.
Update: 2025-09-07
For context, I filed the bug below in November 2024.
Since deciding to stop Debian contribution in the area of Debian Mentors, I have not been idle. I have been doing commits for packages I maintain and also contribute to i.e. upstream projects and other activities that include Ubuntu bug squashing etc.
With my disabilities, it is important to face challenges be they during my daily activities or within the Free/Open Source Software community. These challenges are hard, fun and make me feel useful.
