[Debian-in-workers] A Few Questions For Jaldhar H. Vyas

[Kartik Mistry]

Nice interview :)

Sent to you by Kartik Mistry via Google Reader: A Few Questions For
Jaldhar H. Vyas via DebianTimes on 5/6/09
A Few Questions For Jaldhar H. Vyas Who is Jaldhar H. Vyas?
I'm a 38 year old Gujarati-American male who lives in Jersey City, New
Jersey (A suburb of New York) with my wife Jyoti and my children
Shailaja (7) and Nilagriva (4).

My Debian blog is at http://www.braincells.com/debian/ but I should
warn you in advance it is mostly devoid of meaningful content :-)
How did you end up using Debian and becoming a DD?
Because I don't actually like computers. Growing up in the '70s we were
told computers were great. if you had any problem you could just say
“let's ask the computer!” and Sentinel One or whoever would appear as a
hologram and instantly tell you the answer. Or maybe they were lovable
wisecracking robots. But we were lied to. Real computers turned out to
be neither lovable nor cute and they maddeningly refused to do what
they were told for incomprehensible reasons. From the very beginning I
had the urge to take the lid off and try to understand what was going
on in these mysterious boxes in the hopes of somehow beating them into
submission.

Way back in college in the early '90s I managed to stumble across the
Internet (just in time for the dot-com boom.) Naturally I wanted to
learn more about it and how it worked and that meant learning Unix.
Even if you used Windows, you used ports of Unix software so there was
no way around it. The trouble is Unix was expensive and ran on exotic
hardware far beyond the purchasing power of a destitute student. Thus
when I heard that there was a free clone of Unix that could run on a
386 pc, I was very interested. When I learned it came with full source
code that you could tinker with as much as you wished it was like a
dream come true. So I cleared up some space on my massive 40MB hard
drive for a version of Slackware which was the only decent distribution
at the time.

I played around with that for a while until the time came when Linux
swtiched from the a.out to the ELF binary format. This process had to
be done manually and I somehow managed to botch it completely. Since I
had to reinstall my system anyway, I decided to take a look at some of
the new distributions which were out there. I must confess my reasons
for choosing Debian were utterly superficial. Red Hat is boring; Suse
is a girls name; Debian on the other hand sounded science-fictionish to
me.

After using Debian for a while I was whining about some trivial thing
or another on the Debian users mailing list and Bruce Perens who was
the project leader challenged me to stop complaining and fix the
problem myself. I decided to do so and the rest, as they say, is
history. By the way, there was no complicated process to become a
Debian Developer in those days. You just told Bruce you wanted to work
on the project and what you wanted as your login name and a little
while later you would get an account on master.debian.org and you could
upload packages.
How are you currently involved in the Debian project?
At the moment I am not spending as much time on Debian as I would like
to but it still atleast a few minutes every day. In the past I have
been employed to work on Debian full time.

Apart from packaging, I have written documentation, represented Debian
at trade shows, conferences, and user groups and mentored prospective
new maintainers. One initiative I started which I am particularly proud
of is Debian-IN. This is a group of people interested in promoting
Debian and Free Software in India. Activities include maintaining
packages of cultural interest to Indians, advocaing the use of Debian
and increasing the number of Indian Debian developers. An operating
system that is free, flexible and doesn't drain money in crippling
license fees is a good fit for an emerging nation like India. Plus we
have lots of IT talent so we can give something back to the rest of the
world too.
How do you currently use Debian?
I work as a consultant webmaster/sysadmin/Perl developer and I try to
use Debian or atleast Ubuntu whenever possible. I maintain several
websites and mailing lists related to aspects of the Hindu religion and
they all run on Debian. My personal laptop runs Ubuntu and Debian (naq
bapr va n oyhr zbba Jvaqbjf Ivfgn ohg qba'g gryy nalbar!)
What do you do when you're not working on Debian?
I come from a Hindu priestly family and I am a scholar of Sanskrit,
preacher and very occasionally priest for weddings etc. This and being
a father take up nearly all my spare time but when I can squeeze in a
few minutes I am an avid reader of fantasy/sci-fi. I prefer authors
like Frank Herbert, Phillip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, or Neal
Stephenson. I.e. the kind that create whole civilizations and tackle
philosophical issues rather than those that focus on technology or
laser fights with aliens.

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