Ben Rosser
Some notes about me and what I think about Fedora:
I'm currently a physics PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. (As an undergrad, I also picked up a CS degree). I've been running Fedora since 2011 and programming in Python for about that long.
I use the KDE editions of Fedora almost exclusively.
I contribute to Fedora because I want to make it easy for other people to install software that I, personally, want to install on Fedora and find unavailable in our repositories. I think that distribution package management is generally the "right" way to install software on a system (which is why I became a packager to begin with).
While I believe in Free and Open Source Software, I think it is important we recognize that occasionally, people want to install nonfree software, or free software unavailable in Fedora for whatever reason. We don't have to endorse third-party repositories, but we shouldn't pretend they are not key parts of the Fedora ecosystem for many users.
Contact
FAS: tc01 (I made a poor decision at the time)
Email: rosser dot bjr at gmail.com
IRC: TC01, sometimes TC02 also. You can find me in many fedora- channels, among other places.
Packages maintained
Note: this may not be a complete list. Check here for a completely accurate one.
- The tilp2/libti stack for communicating with Texas Instruments graphing calculators.
- The Adobe cmap resources.
- python-pdfminer.
- The python-seesaw toolkit, and its dependency, python-sockjs-tornado
- The elog logbook server and client.
Things being worked on
Personal wishlist
Things I have looked into packaging briefly and may intend to have a more serious go at later, but don't exist yet in bugzilla.
- flaskbb, as a nice piece forum software not written in PHP.
- quassel-webserver, as I use quassel and the web client is quite useful. Although this may require many nodejs libraries.
- quasselgrep, as it is the primary tool for searching and querying Quassel backlogs.
- snorenotify, so I can add snore support to Quassel (probably via a COPR build of quassel with snore enabled).
- opam, the OCaml package manager. This was attempted recently but seems to have been abandoned. I'm not sure I'll ever get to working on this.
- discord-irc, a (nodejs) bridge between Discord and IRC. Unfortunately this requires a large stack of nodejs dependencies.
If you happen to be interested in seeing any of the above stuff land in Fedora, let me know! I'd be happy to co-maintain and/or review other people's packages.
Interests in Fedora
SIGs
Other Areas
- As a member of the Texas Instruments graphing calculator hacking community, I want to make sure any FOSS software written for interacting with graphing calculators is available in Fedora.
- As an avid Dwarf Fortress player, I would like to see the FOSS tooling built up around Dwarf Fortress (a nonfree but redistributable game) made available in Fedora where possible.
- As a user and occasional contributor to the Quassel distributed IRC client, I'd like to see related utilities made available in Fedora.