From: Ludovic Brenta on
After Xavier Grave last month[1], Stephen Leake has just been promoted
to Debian Maintainer status[2]. Stephen has been my Padawan for more
than
a year and has been a key contributor to the upcoming Debian 6.0
"Squeeze"
stable release (current status at [3]), so it is with great pride and
gratefulness that I make this announcement.

Thanks in a large part to Stephe, the Debian Policy for Ada[4] has
received
a major update, raising the bar even higher for the quality of Ada
software
packages, to the point where other free software projects now look to
Debian for guidance and best practices[5].

After this major contribution, Stephe has adopted a few of my packages
and
added a new one to Debian. I have already added the DM-Upload-Allowed
flag
to his packages so that he can upload new versions of them to Debian
without supervision. This is a token of the trust I place in the
quality
of his work.

Here is a list of packages that Stephe currently maintains:

gnade -- GNu Ada Database Environment (adopted)
gprbuild -- a multi-language build tool (new)
libaunit -- AUnit, a unit test framework for Ada (adopted)
opentoken -- OpenToken lexical analysis for Ada (adopted)

In addition to his Debian packaging work, Stephe also contributes
upstream
to OpenToken (which he has also adopted as the main upstream
developer),
monotone and Emacs ada-mode.

Stephe shows great attention to detail, a deep understanding of the
Free
Software philosophy and, most of all, is a joy to work with. I have
already encouraged him to apply for the full Debian Developer status;
his
application is in progress but will take some more time.

Please join me in congratulating Stephe on this recognition of his
talent
and dedication.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-ada/2010/03/msg00000.html
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-ada/2010/03/msg00038.html
[4] http://people.debian.org/~lbrenta/debian-ada-policy.html
[5] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2009-November/057661.html

PS. No, this is not an April Fool's Day prank; it is for real!

--
Ludovic Brenta.