Interview with Ian Jackson

Figuring you can never get too much Ian Jackson, Trevelyan writes: "Debian Planet has an interview with the long time Debian maintainer, and a former DPL, a current member of the technical committee and the author of dpkg. Also announced Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r7 released. In case some of you thought Debian won't be releasing anything this year =)"

Comments

Ian Jackson and the Holy Grail...

[tlambert]

When I first joined the project, dpkg was a very evil shell script that was little more than a placeholder.

Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp.

"I wrote dpkg v2, a Perl script, because it was the thing that needed writing next."

So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.

"The current C dpkg is actually the third dpkg. I think there may have been parts of the Perl one that were done by someone else, but I basically wrote the Perl version, and wrote all of the C version."

So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp

"Around the introduction of the C version, the format was changed from the old `two lines of text and two gzipped tarfiles'. I wanted something more extensible, with room for some additional out-of-band metadata. I also wanted something you didn't need Debian-specific tools to unpack."

but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

-- Terry

You can never have...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Figuring you can never get too much Ian Jackson

Grins. That was not exactly my experience. I used to work with him whilst he was doing a summer job before he went to Cambridge. He didn't actually get fired or have to resign; but let's just say that at the time he was rather more interested in security than the system administrators would wish perhaps...

Anyway he matured loads at Cambridge; must have done, cos he's still alive ;-)

Bloody smart guy.