The Developer Identity
Maia is walking through her FOSS participation—confident, triumphant. I’ve switched completely in Ubuntu, got a patch for AUTHORS merged into Arora, changed the name in two of my three Debian packages (the third is pending a cosmetic lintian-cleanliness upload), and I’m considering updating gtkpod as well.
Perhaps this is part of a psychological campaign to distance from my past self, and to give the new identity a semblance of reality. The more people know me as Maia, the more natural and right it feels.
Still, in the domain of abstract thoughts, I found myself musing over this line from my latest Debian upload for smplayer. When a sponsor pointed out that I used three different name-email pairs in the old package, new package, and RFS email (I since configured Maia to be my default sender name in Thunderbird and the Gmail web interface), I inserted this line into debian/changelog:
- Changed maintainer name (still the same person and GPG key).
That got me thinking: what am I to the Debian and Ubuntu developers, at large? What identity matters the most? Maia, sikon@ubuntu.com, launchpad.net/~sikon, or FB21C80A?
One of the points I’m going to make in That Twoform Story™ is how Internet patterns bleed into the real world there, and people start referring to each other by online nicknames, even in person. Some fellow Polymex users actually call me LucidFox in real life. But what if we went even further, and displaced conventional names by some kind of “hard” identity, like the aforementioned GPG keys?
…I need sleep.
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