20 years of being a debian maintainer

fte (0.44-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * initial Release.

 -- Riku Voipio   Wed, 25 Dec 1996 20:41:34 +0200

Welp I seem to have spent holidays of 1996 doing my first Debian package. The process of getting a package into Debian was quite straightforward then. "I have packaged fte, here is my pgp, can I has an account to upload stuff to Debian?" I think the bureaucracy took until second week of January until I could actually upload the created package.

uid                  Riku Voipio 
sig          89A7BF01 1996-12-15  Riku Voipio 
sig          4CBA92D1 1997-02-24  Lars Wirzenius 

A few months after joining, someone figured out that to pgp signatures to be useful, keys need to be cross-signed. Hence young me taking a long bus trip from countryside Finland to the capital Helsinki to meet the only other DD in Finland in a cafe. It would still take another two years until I met more Debian people, and it could be proven that I'm not just an alter ego of Lars ;) Much later an alternative process of phone-calling prospective DD's would be added.