Hello! The MariaDB Foundation is seeking to get a Debian expert to work for them (plus if you are a DD). This is a great opportunity for Debian people to land a job/contract where they can work full-time on open source and with a big part of it related to Debian.
Check out: https://mariadb.org/debian-ubuntu-packaging-expert/ I got MariaDB 5.5 into Debian unstable back in 2013 and have been the main maintainer ever since. At one point I also worked for the MariaDB Foundation, but left a couple of years ago. I still maintain all my commitments to Debian, but only on a best-effort level. There is no crisis in MariaDB packaging. The Foundation is simply now investing in the area as one volunteer (me) is not enough, and I will continue to stay around. Current state of MariaDB, Galera and related packages in Debian and Ubuntu is very good. Despite it being a very large package and installed on about 10% of all Debian systems (according to popcon) it has a surprisingly low number of bugs (mariadb-10.3 in stable has _4_ and mariadb-10.5 in unstable has 35). It is a nice situation to start contributing to the work. The package is well documented with good commit history for the past 10 years, up-to-date README files for both maintainers and contributors and probably the most extensive Salsa-CI pipeline in all of Debian to ensure new commits don't regress anything (check out https://salsa.debian.org/mariadb-team/mariadb-10.5/-/pipelines/266998). The Debian packaging is also almost fully in sync with the upstream packaging in mariadb.org repositories, so this is a nice piece of software to work with, promise! Note that MariaDB Foundation is not looking for simply a maintainer, but that the work includes a lot of new development as well. MariaDB is constantly shipping new interesting features and you could have your say in them. If you are at all keen to do FOSS and MariaDB full-time, or if you have friends who might be interested, please check out https://mariadb.org/debian-ubuntu-packaging-expert/ or reach out to dan...@mariadb.org for more info. - Otto PS. I am a long-time entrepreneur in the open source scene, and everybody who works for me gets to spend a big share of their working time contributing to open source. If MariaDB Foundation turns you down, you can also ping me and ask for work opportunities.
