Hello, I am looking for a sponsor

[Sébastien Boisvert]

Hello,

I am looking for a sponsor.

I am Canadian, I know French, English, and many programming languages. I use Fedora 17 on
my Lenovo Thinkpad x230 and I have started using Linux in 2003 on a Red Hat 9 installation.
Over the years, I have used: Slackware, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, CentOS, Mint, Debian.

I strongly believe in free software for the common good of humanity. The biggest disease in
Windows(R) is the bundling of libraries in everything. Package dependencies solve the
bundling problem and is one of the biggest strengths of Linux distributions.

I like the "delta RPM" thing in yum, that's one of the reason I use Fedora.

I am a Ph.D. student doing high-performance computing. In particular, I write programs
in C++ 1998 using MPI 2.2. One of my creations is Ray -- a distributed de novo assembler
for genomics. [1]

My personal site is [2] and my github is [3]. My tools are vim, git, screen, ssh, gprof,
gdb, and the likes. I use git a lot. I don't like using Google Docs, I prefer emails and
terminals and LaTeX too.

According to the Fedora documentation [4], I can acquire sponsorship either by "Submitting quality
new packages" and/or by "Reviewing packages"  and/or "Become a co-maintainer".

The problem with packaging in bioinformatics is that a sizable number of software pieces
contains bundles (like Velvet ships with zlib for instance, and tophat ships with SeqAn if
I am not mistaken).

Reading Review Requests (bioinformatics) in Red Hat Bugzilla indicates that almost all
"blocked" packages contain too many bundles and they are simply too painful to sort out (because
of patchy bundles that differ from upstream, for instance).

Ray is a high-quality software, and it does not bundle any library (the famous bundling problem).
The only dependency are zlib, libbz2 and a mpi library (like openmpi).

I think in that regard that my new package [5] is of high-quality. Ray is on its way too
for being included in Debian [6], and Ubuntu too I believe.

As it can be seen on the Ray mailing list [7], I give good support for what I do.

So I need a sponsor for my package to be distributed by Fedora.

I can answer questions about myself as the sponsorship I am seeking is not for my Ray
package, but for me.

p.s.: I have a blog too [8] and my current array of research is about hybrid programming
models, particularly one called "mini-ranks" that I devised with some researchers when I
visited Argonne National Laboratory a few weeks ago. [9]

---
Sébastien Boisvert

[1] http://denovoassembler.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://boisvert.info/
[3] http://github.com/sebhtml
[4] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_get_sponsored_into_the_packager_group#Convincing_someone_to_sponsor_you
[5] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=872783
[6] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-med/ray.git
[7] http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=denovoassembler-users
[8] http://blog.boisvert.info/
[9] http://blog.boisvert.info/2012/11/new-mini-ranks-hybrid-programming-model.html