Hello, Planet Debian. My blog was added to the Planet today, so I think the polite thing is to introduce myself before you start finding my posts between yours.
I am Juan Manuel Méndez Rey, from Sevilla. In Debian I am mendezr, and on OFTC I am Vejeta. I have been using Linux since 1994 and Debian since 1998. For a long time that was all: a happy user, installing, breaking things, reading the mailing lists from the outside. I started contributing in October 2025, and last month I became a Debian Maintainer.
A friend and an old RFP
The way in was a friend. Back in 2019 Arturo Borrero Gonzalez filed RFP #943703 for Stremio, and for years he kept telling me I should pick it up. In September 2025 I finally listened and turned it into an ITP. It took longer than I like to admit, but Stremio is now in Debian, and I told that story here. A six year old RFP turned out to be a very good first package.
Rescuing old software
Somewhere along the way I discovered that what I enjoy most is bringing old software back.
The first one came from tille, who asked for help in #debian-tinytasks with xwpe, a Borland style programming editor for the terminal that nobody was looking after. I adopted it, and then I ended up as its upstream maintainer too. I fixed the old bugs and added LSP and DAP, so now an editor from 1993 can debug Go. It ships on several distributions, in Homebrew and on the BSDs. The canonical repo is on Codeberg, and the long version is in this post.
The second one is older and took much longer. Conquer is a Unix strategy game written by Ed Barlow and Adam Bryant in 1987, and I lost many hours of my youth to it. It never had a free licence. I first asked about it on debian-legal in October 2006, and I spent the next 20 years tracking down the authors, one email at a time. Today Conquer v4 and V5 are GPL-3.0. It is not packaged in Debian yet, that is the next step, but you can already play it in the browser.
What I am doing now
CEF took me six months and brought me into the Chromium team, and these days I am mostly with the syft, trivy and grype security stack and with Scala 3 and sbt for Debian.
Thanks
To Arturo, for the nudge. To dilinger, tille and tsimonq2, my DM advocates, for trusting me.
And if you can sponsor uploads for syft, trivy, grype or the Scala work, I would be very grateful. The details are on my wiki page.
You can find me there, as Vejeta on OFTC, or on Mastodon as @vejeta@mastodon.sdf.org. Nice to meet you all.