Debichem is a team effort to package and maintain chemistry-related packages in Debian GNU/Linux. It was founded by Michael Banck in 2005/2006. Until then packages usually had been maintained by a single person or a small group and packaging files had been stored locally. With the availability of the Alioth service a platform had been created, which introduced the concept of team maintenance to everyone invloved in Debian by providing

  • different versions control systems (VCS) like CVS, SVN and later GIT to centrally store the packaging files and
  • mailing lists for user and developer discussions and to collect bug mails at a central place.

In these early years I already maintained a few chemistry related packages, like my own chemical-mime-data or the GNOME chemistry utils and had contact with Michael. So I immediately joined this team effort. Over the years I’ve been a key maintainer for several other packages like ShelXle, GAMGI or Gabedit and helped packaging a lot more.

As of the time of writing I’m still part of this team, that is now located on Salsa - which replaced Alioth - and maintains more than 70 packages, and also handled the subversion-to-git migration.