Starting to play with packaging -- which release to use?

["Alejandro R. Mosteo" <alejandro@mosteo.com>]

Hello everybody,

I'm long due to contribute my robotic code to Debian, which is one of the goals of my PhD thesis. I talked about this long ago with Ludovic; he sent to me very useful pointers on how to get started.

I have two questions, though:

1) I understand that if I want to eventually become an official maintainer, I should package for the "unstable" version? That would be "sid"?

2) Is there some "usefulness" rule about the things included in the official Debian? I ask this because some of the things I want to contribute (e.g. the Ada binding to the already packaged robot-player C library) are quite obviously of interest for the robotic community, while some others (e.g. some parts that are very specific to my thesis, or my wide-scope "general purpose tools" library) are not. If that's not a good candidate for Debian addition, I could start right away improving the separation between these parts.

Thanks in advance,

Alex.