Re: Inquiry about GSoC 2025 Debian ROCm proposal

Hi Bo-Jun,

On Mar 26, 2025, at 11:25, 黃柏竣 <adopcarry@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Mr. Huang,

Sorry for the interruption. I am interested in the Debian ROCm GSoC project and have been researching to prepare my proposal. While doing so, I came across your GSoC report from last year, which led me to reach out to you.

I am a student and a team member at my department’s IT center, where I manage several mail servers, Proxmox VE machines, and a Slurm cluster running Debian. However, despite my experience with Debian, I am not very familiar with how Debian packages are built or which ROCm-related packages I should focus on.

As someone who participated in GSoC on this topic last year, I would greatly appreciate any guidance you can provide on where to start and which areas to focus on.

Thank you for your time!
--

Best regards,
黃柏竣 / Bo-Jun Huang

國立陽明交通大學資訊工程學系 (NYCU CS)

Department of Computer Science,

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Thanks for reaching out!

Your experience in Debian helps. And for Debian packages, the maintainer instruction [1] is a good starting place to learn how to package a software in Debian and the steps to include it in the official archives. And if you like to get your hands on, you can first setup the develop tools [2] including gbp [3] and sbuild [4].

For ROCm packages, you can inspect the current status of each packages already in Debian in the team QA page [5]. You can either choose to upgrade an existing package to its latest version or try to package a ROCm component not yet included in Debian.

Last but not least, it’s better to seek helps and discuss in the Debian ROCm team mailing list (in CC). Meanwhile, debian-mentors@l.d.o is also a good place where you can both ask and learn. Other mentors including Cory (CCed as well) can also help. And you can ask LLMs and I believe they can provide good answers for most entry-level questions.

Hope you enjoy your Debian trip!

Best,

Xuanteng

[1]: https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers/

[2]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debmake-doc/ch04.en.html

[3]: https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/git-buildpackage/gbp.1.en.html

[4]: https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild

[5]: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=debian-ai%40lists.debian.org

[6]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/