Re: Newbie Looking to Contribute to Debian HPC
Hi Gonzalo,
On 2025-01-22 18:21:02, Gonzalo Silvalde Blanco wrote:
I’d really like to contribute, but I’m a total beginner when it comes to
open source contributions. I’m not sure where to start or what kind of
tasks might be suitable for someone like me, but I’m eager to learn and
happy to help with anything—whether that’s documentation, testing, or small
development tasks.
If you could point me in the right direction or share any resources for
beginners, I’d be super grateful.
it is great to hear that you are looking for opportunities to contribute.
A good starting point might be to look for packages maintained by the
HPC team that need some care. e. g. because there are open bugs or where
new upstream versions have not been packaged yet. A good overview
provides the Debian package tracker:
https://tracker.debian.org/teams/debian-hpc
Most HPC team packages use a repository layout which is described by DEP
14 [0] (or something close to it) which allows easy package building
with a tool called git-buildpackage [1]. To test package building it is
recommmended to run the build process in a clean build environment which
is identical for each test build and separated from your everyday
working environment. A possible tool to set up such an environment is
sbuild [2] which (these days) runs the builds in separate kernel
namespaces if you follow the instructions on the wiki page.
The referenced documentation assumes a certain familiarity with tools
like git and Debian systems in general.
You can provide improvements either as merge requests on salsa [3] or as
debdiff files [4] in the bug tracking system [5] - whatever you feel
more comfortable with.
If you have more specific questions (e. g. because the above
documentation assumes too much previous knowledge), do not hesitate to ask.
Best regards
Peter
[0] https://dep-team.pages.debian.net/deps/dep14/
[1] https://honk.sigxcpu.org/projects/git-buildpackage/manual-html/
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/hpc-team/
[4] https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/devscripts/debdiff.1.en.html
[5] https://bugs.debian.org
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