Re: Newbie Looking to Contribute to Debian HPC

What kind of skills do you have or wish to develop?

The main challenges are clearing old bugs (a janitor task that’s useful both in itself, and training);

We need to put together CI/CD pipelines on Salsa for MPI and GPU related testing;

There is also new components to package, such as UCC (https://github.com/openucx/ucc)

Regards

Alastair

From: Peter Wienemann <wiene@debian.org>
Date: Sunday, 26 January 2025 at 19:13
To: Gonzalo Silvalde Blanco <gonzalo.silvalde@gmail.com>
Cc: Debian HPC team <debian-hpc@lists.debian.org>
Subject: 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://scanner.topsec.com/?d=3313&r=auto&u=https%3A%2F%2Ftracker.debian.org%2Fteams%2Fdebian-hpc&t=cab2fc6eb4f98c897558d8c2a8e984e50a1940b6

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://scanner.topsec.com/?d=3313&r=auto&u=https%3A%2F%2Fdep-team.pages.debian.net%2Fdeps%2Fdep14%2F&t=70ec9f5ad975965022a11e7b67cdc0e119156c9e
[1] https://scanner.topsec.com/?d=3313&r=auto&u=https%3A%2F%2Fhonk.sigxcpu.org%2Fprojects%2Fgit-buildpackage%2Fmanual-html%2F&t=a82998c76613204cf003e0b9555ab0308391bf4f
[2] https://scanner.topsec.com/?d=3313&r=auto&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.debian.org%2Fsbuild&t=5ad1b53199dbdbd93875dc0b7e73314c214c7f52
[3] https://scanner.topsec.com/?d=3313&r=auto&u=https%3A%2F%2Fsalsa.debian.org%2Fhpc-team%2F&t=3a7ae75dce773c2de7cc31a96a4e83acb5c6c39f
[4] https://scanner.topsec.com/?d=3313&r=auto&u=https%3A%2F%2Fmanpages.debian.org%2Funstable%2Fdevscripts%2Fdebdiff.1.en.html&t=09aeaa8402705b42b3bcf7a3916fdf9d865ce38f
[5] https://scanner.topsec.com/?d=3313&r=auto&u=https%3A%2F%2Fbugs.debian.org&t=0c16f3dab2344822362d9c208b3f883f1f4f8ffa