Hi all,
Haifux and Telux are two LUGs in Israel that promote information
sharing. In particular, we believe in making people learn new stuff by
committing to lecture about them :-). I entered such a commitment to
give a lecture called "The Debian QA system". The lecture's abstract
follows:
Debian is a community Linux distribution (and some say THE community
Linux distribution). It is most unique in having tens of thousands of
packages on one hand, and yet allowing a smooth end-user experience
in which every Debian package is a single "apt-get install" away on
the other. In order to achieve this goal, a complex set of strict QA
and developer certification procedure exists, which tries to make
sure, in as automatic a way as possible, that the debs packaged for
Debian will work.
This lecture will give an overview of debianizing an open source
project. More importantly, it will talk about the process a package
has to go through in order to be considered a part of Debian's "main"
archive, with a special focus on software QA processes.
(http://www.haifux.org)
Subjects I'm going to cover are:
1. The basics of creating a deb
2. Standard package naming and file locations
3. The Debian human hierchy (from the sponsored maintainers to
ftpmasters, possibly even up to DPL, if I'll think it's relevant).
4. The automatic QA tools (pbuilder, lintian, linda)
5. The tools that help keep it all together - dch, uscan, dupload,
dpkg-buildpackage
I'll also not lie, I'm doing this to help me learn the turf toward
becoming a DD myself.
Thing is, as mentioned above, I'm doing this in order to learn this.
I'd love to hear from the mentors here about any other tools that may
be worth looking into. Things I know I don't know include: someone
mentioned a tool for tracking the Debian directory in CVS and SVN.
There is an archive of all past Debian packages, which I can't seem to
locate.
Of course, there are also the things I don't know I don't know, and I
would love to hear about those as well.
Many thanks,
Shachar