Hi, On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 12:19:23AM +0100, Richard van Roy wrote: > I'm a programmer with at least abdicate understanding of C++ and a long > time Debian user. At the moment I have a lot of free time and I wish to > spent this productively by aiding Debian in development. Great, welcome. :-) > I really do not have a clue where to start. I thought of taking over a > near dead package that was up for adoption. That's a good choice. Try to pick something you use yourself, and in a language that you understand. > But I really don't have a clue what my jobs as a maintainer are (And > I'm a little ashamed of that) Does it mean I have to remove bugs and > improve the package and coordinate others to do the same??? It all comes down to "keeping the package in a good shape". That means fixing bugs in the packaging (things like incorrect dependencies) and making sure bugs in the package are fixed (either by doing it yourself, or by asking "upstream" (the people who wrote the code) to do it). In Debian terminology, "feature requests" are called "wishlist bugs" and should also be fixed (although that can sometimes be done by saying "I don't agree that this is a useful feature" ;-) ). In many cases, you can of course also fix things which are not reported. You can always report them first yourself if it makes you happy. :-) In case of large bugs, and certainly security-related bugs, this is even a good idea for the sake of documentation. > Maybe if I don't even know what a maintainer is, it is not the time of > becoming one. Well, if you think it would be nice, you have some reading to do. No reason to stop before finding out what it is. :-) As was suggested already, you should read the new maintainer's guide. Eventually, you should also read the policy manual and the developers' reference. However, you can start working before you've read all that. Looking at the tables of contents when you're working on something is a good idea though. :-) All these documents can be found under http://www.debian.org/devel/. > Another thing (I think) is to help with the bugs and todo's of > packages, but this seems to me like a fast moving train, which is fine > by me, but I have no idea how to jump in and join the ride. That's QA stuff. Help is always very welcome there. :-) You don't even need any special permissions. Just read bug descriptions of release-critical bugs, and see if you can fix them. Lists of RC bugs can be found via http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/. In particular using the links on the bottom of the page. I think it may be better to do some packaging before fixing bugs, so you know how a package looks and what can be wrong with it. However, when fixing bugs in the upstream code, that is less of a concern. > So my question is, does anybody have any tips on how to “jump in the > train” like a sad before, I'm a good programmer but constantly when I > wish to join Debian I'm a bit confused or maybe overwhelmed. You should probably start with reading the new maintainer's guide. And then create some packages. First just package anything, it doesn't have to go into Debian. Or adopt an orphaned package (see NM guide about how to do that). When you have problems, you can ask them on this list or on irc (irc.debian.org, #debian-mentors). More more howto-style documentation, you can read things at http://wiki.debian.org/ (I think). Most importantly, remember to always do things you like to do. If you feel that things are not going the way you like them, and you are unable to do anything about it, go do something else. We're a volunteer project, and we shouldn't torture ourselves. Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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