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Guidance for a Newbie wanting to contribute to Debian



Hi all,

Hopefully this is a good place to be posting this! Please feel free to
recommend a better place!

I'd like to start with a bit of background (as I think it sets the scene
for my more specific questions, however if it's all tl;dr my specific
questions are under the heading 'Specifics' lower down.

Background
----------
I have been using and playing with Debian/Ubuntu for many years
(probably about 7 or 8) and have been casually involved (as an active
community member) with TurnKey Linux[1] for most of that time. At the
start of this year I was offered a position with TurnKey (which I
happily accepted).

[1] http://turnkeylinux.org

Besides continuing to do what I have done, part of the position brief
was to foster greater community involvement, both upstream and downstream.

So as TurnKey is based on Debian it seems like a no brainer to get
involved with Debian more closely. But even after reading tons of info
about Debian development and the Debian community I am still unclear on
the best path to take; especially as I want to provide the best value
for TurnKey; but without making the Debian contribution just all about
TurnKey (i.e. I don't want it to be a disingenuous contribution to Debian).

We have a number of applications that we have developed that ultimately
we'd like to contribute back to the Debian repos. We package these
already but they are only available via our repo.

We also have a fork of a existing package that we'd like to contribute
the modifications back upstream (I guess perhaps that needs to go all
the way back upstream rather than just patch the Debian version?)

We have a couple of other third party apps which we package for our own
use which we could perhaps contribute to Debian.

Personally I don't have a lot of experience packaging apps although I
have used checkinstall to create debs for my own use. The existing
Turnkey Linux packages are made by Alon and Liraz (our core devs) but I
would be the one doing the bulk of the workload for our involvement with
Debian.

Specifics
---------
So my specific question(s) are:

-Where should I start?

-Should I first get involved and help with an existing package that our
distro uses? (I notice that there are a few RFH on packages that we include)

-Should I just jump straight in and start packaging our own apps for
inclusion in Debian?

-Any other suggestions on where would be the best place to start?

Any input is gladly accepted! :)

Regards,
Jeremy Davis
TurnKey Linux

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