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Re: Package maintainers, I feel like such an outsider



Am Dienstag, den 26.04.2016, 19:54 +0000 schrieb Wayne Booth:
> Hi all,
> 
> Sorry for this little lost sheep mail, but even after pouring over
> the
> documentation many times, I really cant find a solution to my issue.
> 
> I'm a developer of some 3rd party applications, one of which is
> getting
> some traction with a wider audience. For some time I've looked at
> documentation and articles about how to get a package into the Debian
> repositories. Unfortunately, with no luck - since it seems to me that
> I
> need to have some relationships with people at Debian, that have
> access.
> (?)

Of course all the documentation is available without restrictions, but
soetimes they might not be easy to be found. Let me post the usual
links :)
http://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers
http://mentors.debian.net/qa
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
(if you are upstream yourself: https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide ;)

But of course the debian-mentors mailling list is also a good place to
ask questions, but you've found it already.

> Recently, I found that one of the libraries I use has just dropped
> off the
> Debian repositories (
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=751916). This kills
> the
> USP for my application. I can provide a .deb to my users for my app,
> but
> cannot for the requisite libraries.
> 
> So, my question is this. Is there anything I can do, as someone with
> no
> special merit or connections at Debian, but with time, technical
> skill and
> the motivation to see this happen, to get the "pHash" re-included
> into the
> repositories?

> And, second (to a lesser degree for now) start the ball rolling in
> getting
> my application into the repositories?
> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Everyone started with no special connections to Debian :)
I propose browsing the docs above, taking a look at similar packages,
and go into packaging and present your work to mentors by uploading it
and open up a RFS bug against pseudo-package sponsorship-requests.

Then it might take a little time (as we are all volunteers), but
eventually you will get some review / feedback. It will be ugly the
first iterations, but with a steep learning curve. 
I saw that for libphash the repository still exists, so this is
definitly a starting point (even if it'd needs overhaul, I didn't
check)

Do you plan also to package your 3rd party app?
(libphash is GPL-3 so I assume your app is also FLOSS)

> (I originally posted this question on debian-users (
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/04/msg00947.html), who sugg
> ested
> it was more appropriately directed here. There was also some
> interesting
> feedback from 'Thomas Schmitt', who suggested that if I could fix the
> outstanding bugs, and bring the code up to the current upstream
> version,
> things would get moving. I can certainly do that, but wouldn't know
> how to
> progress from there.)
> 
> Many many thanks.
> 
> Wayne Booth.


-- 
tobi


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