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Re: Remote supervised internship / mentorship inquiry



Asif,

On Friday, December 5, 2025 2:11:15 AM Mountain Standard Time Md. Asif Hossain 
wrote:
> Sir, I want to take this one: ibus-avro: IBus engine for Avro Phonetic
> <https://bugs.debian.org/1121687> (package info
> <https://packages.debian.org/src:ibus-avro>) orphaned since 4 days. Can you
> help me please? Or, do I look for another one?

This is a good package to start with.  It has a few small things that need to 
be fixed, but nothing too hard.

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ibus-avro

The above website is a good place to see everything important about a package.

The first thing we need to do is get a build environment setup on your system 
and build the current version of the package.  Then we can make changes.

From the above website, we can see that the packaging repository is located on 
Salsa (Debian’s GitLab instance).

https://salsa.debian.org/input-method-team/ibus-avro

As this is your first package, I would recommend you create an account on 
Salsa (it takes a little bit of time for your account to be approved), fork 
the repository, and work in your fork.  Later, when you are more experienced, 
you can just work in the main repository when adopting a package.

There are many, many, many workflows for Debian packaging.  To keep things 
simple, I am going to only describe to you the one that is most commonly used.  
Later, when you are more experienced, you can look at other options to see if 
they suite you.  I say this as a disclaimer, because otherwise any piece of 
advice I give in the next section could immediately elicit responses of “you 
could also do it this way”.  Those responses are sometimes helpful, but can 
often be confusing for someone doing things for the first time.

The workflow I am going to recommend to you is to use git-buildpackage (a git-
centric workflow) with "sbuild unshare" doing the actual building.

There is a lot to know about git-buildpackage.  I would recommend you read 
over the following documentation, but don’t worry if not everything makes 
sense to you.  What you need to know right now is we are going to use 
pristine-tar and sbuild.

https://wiki.debian.org/PackagingWithGit

The above should explain how to setup git-buildpackage (abbreviated gbp).  
Follow the wiki below to setup sbuild.

https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild

Once you have done so, create a parent directory for ibus-avro, and then use 
“gbp clone” (not “git clone”) inside of that directory to clone the 
repository.  cd to that cloned repository and run “gbp buildpackage”.  It will 
prompt you to install any missing packages that you need to run the clean 
target for the package.  Then run “gbp buildpackage” again, and, if everything 
is setup correctly, it should build (the output of the build is created in the 
parent directory).

For a little more background on gbp, see the following two emails, one of 
which I wrote just recently and the other a while back.  Neither of them are 
comprehensive, but both will probably be helpful to you.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2025/12/msg00040.html

https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2024/09/msg00057.html

-- 
Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org

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