This page is for people who want to contribute technical work to Debian and that would like to help me. If you don't have the time required for this, check out my support page.

Contribute to dpkg

Read Teams/Dpkg (and the other pages in that hierarchy) for a start, it contains many information about the organization of the team.

I would recommend you to start with dpkg-dev bugs, it's in Perl, it's probably easier for a start than attacking dpkg itself. I will be reactive in reviewing and merging patches for all dpkg-dev bugs.

Here some more precise suggestions for things that I want to see tackled:

Contribute to the developers-reference

This is an important document within Debian. Many developers file wishlist bugs to suggest new topics to cover. You could do the required research and draft a new section. Then send the corresponding patch to the bug.

How to start:

If you want to be able to work on multiple patches in parallel either you do several SVN checkouts or you learn how to use git-svn (I do use it for this package).

Contribute to the Package Tracking System

I am maintaining the Package Tracking System (read this link!). We always have many (wishlist) bug reports (they should be tagged "pts" in theory but some might have not yet been user-tagged, see qa.debian.org/bugs to learn how to user-tag them).

You can install the PTS on your own machine to develop new features, develop fixes and test your changes. I will gladly merge patches that have been tested, just send them to the BTS (in the corresponding bug reports!).

Help me develop SAT-britney

I have started to experiment with the proposal of Joachim Breitner on debian-release: http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/05/msg00191.html The idea is to replace the tool that manages testing (britney) with a software relying on SAT solvers to find the set of package that can migrate to testing.

You can get the code with git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/~hertzog/sat-britney.git (or browse it online). Continue where I left off.

You might want to read the full thread:

Some packages that need help

I am co-maintainer on the packages below only because they are important to me as a user but I would prefer to not be involved in the long term. The current maintainers need your help.

Some personal wishlists

Infrastructure to package wordpress themes and plugins

Having wordpress in Debian is great but anyone running Wordpress will always have a few custom themes and a dozen of plugins. None of those are packaged. We should create some wordpress packaging policy to make it possible to package those. And we need a tool similar to dh-make-perl that would make it easy to package plugins and keep them up-to-date.