This page is for people who want to contribute technical work to Debian and that would like to work with me. If you don't have the time required for this, check out my support page instead. Feel free to contact me if you have any question.
Contribute to dpkg
- Skills required: Perl and/or C, git
Where to discuss: debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org (click to subscribe) or #debian-dpkg
Follow the instructions on Teams/Dpkg/Contribute for a start. Have a look at the other pages below Teams/Dpkg), they 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:
New features for dpkg-dev: 555743, 597340, 572128, 615940, 630342, 630344, 572216, 577113, 592839
New features for dpkg-maintscript-helper: 582873, 583585, 595112
Contribute to the developers-reference
- Skills required: good written English, docbook, svn
- Where to discuss: on bug reports against the package
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:
Retrieve the latest sources with debcheckout developers-reference.
Click here to subscribe to the package (don't forget to update the email before validating the form). You'll receive the bug traffic but also the SVN commit notices. If you're already subscribed to debian-policy@lists.debian.org, you can disable the bug traffic (keyword "bts" and "bts-control") since you already get them via the list.
Browse the bugs and pick one that you feel like fixing. Prepare the patch and send the result of svn diff.
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
- Skills required: Python, Perl, XSLT, shell, svn
Where to discuss: debian-qa@lists.debian.org (click to subscribe) or #debian-qa
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!).
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.
wordpress needs more man-power and a reliable backup maintainer. There many things to do to improve the package (see one of my suggestions in the section "Some personals wishlists").
quilt is in need of a new lead maintainer. All the upstream code is in bash. Upstream is not very active, you could even help there.
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.
Package stuff that I could use
- nothing right now