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Debian Developers' Corner

The information on this page, while public, will primarily be of interest to Debian developers.


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Debian Organization
The organization has many access points, and many people. This page explains who to contact about a specific aspect of Debian, and tells you who might respond.
The People
This is a comprehensive listing of all the Debian developers associated with packages they maintain.
Joining Debian
The Debian Project consists of volunteers, and we are generally looking for new developers who have some technical knowledge, an interest in free software, and some free time. You too can help Debian, just see the page linked above.
Developer Database
The database contains basic data accessible to everybody, and the more private data available only for other developers to see. Use the SSL version to access it if you're going to log in.

Using the database, you can see the list of project machines, get any developer's GPG key, change your password or learn how to set up mail forwarding for your Debian account.

If you are going to be using one of the Debian machines make sure you have read the Debian Machine Usage Policies.

The Constitution
The document of utmost importance to the organization, describing the organisational structure for formal decision-making in the Project.
Voting Information
Everything you ever wanted to know on how we elected our leaders, chosen our logos and in general, how we vote.

 
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Releases
This is the list of old and current releases, some of which have detailed information on separate web pages.

You can also jump directly to the stable release area, and unstable distribution area.

Different Architectures
Debian runs on many kinds of computers (not only the Intel-compatible ones!), and maintainers of our `ports' have some useful web pages. Take a look, maybe you'll want to get another weirdly named piece of metal for yourself.
Release Critical Bugs
This is a list of bugs which may cause the package to be removed from the frozen distribution, or in some cases even cause a delay in releasing the distribution. Bug reports with a severity higher than `serious' qualify for the list -- be sure to fix such bugs against your packages as soon as you can.

Also take a look at the list of bugs more than two years old, and help us fix them.

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Debian Policy Manual
This manual describes the policy requirements for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. This includes the structure and contents of the Debian archive, several design issues of the operating system, as well as technical requirements that each package must satisfy to be included in the distribution.

In short, you need to read it.

There are several policy-related documents you might be interested in, such as:

  • Packaging Manual
    The Packaging manual describes the technical aspects of creating packages, and procedures in it are mostly required to have proper packages.
  • Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS)
    The FHS is a list of directories (or files) where things have to be put, and compatibility with it is required by Policy 3.x.
  • List of build-essential packages
    The build-essential packages are packages you are expected to have before you try to build any package, or a set of packages that you don't have to include in your package's Build-Depends line.
  • Menu system
    Programs that have an interface that need not be passed any special command line arguments for normal operation should have a menu entry registered.
  • Emacs policy
    The packages related to Emacs are expected to abide by their own sub-policy documents.
  • Java policy
    The proposed equivalent for the above, for Java-related packages.

Take a look at proposed updates to Policy, too.

Lintian reports
Lintian is a program that checks whether your package is policy-comforming or not. You should use it before every upload; there are reports on the aforementioned page about every package in the distribution.
Developers' Reference
The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the recommended procedures and the available resources for Debian developers. Another must-read.
Incoming directory
Instead of the hassle of ssh-ing into ftp-master.debian.org to get something from the incoming directory, you can now access it over HTTP. Note: Due to the nature of Incoming, we do not recommend mirroring it.
Packages that need help
Work-Needing and Prospective Packages, WNPP for short, is a list of packages in need of new maintainers and prospective packages in Debian. Check it out if you want to create, adopt or orphan packages.

 
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Debian is a large group, and as such, it consists of several internal groups and projects. Here are the most prominent ones:

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Converting PGP keys to GPG:
There is information on this in the developers' reference. You can get some more useful information from /usr/doc/debian-keyring/README.gz on signing a GPG key with a PGP one.

Assorted links:

Here are some interesting external links:


Back to the Debian Project homepage.
See the Debian contact page for information on contacting us.

Last Modified: Sat, Dec 2 19:42:52 UTC 2000
Copyright © 1997-2000 SPI; See license terms