Lev Lazinskiy

Becoming a Debian Developer

I’ve been using debian for as long as I remember. I’ve always wanted to play a more active role in debian development but for whatever reason I never got around to it. Now that I am 30, older, wiser, I am starting a new push to become a debian developer.

So far I have gotten involved in the debian-qa team. Specifically I have been working on fixing some of the newcomer bugs on the distro-tracker project. It’s actually been really fun. The code base is django which I am pretty comfortable with. For the first time in many years, I have been rushing home after work so that I could keep hacking on the bugs that I am working on.

Code contributions are one thing. The thing that I am going to need more practice on is debian packaging itself. This is pretty complex process and I think that becoming someone who can debug and perform packaging issues would bring a lot of value to the project.

I am going to start working on some of the RC bugs (which typically involve at least re-packaging software) to get more comfortable with how other folks have been doing packaging.

In the next few months I would love to bring a new package through it’s full lifecycle.

I hope to be able to look back on this blog post in the future and see how far I have come.