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.
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- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
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Articles from blogs I follow around the net
The year of technoligarchy
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via Citation Needed January 7, 2026we are here. Performance at Beyond Tellerrand
This performance has been years in the making. In a sense, you could say it’s been a lifetime in the making. On November 6th, 2025, my brother Ian and I gave a “talk” at the amazing Beyond Tellerrand conference in […]
via Blog – Brad Frost January 7, 2026Pluralistic: Writing vs AI (07 Jan 2026)
Today's links Writing vs AI: If you wouldn't ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for you, why would you ask it to write a college essay? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: WELL State of the World; A poem in 30m logfiles; We…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow January 7, 2026Generated by openring