Becoming a Debian developer

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

NewForge has a nice article on becoming a Debian developer.

The article gives nice insights into the process of becoming a Debian developer. It’s not as easy as it seems. I know some people that know some people that are Debian developers, and I’ve heard about the keysiging thing before. For some reason, I always thought that would be the hardest part of becoming a Debian developer. (The article does stress the importance of an advocate btw). But when I read about things like this:

My P&P [Debian Philosophy and Procedures] questions started with the necessary stuff about understanding the Debian Social Contract and the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines). Then they moved on to some fairly difficult questions about licensing issues. Then there were a long string of questions about details of the normal Debian practises for things like handling bug reports, non-maintainer uploads, internationalisation of packages, and so on.
The testing of knowledge about the P&P shouldn’t be that hard. I’ve read them a bunch of times, and I’ve got the impression that I know what the soul of Debian is all about. But presenting soon-to-be-or-not-to-be developers licensing issues is an actual test of your understanding of (and compassion for ) the Debian project’s goals. I’m not sure what kind of questions they ask, but they will probably be a mix between tough legal and moral problems. Then again, apparentelly you get to do it over and over again until you get it right.

Personally I have no desire to become a Debian developer. To be honest, it seems that being a Debian developer takes up enormous ammounts of time, which I simply don’t have.