This step is usually known as the Philosophy & Procedures (P&P for short) in the lingo of the developers involved in the new maintainer process.
15.4.2.4. Checking Skills
Each application to become an official Debian developer must be justified. Becoming a project member requires showing that this status is legitimate, and that it facilitates the candidate's job in helping Debian. The most common justification is that being granted Debian developer status eases maintenance of a Debian package, but it is not the only one. Some developers join the project to contribute to porting to a specific architecture, others want to improve documentation, and so on.
This step represents the opportunity for the candidate to state what they intend to do within the Debian project and to show what they have already done towards that end. Debian is a pragmatic project and saying something is not enough, if the actions do not match what is announced. Generally, when the intended role within the project is related to package maintenance, a first version of the prospective package will have to be validated technically and uploaded to the Debian servers by a sponsor among the existing Debian developers.
COMMUNITY Sponsoring
Debian developers can “sponsor” packages prepared by someone else, meaning that they publish them in the official Debian repositories after having performed a careful review. This mechanism enables external persons, which have not yet gone through the new maintainer process, to contribute occasionally to the project. At the same time, it ensures that all packages included in Debian have always been checked by an official member.
Finally, the examiner checks the candidate's technical (packaging) skills with a detailed questionnaire. Bad answers are not permitted, but the answer time is not limited. All the documentation is available and several tries are allowed if the first answers are not satisfactory. This step does not intend to discriminate, but to ensure at least a modicum of knowledge common to new contributors.
This step is known as the Tasks & Skills step in the examiners' jargon.
15.4.2.5. Final Approval
At the very last step, the whole process is reviewed by a DAM (Debian Account Manager). The DAM will review all the information about the candidate that the examiner collected, and makes the decision on whether or not to create an account on the Debian servers. In cases where extra information is required, the account creation may be delayed. Refusals are rather rare if the examiner does a good job of following the process, but they sometimes happen. They are never permanent, and the candidate is free to try again at a later time.
The DAM's decision is authoritative and (almost) without appeal, which explains why the people in that seat (currently, Jörg Jaspert, Christoph Berg and Enrico Zini) have often been criticized in the past.
Chapter 16. Conclusion: Debian's Future
The story of Falcot Corp ends with this last chapter; but Debian lives on, and the future will certainly bring many interesting surprises.
16.1. Upcoming Developments
Weeks (or months) before a new version of Debian is released, the Release Manager picks the codename for the next version. Now that Debian version 6.0 is out, the developers are already busy working on the next version, codenamed Wheezy…
There's no official list of planned changes, and Debian never makes promises relating to technical goals of the coming versions. However, a few development trends can already be noted, and there are many reasons to believe they will turn into concrete results in the new version.
The package management system will be able to install packages for several different architectures on the same system (this is known as “multi-arch support”). This will allow installing 32 bit applications on a 64 bit system, and vice-versa. Another project worth mentioning is Constantly Usable Testing, which aims at labeling Testing as an officially supported distribution that can be recommended to the general public. The default “init” process (sysvinit) may also be replaced by more modern systems such as upstart or systemd.
Of course, all the main software suites will have had a major release. For instance, Wheezy will include a 3.x version of GNOME, which brings a deep and promising change in the usual graphical desktop paradigm.
16.2. Debian's Future
In addition to these internal developments, one can reasonably expect new Debian-based distributions to come to light, thanks to the growing popularity of debian-installer and its flexibility. New specialized subprojects will also be started, in order to widen Debian's reach to new horizons.
The Debian user community will increase, and new contributors will join the project… including, maybe, you!
The Debian project is stronger than ever, and well on its way towards its goal of an universal distribution; the inside joke within the Debian community is about World Domination.
In spite of its old age and its respectable size, Debian keeps on growing in all kinds of (sometimes unexpected) directions. Contributors are teeming with ideas, and discussions on development mailing lists, even when they look like bickerings, keep increasing the momentum. Debian is sometimes compared to a black hole, of such density that any new free software project is attracted.
Beyond the apparent satisfaction of most Debian users, a deep trend is becoming more and more undisputable: people are increasingly realising that collaborating, rather than doing business solo, leads to better results for everyone. Such is the rationale used by distributions merging into Debian by way of subprojects.
The Debian project is therefore not threatened by extinction…
16.3. Future of this Book
We would like this book to evolve in the spirit of free software. We therefore welcome contributions, remarks, suggestions, and criticism. Please direct them to Raphaël (<hertzog@debian.org>) or Roland (<lolando@debian.org>). The website will be used to gather all information relevant to its evolution.
→ http://debian-handbook.info/
We tried to integrate most of what our experience at Debian taught us, so that anyone can use this distribution and take the best advantage of it as soon as possible. We hope this book contributes to making Debian less confusing and more popular, and we welcome publicity around it!
We'd like to conclude on a personal note. Writing (and translating) this book took a considerable amount of time out of our usual professional activity. Since we're both freelance consultants, any new source of income grants us the freedom to spend more time improving Debian; we hope this book to be successful and to contribute to this. In the meantime, feel free to retain our services!
→ http://www.freexian.com
→ http://www.gnurandal.com
See you soon!
Appendix A. Derivative Distributions
Many Linux distributions are derivatives of Debian and reuse Debian's package management tools. They all have their own interesting properties, and it is possible one of them will fulfill your needs better than Debian itself.