Fun and Sanity in Debian

debian eng pdo

A friend of mine recently asked: "is there anything happening in Debian besides systemd?"

Of course there is. He asked it 2 days after the freeze, which happened in time, and with an amazingly low RC bug count.

The most visible thing right now seems to be this endless init system argument, but there are fun and sane things in Debian. Many of them.

I think someone should put the spotlight on them, and here's my attempt.

Yesterday I set up a gobby document asking "What is now happening in Debian that is exciting, fun and sane?", and passed the link around the Cambridge Miniconf and some IRC channels.

Here are a few quotations that I collected:

The armhf and arm64 ports have for me been wonderful and exciting, and were a great time for me to start getting involved. (Jon "Aardvark" Ward)

We have a way of tracking random contributors, and as far as I know no other project has anything like it. (Enrico Zini)

codesearch.debian.net is an incredibly important resource, not just for us but for the free software community at large. (Ben Hutchings)

sources.debian.net is a very useful resource with lots of interested contributors, it received 10 OPW applicants (Stefano Zacchiroli)

It has never been easier to work on new infrastructure project thanks to the awesome work of the DSA team. We have dozens of contribution opportunities outside of just plain packaging. (Raphaël Hertzog)

The work on reproducible builds has achieved excellent results with 61.3% of packages being reproducible. (Paul Wise)

Porting arm64 has been (peversely) great fun. It's remarkably morish and I like nothing more than a tedious argument with autoconf macros. Working with lots of enthusiastic people from other teams, helping getting the port set up and build has been great - thank you everybody. (Wookey)

And here are random exciting things that were listed: