A newbie's newbie guide to Debian

Are you a newcomer? In this talk Helen will discuss how a community composed of only volunteers is organized, what is a Debian Developer, how and by whom the packages and repositories are managed from the upstream code to the stable release of Debian, and how you can contribute.

The talk will cover:

* History of Debian: The origins of Debian (who created it, where the name came from), how it grew, where we are today (number of packages, arquitectures supported), who keeps Debian's logo, machines, donations.
* The Foundation Documents: What are the Debian Social Contract, the Debian Constitution and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), and what they talk about
* Internal Organization and Hierarchy: Volunteers, Sponsors, Team, Debian Maintainers, Debian Developers, Technical Committee, Project Leader, .... What all these titles mean, how they are chosen and what their responsabilities are
* The release cycle: What unstable/testing/stable means, how a package flows from the upstream author to the mirrors. How a new stable release is performed. What is main/contrib/non-free.
* BTS and WNPP: How the bug tracker system is used to manage who maintains which package.
* How to start contributing
* Debian vs Ubuntu: what is the relationship between the two distros

• Video
• Slides