David Bremner

Techniques and tools for using git for Debian packaging continue to develop, though there remain many pain points. Since last year’s DebConf, dgit, in particular, has seen a lot of development. The new possibilities for using this tool have not yet been fully explored.

The starting point for this BoF will be a brief demo of some of elements of the pure dgit workflows that have only become possible in the past year: a merging workflow and a rebasing workflow (if git debrebase is not finished by DebConf, the design of this tool will be explained).

A possible follow-up discussion would be figuring out what Debian package maintainers consider the highest priority pain points for maintaining Debian package in git: Should we be focusing on a new source package format? Is it documentation that is lacking? Is it our conventions regarding the BTS and NMUs that are blocking progress? Etc.

An opportunity to meet the members of the Debian Technical Committee who are in attendance at Debconf, hear the status of open issues, and discuss pending and future issues with the committee.

URLs: https://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte

At this DebConf a few of us have been discussing the problem of packages that are not well maintained (or at least perceived that way), but whose maintainers are otherwise active in Debian. In this BoF we’d like to continue that discussion and hear about different people’s points of view. A great outcome would be some kind of concensus on a process or criteria to change maintainers for such undermaintained packages.