Debian

Debian is a GNU/Linux distribution completely inclinded towards Free Software philosophy, maintained by the community.

Before talking about how i started contributing to debian, i would like to talk about the camp organized by FSCI It is an online free mentorship programme organized by Free Software Community of India ,introducing people to Free Software.Ravish introduced me to 2021 FSCI’s camp, and there i got introduced to Debian Packaging through Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers.

During the project phase of the camp, i choosed to work on Debian Packaging and System Administration(here is my Project Proposal)

Debian Packages and my Story !!

Debian has roughly over 51,000 packages, these packages are installable through apt, just like “sudo apt install nano”. I always wanted to know how “sudo apt install nano” works !.

During the project phase of the camp Praveen my mentor of the project,a Debian Developer himself suggested to get started by packaging node packages(dependencies of Gitlab). A big Thanks to praveen for teaching packaging from scratch, also answering my useless questions and also sponsoring my packages to debian. Initially i found it very difficult to understand it,but the community was so welcoming, they were helping and assisting me by clearing all my doubts through matrix.

I took a lot of time to learn,tried to spend more time in learning during hectic schedule of college and also i gave up hope many times and restarted it. So initial task was to setup the Debian Unstable environment and rebuilding the existing simple node-pretty-ms package, and then tried a simple package update and then went to continue packaging few node modules.

I currently maintain around two node modules as of today, looking forward to maintain more packages in debian. All the communication happens mainly through mailing list or irc of respective teams.

Further Development

Looking forward to contribute and hangout with the awesome debian community and learn more.

    :wq