Contributing to Debian Astro

Like Debian itself, Debian Astro is a volunteer project that is developed in the open. Our packaging code is organized in git repositories and contains mainly code under a DFSG-free license. We appreciate contributions of any type: bug fixes, new packages, documentation, art work and so on.

Feedback

You can give us feedback on our debian-astro mailing list. The list is used for both user and developer discussion.

To submit bug reports the simplest way is though the reportbug program. The program will collect all information and finally inject the report into our bug system.

Bug fixes

If you are interested in contributing bug fixes, you may pick up one from our bugs list. You may send the fix directly back to the bug. The submission will be reviewed and then merged into the package.

Packaging

If you feel that a package is missing in Debian Astro, you can package it yourself. You may also contribute to an existing package. In these cases, you should join our debian-astro mailing list . To get write access to our repositories, you need to create an account on the "Salsa" computer that hosts our repositories. Once you got your account, you can request a membership in debian-astro. We have no dedicated team policy yet and mainly adopt the general Debian Science Policy.

There are already some packaging tutorials as well, for example for packaging astropy affiliated packages. We also have a New Maintainer's guide that describes all steps to create a new package. Once you have your package ready, we can upload it for you to Debian until you get your own permission to do so.

Meetings

We had our first Debian Astro Sprint at the DebCamp 2015. The report is here. The plan is to have the next sprint 2016 in Germany (Heidelberg or Potsdam). Our meetings are open, so feel free to join us!

Further links

The following links provide some nice statistics about the packaging of the Debian Astro Pure Blend: