During Debconf, Holger, who’s one of the developers-reference maintainers, made a quick presentation that was explaining the developers-reference needs some love. Indeed, it has gathered dust, and some useful refresh would be very welcome. Holger pointed at the list of bugs:
https://bugs.debian.org/src:developers-reference
After having a quick look into that list, after Holger’s Debconf presentation, I wrote to him on IRC:
<zigo> Many of the bugs you refered are indeed easily actionable, if all of us just try to help for one bug, that’d be a huge improvement of that doc.
Then, as I was waiting for the closing ceremony of Debconf, I thought I shouldn’t just say it, but actually do something about it. I decided to address https://bugs.debian.org/793633 as I thought it was easy. In just a few minutes, I was able to do a first patch, as seen here:
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/developers-reference/-/merge_requests/27
I wrote about it on IRC, and a few people helped with rephrasing what was there (thanks to Fil for correcting my English mistakes, and others for the content).
Today, which is 2 days after the MR was opened, I have decided it was long enough and actually merged it, as I considered it was enough time to gather comments. So we now have a brand new shiny chapter about Backports and how to handle them. I’m sure that new part is perfectible, so do not hesitate, and do patch what I just wrote if you feel like you can do better.
If I’m writing this blog post, this is not to promote myself. The goal is to promote the developers-reference manual and push others in Debian to do the same. Please do what Holger suggested, and what I just did: contribute to the document by addressing just one of the currently opened bugs. If all DDs do it, we’ll get a much nicer document, and help others to contribute to Debian.
This is going to take less than 30 minutes of your time, and it is very much ok if you do this only once. It is really easy: just clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/developers-reference/ and write a patch. If you’re a DD, you can even merge your patch yourself once you’re satisfied with it.