The current website page about helping Emdebian is a little out of date, so as I've had a request for information about how to help I thought we should talk about what we need done. Current items include: "Keeping the website up to date" - that needs people to gain SVN access (which is usually by asking Wookey to setup SSH details) and then have some familiarity with WML which is yet-another-HTML-markup template system where you only need to worry about the content and not about the styling. (Think of it as a read-only wiki, updated via SVN.) In the absence of SSH access, anyone can and should edit the Debian wiki pages for Emdebian and keep them updated, remove bad advice, remove outdated models and generally write more stuff. "Emdebian-ise existing Debian packages" - that dates from when Crush was in active development, so that now translates as "make more Debian packages MultiArch compliant" and that needs a lot of reading, a bit of careful selection of the packages to work on and then filing bugs with patches. It comes down to packages needed to allow the cross-compilers to install and packages needed as linktime dependencies of stuff being cross-built. This is hard but there are people already working on this who can speak up about exactly where things stand. Add to that "support Emdebian integration into Debian" which covers a range of roles, including working with the Debian WWW team to prepare the debian webpages for the arrival of Emdebian packages, responding to queries about Emdebian packages on IRC, mailing lists and elsewhere. (Note: most of that needs to be done on the *other* channels / lists you're on - not everyone will join #emdebian with questions and problems.) Standard Debian help tasks are important as well - we are tying Emdebian more and more closely to Debian schedules and that means that Debian problems are our problems. i.e. RC bugs, orphaned packages, standard Debian QA tasks, not all of which need Debian Developer access. There is also a clear role for more advocates on IRC and other media. All too often I see people popping up on IRC, asking a question and then disappearing without an answer. Yes, people need to hang around for more than a few minutes but we could also do with more people watching the IRC channel and offering help (even if it is only "don't disappear off IRC before getting an answer). More publicity in other places will help too - blog about what you're doing with Emdebian, get more people talking about it. Someone needs to take a hard look at the buildd.emdebian.org bugs and close quite a few of them. Many were filed as part of the work on Crush and the underlying systems have changed quite a lot since then. The issues described are out of date, the solutions proposed may well be unworkable or need revision. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=buildd.emdebian.org If the bugs on that page were tidied up, we could use that as our help list - this was the original intention. Just file a bug against buildd.emdebian.org and follow up to existing bugs to help fix issues. Short term issues: Right now, I need someone with git, python-2.6, sqlalchemy and postgres experience to sort out a problem with dak (the Debian Archive Kit) which is a huge piece of software. Contact me off-list about that - work can only be done on Squeeze and needs a sizeable amount of disc space and a really fast connection as you'll be testing against an almost full Debian archive. I'll work out how to do this at some point, so this is a really short term issue, but it would save time if someone had the necessary experience. This is a prime example of what could have been done with the buildd.emdebian.org BTS page by filing an RFH bug - once the page has been tidied up. There is a way of categorising bug reports automatically (e.g. ftp.debian.org bugs) and we need to re-investigate how to do that. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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