The Debian Administrator's Handbook

The ftpmasters are in charge of the official archive of Debian packages. They maintain the program that receives packages sent by developers and automatically installs them, after some checks, on the reference server (ftp-master.debian.org).

They must also verify the licenses of all new packages, in order to ensure that Debian may distribute them, prior to including them in the corpus of existing packages. When a developer wishes to remove a package, they address this team through the bug tracking system and the “pseudo-package” ftp.debian.org.

VOCABULARY The pseudo-package, a monitoring tool

The bug tracking system, initially designed to associate bug reports with a Debian package, has proved very practical to manage other matters: lists of problems to be resolved or tasks to manage without any link to a particular Debian package. The “pseudo-packages” allow, thus, certain teams to use the bug tracking system without associating a real package with their team. Everyone can, thus, report issues that needs to be dealt with. The BTS has an entry ftp.debian.org to report problems on the official package archive or simply to request removal of a package. Likewise, the pseudo-package www.debian.org refers to errors on the Debian website, and lists.debian.org gathers all the problems concerning the mailing lists.

TOOL FusionForge, the Swiss Army Knife of collaborative development

FusionForge is a program that enables creation of sites similar to www.sourceforge.net, alioth.debian.org, or even savannah.gnu.org. It hosts projects and provides a range of services that facilitate collaborative development. Each project will have a dedicated virtual space there, including a web site, bug tracking system, patch monitoring system, survey tool, file storage, forums, version control system repositories, mailing lists and various other related services.

alioth.debian.org is Debian's FusionForge server, administered by Roland Mas, Tollef Fog Heen, Stephen Gran, and Christian Bayle. Any project involving one or more Debian developers can be hosted there.

→ http://alioth.debian.org/

Very complex for the broad scope of services that it offers, FusionForge is otherwise relatively easy to install, thanks to the exceptional work of Roland Mas and Christian Bayle on the fusionforge Debian package.

The debian-admin team (), as one might expect, is responsible for system administration of the many servers used by the project. They ensure optimal functioning of all base services (DNS, Web, e-mail, shell, etc.), install software requested by Debian developers, and take all precautions in regards to security.

TOOL Package tracking system

This is one of Raphaël's creations. The basic idea is, for a given package, to centralize as much information as possible on a single page. Thus, one can quickly check the status of a program, identify tasks to be completed, and offer one's assistance. This is why this page gathers all bug statistics, available versions in each distribution, progress of a package in the Testing distribution, the status of translations of descriptions and debconf templates, the eventual availability of a new upstream version, notices of noncompliance with the latest version of the Debian Policy, information on the maintainer, and any other information that said maintainer wishes to include.

→ http://packages.qa.debian.org/

An e-mail subscription service completes this web interface. It automatically sends the following selected information to the list: bugs and related discussions, availability of a new version on the Debian servers, translations completed (for revision), etc.

Advanced users can, thus, follow all of this information closely and even contribute to the project, once they've got a good enough understanding of how it works.

Another web interface, known as Debian Developer's Packages Overview (DDPO), provides each developer a synopsis of the status of all Debian packages placed under their charge.

→ http://qa.debian.org/developer.php

These two websites comprise the tools for Debian QA (Quality Assurance), the group responsible for quality assurance within Debian.

The listmasters administer the e-mail server that manages the mailing lists. They create new lists, handle bounces (delivery failure notices), and maintain spam filters (unsolicited bulk e-mail).

CULTURE Traffic on the mailing lists: some figures