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10 habits to help becoming a Debian Maintainer

Becoming a Debian maintainer is a journey that combines technical expertise, community collaboration, and continuous learning. In this post, I’ll share 10 key habits that will both help you navigate the complexities of Debian packaging without getting lost, and also enable you to contribute more effectively to one of the world’s largest open source projects. 1. Read and re-read the Debian Policy, the Developer’s Reference and the git-buildpackage manual Anyone learning Debian packaging and aspiring to become a Debian maintainer is likely to wade through a lot of documentation, only to realize that much of it is outdated or sometimes outright incorrect.

10 habits to help becoming a Debian Maintainer

Should developers always just write code and never design documents?

In software engineering, most ideas can be implemented without writing any design document at all. This is particularly prominent in open source communities. For example, the Linux kernel has 35 million lines of code that have been written and rewritten many times over alongside 30 years of mailing list discussions. Linux wasn’t created as a result of a grandiose design document by Linus Torvalds, but it evolved organically in small increments of actual running code.

Should developers always just write code and never design documents?