2 - Raspberry PI Community Projects

PERSPECTIVE
Debian for multimedia
Agnula was a European project, managed under the direction of an Italian
team. It entailed, for the “DeMuDi” part, the development of a version of
Debian dedicated to multimedia applications. Certain members of the project,
especially Marco Trevisani, wanted to perpetuate it by integrating it within
the Debian Project. The Debian-Multimedia sub-project was born.
➨ http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia
The project, however, had difficulty in forging an identity and taking off. Free
Ekanayaka did the work within Debian, but offered the results under the form
of a derivative distribution, which is now known as 64Studio. This distribution
is affiliated with a new company that offers technical support.
➨ http://www.64studio.com/
1.3.3.2. Administrative Teams
Most administrative teams are relatively closed and recruit only by cooptation. The best means
to become a part of one is to intelligently assist the current members, demonstrating that you
have understood their objectives and methods of operation.
The ftpmasters are in charge of the official archive of Debian packages. They maintain the
program that receives packages sent by developers and automatically stores them, after some
checks, on the reference server (p-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 maers: 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
p.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.
18 The Debian Administrator's Handbook