Hi Patrick, Many thanks for your message and welcome in the Debian community.
As a distribution, Debian has 2 big needs: packaging existing source packages, and programming some internal tools. As the community is small, and debian maintains more than 5000 packages, the work is enormous. Perhaps you could try two directions then, to discover Debian and choose your preferred action focus: 1. Packaging some packages needed by a team specialized in some aspect of Debian: for example, accessibility team would like to package some packages, see TODO packaging https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility-devel You could do the same with any team, provided that you are interested in the topic or the tools it maintains. Typically, if you use a desktop or a server, perhaps you think "hmm this package is useful and not in Debian", and could join the team related to the server/desktop to take their opinion and propose your help in doing this. 2. Helping for an internal team: for example, see the TODO of the QA team. 3. Dealing with bugs: a last approach consists in choosing a team and/or a/some package(s) and examining bugs against them. You could then help the responsible team or maintainer to determine wether the bug is still relevant, should be forwarded upstream, or fix it and proposing a patch (to Debian or to upstream then will back to Debian). This approach can affect packages or internal tools such as the package manager, etc. The 3rd approach makes you do some code quickly. The two first ones make you introduce to teams, proposing a topic of contribution from their todo or bug list, and learn how the packaging works (from a template, the doc, etc). Note that the most important is to establish a human relationship with the team or the maintainers you intend to help. Never do something without their agreement, it would be useful most time. You could do a package alone (from the orphan list or inserting a new one), but the process may be long and less exciting than working with a team, because you will need a mentor, then a sponsor, etc. tell us if you have further questions and how we can help you furthermore. regards Jean-Philippe MENGUAL Le 28/08/2019 à 15:38, PATRICK HERMANN ZEUFACK a écrit : > Hello, my name is Patrick Zeufack, a young Cameroonian, computer > science student. I work since the beginning of my studies with the > debian distribution. and I would like you to accept me to the > community. to contribute to the project,I think that will allow me to > know more about open source and help me improve my level of > programming. I program in java, python c and typescript. >
