I must emphasise that I am not an authoritative source but from my
hobby level work towards getting the Trisquel maintainer knowledges I
can give some pointers as to what I'm using:
Firstly, the places to find out about .deb packaging are:
One of the following packages,
maint-guide - Debian New Maintainers' Guide
maint-guide-ca - Debian New Maintainers' Guide
maint-guide-es - Debian New Maintainers' Guide
maint-guide-fr - Debian New Maintainers' Guide
maint-guide-ja - Debian New Maintainers' Guide
And I think the following package
debian-policy - Debian Policy Manual and related documents
Maint-guide gives you a large reading list. On top of that for
Trisquel you need to know
bazaar - http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/latest/en/user-guide/
sed and awk - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565922259.do
git - http://search.oreilly.com/?q=mastering+git&x=0&y=0
bash - http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/index.html and
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
The last two are needed for the latest version of the package-helper
framework code. Package helpers themselves are still in a bazaar
repo.
If you want to be a documenter, back at the release of 5.5 Rubén
punted the requirement for updates to some docs. One was IIRC the
Ubuntu Desktop Guide (package ubuntu-docs). I'd suggest you go to
the Ubuntu Documentation Team's landing page
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam and follow the links on
System Documentation (for instructions on tool use) and Style Guide.
You will probably be able to learn a working level of DocBook markup
from the now out of date package
docbook-defguide - DocBook: The Definitive Guide - HTML version
OReilly do a more recent version of Docbook : The Definitive Guide
for the latest version of DocBook if you have the money.
Since we don't appear to have any editors (as per the publishing job
position) we might consider an alt system like fanfic uses.
For my own part I'm 4 out of >30 books or manuals in. I'm still able
to triage a few bugs/issues when I have the time. Many reports
haven't been researched first and one can locate upstream bugs quite
easily. Others I can pull the source for from the Trisquel repo[1].
Reading and patching source takes less skill than programming the
same software from scratch. So if you have knowledge of some
language (C/C++ is the commonest), give it a go.
I pester SirGrant on IRC if I need an issue putting into a status I
don't have authority for. But mostly he actions them in a manner
appropriate to my update before I get around to that.
Leny
[1] I've puzzled out a sequence of 'apt-get build-dep' 'apt-get
source --compile' then after I make any changes 'dpkg-buildpackage.'
It's almost certainly not the best or the right way to do it, but it
works for me.
