Dear Debian community,

This is bits from the DPL for June.

The Challenge of Mentoring Newcomers

In June there was an extended discussion about the ongoing challenges around mentoring newcomers in Debian. As many of you know, this is a topic I’ve cared about deeply--long before becoming DPL. In my view, the issue isn’t just a matter of lacking tools or needing to “try harder” to attract contributors. Anyone who followed the discussion will likely agree that it’s more complex than that.

I sometimes wonder whether Debian’s success contributes to the problem. From the outside, things may appear to “just work”, which can lead to the impression: “Debian is doing fine without me--they clearly have everything under control.” But that overlooks how much volunteer effort it takes to keep the project running smoothly.

We should make it clearer that help is always needed--not only in packaging, but also in writing technical documentation, designing web pages, reaching out to upstreams about license issues, finding sponsors, or organising events. (Speaking from experience, I would have appreciated help in patiently explaining Free Software benefits to upstream authors.) Sometimes we think too narrowly about what newcomers can do, and also about which tasks could be offloaded from overcommitted contributors.

In fact, one of the most valuable things a newcomer can contribute is better documentation. Those of us who’ve been around for years may be too used to how things work--or make assumptions about what others already know. A person who just joined the project is often in the best position to document what’s confusing, what’s missing, and what they wish they had known sooner.

In that sense, the recent "random new contributor’s experience" posts might be a useful starting point for further reflection. I think we can learn a lot from positive user stories, like this recent experience of a newcomer adopting the courier package. I'm absolutely convinced that those who just found their way into Debian have valuable perspectives--and that we stand to learn the most from listening to them.

We should also take seriously what Russ Allbery noted in the discussion: "This says bad things about the project's sustainability and I think everyone knows that." Volunteers move on--that’s normal and expected. But it makes it all the more important that we put effort into keeping Debian's contributor base at least stable, if not growing.

Project-wide LLM budget for helping people

Lucas Nussbaum has volunteered to handle the paperwork and submit a request on Debian’s behalf to LLM providers, aiming to secure project-wide access for Debian Developers. If successful, every DD will be free to use this access--or not--according to their own preferences.

Kind regards Andreas.

We are pleased to announce that AMD has committed to sponsor DebConf25 as a Platinum Sponsor.

The AMD ROCm platform includes programming models, tools, compilers, libraries, and runtimes for AI and HPC solution development on AMD GPUs. Debian is an officially supported platform for AMD ROCm and a growing number of components are now included directly in the Debian distribution.

For more than 55 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies. AMD is deeply committed to supporting and contributing to open-source projects, foundations, and open-standards organizations, taking pride in fostering innovation and collaboration within the open-source community.

With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, AMD is contributing to the annual Debian Developers’ Conference, directly supporting the progress of Debian and Free Software. AMD contributes to strengthening the worldwide community that collaborates on Debian projects year-round.

Thank you very much, AMD, for your support of DebConf25!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf25 will take place from 14 to 20 July 2025 in Brest, France, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from 7 to 13 July 2025.

DebConf25 is accepting sponsors! Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf25 website at https://debconf25.debconf.org/sponsors /become-a-sponsor/.

We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected nine contributors to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code.

Here is a list of the projects and students, along with details of the tasks to be performed.

Project: Quality assurance and continuous integration for biological and medical applications inside Debian

• Intern: Harish Chavre

Deliverables of the project: Continuous integration tests for Debian Med applications lacking a test, Quality Assurance review and bug fixing if issues might be uncovered.

Project: Device-specific Tweaks Management

• Intern: Mohammed ElDegwi

Deliverables of the project: Analysis and discussion of the current state of device tweaks management in Debian and Mobian. Proposal for a unified, run-time approach. Packaging of this service and tweaks data/configuration for at least one device.

Project: Enhancing Debian packages with ROCm GPU acceleration

• Interns: Spaarsh, utk4r-sh

Deliverables of the project: New Debian packages with GPU support. Enhanced GPU support within existing Debian packages. More autopackagetests running on the Debian ROCm CI.

Project: Make Debian for Raspberry Pi Build Again

• Interns: Kurva Prashanth

Deliverables of the project: Refreshing the set of daily-built images. Having the set of daily-built images become automatic again—that is, go back to the promise of having it daily-built. Write an Ansible playbook/Chef recipe/Puppet whatsitsname to define a virtual serve and have it build daily. Do the (very basic!) hardware testing on several Raspberry computers. Do note, naturally, this will require having access to the relevant hardware.

Project: Package LLM Inference Libraries

• Intern: k1000dai

Deliverables of the project: Eventually I hope we can make vLLM into Debian archive, based on which we can deliver something for LLM inference out-of-the-box. If the amount of work eventually turns to be beyond my expectation, I'm still happy to see how far we can go towards this goal. If the amount of work required for vLLM is less than I expected, we can also look at something else like SGLang, another open source LLM inference library.

Project: Autopkgtests for the rsync package

• Intern: puer robustus

Deliverables of the project: Autopkgtests for the rsync package.

Project: Enhancing Salsa CI in Debian

• Interns: Aayush (@44yu5h), aquilamacedo

Deliverables of the project: More features, robustness, speed.

Congratulations and welcome to all the contributors!

The Google Summer of Code program is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian Developers and Debian Contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor contributors and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the contributors' weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or reach out to the individual projects' team mailing lists.

Each year on August the 16th, we celebrate the Debian Project Anniversary.

Several communities around the world join us in celebrating "Debian Day" with local events, parties, or gatherings.

So, how about celebrating the 32nd anniversary of the Debian Project in 2025 in your city? As the 16th of August falls on a Saturday this year, we believe it is great timing to gather people around your event.

We invite you and your local community to organize a Debian Day by hosting an event with talks, workshops, a bug squashing party, or OpenPGP keysigning gathering, etc.

You could also hold a meeting with others in the Debian community in a smaller social setting like a bar/pizzeria/cafeteria/restaurant to celebrate. In other words, any type of celebrating is valid!

Remember to add your city to the Debian Day wiki page

There is a list of Debian Local Groups around the world. If your city is listed, talk to them to organize DebianDay together.

To inspire you and your local community, see some photos from 2023 and 2024

Let's use hashtags #DebianDay #DebianDay2025 on social media.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Moritz Schlarb (moschlar)
• Sérgio de Almeida Cipriano Júnior (cipriano)
• Mario Anthony Limonciello (superm1)

The following contributor was added as Debian Maintainer in the last two months:

• Martin-Éric Racine

Congratulations!