Start at the beginning
So, how does one go about becoming a DD? Well, one reads the new maintainer section of the debian website, of course. And then?
The path I’m going to travel is that of being a maintainer for some packages. It’s supposed to be possible to enter Debian by being a translator or a documentation writer, but my skills are not there, and so that’s not what I’ll try.
I had previously started packaging pubtal, a website builder that I use for my company’s site. But I hadn’t tried to get it into Debian. When talking about this at DebConf Santiago Ruano offered to be my sponsor for that package.
Quite frankly, my fist packaging attempt was horrible. debhelper is a wonderful thing, but some brain is needed behind it, anyways. And then I managed to start all this right in the middle of the python transition.
Eventually, with my sponsor’s guidance and some lintian and linda and piuparts runs later, I got the package into proper shape and thus the journey started.