Parts of Debian needing help

Since the release of Sarge, Debian installations can be made with the new debian-installer (or d-i for short). We constantly need help, particularly for architectures other than i386, with further development, with completing translations to other languages, and with documentation. Much work remains to be done polishing and streamlining the installer as well as adding new features. And even just testing it on varied hardware and sending in installation reports can be a great help to the project.

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The Debian Description Translation Project is looking for a skilled C++ programmer to patch APT so that it can show translated package descriptions to the user, according to its environment.

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The build daemon is missing a Debian package. A debconf-managed package installing it flawlessly would be useful for both users and developers.
For now, the source can be found here.

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The Debian developers can enter geographic coordinates on the developers' database, but right now they are not used for much, and this should change. They should be able to get a list of distances to other developers, but more accurate and with names and details.
The goal is to obtain a tool to easily exchange GPG keys between developers when going on vacation, or to sign new developers' keys. Coupling the tool with the new maintainers database, with a map generation tool, or (non-exclusive or) with time-domain location (to put in contact journeying developers) would be interesting improvements.

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After the reorganization of the KDE packages which will soon occur, the Debian documentation part in the KDE documentation system will still have to be rewritten.

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During the Perl 5.6 -> Perl 5.8 transition, a staging area was set up to smooth the transition in unstable. As this idea gave quite successful results, it would be valuable to be able to use it for other important transitions. That's why it is proposed to make a package and/or a set of scripts available on a Debian project machine to setup and handle such a staging area easily.
The scripts used by bod are still available on auric.

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The way the ftp-master people work is still obscure to much of the Debian community. In order to make the process more transparent, and to help them, the ftp-master tools need to be documented. Packaging these tools would be a must, as it would allow anyone to run its own Debian archive, for testing or understanding purposes.

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Sometimes, the testing scripts don't explain why a package is not installed, while it is considered as a valid candidate. It would be better if the maintainer was informed of which packages are holding their one in unstable.

Björn Stenberg has written a frontend to the testing scripts which can explain many problems.

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In Debian systems, the ifup and ifdown commands are responsible for setting up the network. Currently, they write some information at bootup in the /etc/network/ifstate file, as /var is not yet mounted at that time. Storing them in memory (there are many ways to achieve that) would lead to better FHS compliance and improved diskless support.

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/usr/sbin/update-inetd needs to be rewritten to have a decent API and be more robust. This is a precondition for decoupling netbase and netkit-inetd, and allowing easy switching among different inetd packages. Also see bug #185943.

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A lot of the Debian Documentation Project manuals seems to be dead. Some of them are not maintained anymore, never finished, never started etc. When not dropping the whole thing it would be a good idea to work on these manuals since they have the power to help people working with our wonderful software distribution.

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Debian Weekly News is looking for contributors. They need some people who keep in touch with mailing lists and news websites to help in the weekly redaction of what's happening in the Debian world.

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The Policy Editor Team contains four editors, some of whom haven't had all that much time to work on policy recently. The "policy-process" documentation indicates that four-five editors are required, and closer to eight would be preferred.

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The Debian website is maintained by a few people basically. For such a large project (entire source: 64MB, plus documentation) this is not enough normally. The website could be improved in several ways, some of them are written down in our todo list, some are not.

It would be a good idea if somebody would see how the entire website could be turned into a single layout instead of three or more different layouts. Reviewing, updating and creating of new documentation would also be helpful.

The website also lacks some translators. Please contact the translation coordinators if you want to help.

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The Debian Description Translation Project aims at translating every single package description in the distribution, to help in package selection by non-English speakers. The DDTP is always in need of translators and reviewers.

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The Debconf questions asked to users when installing packages need to be translated for non-English speakers.
The new po-debconf infrastructure will help this, as it is now possible to translate those templates using standard gettext tools. Only a few packages make use of po-debconf now, but there are already some translations to do.

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The sarge distribution should support the IPv6 protocol as widely as possible. Still, the experimental IPv6 archive needs help for building woody/sarge/sid packages on ARM, ia64, m68k, mipsel and s390 arches.
Moreover, many packages still need IPv6 patches, and the existing patches need to be tested and integrated into the main archive.

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There are still a lot of programs in Debian that don't have a manpage. Every program in /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/games and /usr/X11R6/bin should have one. Those programs' manpages are sometimes symlinked to undocumented(7) (although that is no longer encouraged) but that doesn't mean they don't deserve one, even if it is sparse. Help in writing them is always appreciated by package maintainers.

Also, there are numerous bugs in the manpages and manpages-dev packages, which require skilled people knowing the involved standards to deal with.

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The Debian usability research project is developing a new presentation for package lists in front-ends such as aptitude or synaptic, through package tags. To make this possible, volunteers are needed to tag packages through the package browser, especially for those which still have to be tagged.

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Packaging new things and correcting bugs in existing packages is always needed. You can have a look at the list of packages needing help, or the packages with security issues.
You can also try to reproduce unreproducible bugs.

And of course, there are still many Work Needing and Prospective Packages.

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