The Debian Project consists of volunteers, and our products are developed entirely by volunteers. We are generally looking for new developers who have some technical knowledge, an interest in free software, and some free time.
If you haven't already, you should read through most of the web pages to get a better understanding of what we are trying to do. Pay particular attention to the Debian Free Software Guidelines and our Social Contract.
A lot of communication in the project happens on our
mailing lists.
If you want to get a feeling for the inner workings of the Debian project,
you should at least subscribe to the debian-devel-announce and debian-news
lists. Both are very low-volume and document what's going on in the
community. The Debian Weekly News (published on debian-news) summarizes
recent discussions from Debian related maillists and blogs and provides
links to them.
As a prospective developer, you should also subscribe to debian-mentors,
an open forum trying to help New Maintainers (and also, though less often,
people who are new to the Project and want to help with something else
than package maintenance).
Other interesting lists are debian-devel, debian-project, debian-release,
debian-qa and, depending on your interests, a lot of others. See the
Mailing List Subscription page
for a complete listing.
(For those who wish to reduce the number of mails, there are "-digest" lists as read-only, digestified versions for some high-traffic lists. It's worth knowing that you can use the Mailing List Archives page to read the mails on various lists with your web browsers.)
If you are interested in maintaining packages, then you should look at our Work-Needing and Prospective Packages list to see which packages need maintainers. Taking over an abandoned package is the best way to start out as a developer – not only does it aid Debian in keeping its packages well maintained, but it gives you the opportunity to learn from the previous maintainer.
You can also aid by contributing to the writing
of documentation, doing web site
maintenance, translation (i18n &
l10n), publicity, legal support or other roles in the Debian community.
Our Quality Assurance site lists several
other possibilities.
You don't need to be an Official Debian Developer to carry out just about all of these tasks. Existing Debian Developers acting as sponsors can integrate your work into the project. It is generally best to try and find a developer who is working in the same area as you and has an interest in what you have done.
After you have contributed for some time and are sure about your involvement in the Debian project, you can become a registered developer. Go to the New Maintainers' Corner page to find out how to apply for official developer status. You should be familiar with Debian's procedures, so it is recommended to read the Debian Policy and the Developer's Reference before applying.
Besides the many developers, there's many areas you can help Debian with, including testing, documentation, porting, donations of money and use of machines for development and connectivity. We are constantly looking for mirrors in some parts of the world.