The Debian Administrator's Handbook

Volunteers make posters, brochures, and other useful promotional materials for the project, which they make available to everyone, and which Debian provides freely on its website:

→ http://www.debian.org/events/material

1.3.3. Teams and Sub-Projects

Debian is organized immediately around the concept of source packages, each with its maintainer or group of maintainers. Numerous work teams have slowly appeared, ensuring administration of the infrastructure, management of tasks not specific to any package in particular (quality assurance, Debian Policy, installer, etc.), with the latest teams growing up around sub-projects.

1.3.3.1. Existing Debian Sub-Projects

To each their own Debian! A sub-project is a group of volunteers interested in adapting Debian to specific needs. Beyond the selection of a sub-group of programs intended for a particular domain (education, medicine, multimedia creation, etc.), this also involves improving existing packages, packaging missing software, adapting the installer, creating specific documentation, and more.

VOCABULARY Sub-project and derivative distribution

The development process for a derivative distribution consists in starting with a particular version of Debian and making a number of modifications to it. The infrastructure used for this work is completely external to the Debian project. There isn't necessarily a policy for contributing improvements. This difference explains how a derivative distribution may “diverge” from its origins, and why they have to regularly resynchronize with their source in order to benefit from improvements made upstream.

On the other hand, a sub-project can not diverge, since all the work on it consists of directly improving Debian in order to adapt it to a specific goal.

The most known distribution derived from Debian is, without a doubt, Ubuntu, but there are many. See Appendix A, Derivative Distributions to learn about their particularities and their positioning in relationship to Debian.

Here is a small selection of current sub-projects:

Debian-Junior, by Ben Armstrong, offering an appealing and easy to use Debian system for children;

Debian-Edu, by Petter Reinholdtsen, focused on the creation of a specialized distribution for the academic world;

Debian Med, by Andreas Tille, dedicated to the medical field;

Debian-Multimedia, from the creators of Agnula, which deals with multimedia creation;

Debian-Desktop, by Colin Walters, focuses on the desktop;

Debian-Ham, created by Bruce Perens, targets ham radio enthusiasts;

Debian-NP (Non-Profit) is for not-for-profit organizations;

Debian-Lex, finally, is intended for work within the legal field.

This list will most likely continue to grow with time and improved perception of the advantages of Debian sub-projects. Fully supported by the existing Debian infrastructure, they can, in effect, focus on work with real added value, without worrying about remaining synchronized with Debian, since they are developed within the project.

PERSPECTIVE Debian in academia

Debian-Edu was, initially, a French project, created by Stéphane Casset and Raphaël Hertzog, within the company, Logidée, on behalf of a pedagogical documentation departmental center. Raphaël then integrated it with Debian as a sub-project. Due to time constraints, it has not progressed further, as is often the case with free software projects lacking contributors.

Likewise, a team of Norwegians worked on a similar distribution, also based on the debian-installer. SkoleLinux's progress being significant, Raphaël suggested that it become part of the Debian family and to take over the Debian-Edu sub-project.

PERSPECTIVE Debian for multimedia

Agnula was a European project, managed under the direction of an Italian team. It entailed, for the “DeMuDi” part, the development of a version of Debian dedicated to multimedia applications. Certain members of the project, especially Marco Trevisani, wanted to perpetuate it by integrating it within the Debian Project. The Debian-Multimedia sub-project was born.

→ http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia

The project, however, had difficulty in forging an identity and taking off. Free Ekanayaka did the work within Debian, but offered the results under the form of a derivative distribution, which is now known as 64Studio. This distribution is affiliated with a new company that offers technical support.

→ http://www.64studio.com/

1.3.3.2. Administrative Teams

Most administrative teams are relatively closed and recruit only by cooptation. The best means to become a part of one is to intelligently assist the current members, demonstrating that you have understood their objectives and methods of operation.