Call for help from Debian's KDE Team

Hi all!

For quite a while now the KDE team has been severely understaffed. We maintain a lot of packages, with many different kinds of bugs, but we don't have enough people to do all the work that needs to be done. We have tools that help us automate the update to new upstream releases, but that's just the tip of the iceberg of our work and so we are writing to invite more people to get involved in the team and help us get KDE software in Debian into better shape.

Some of the tasks that we need help with are:

• Bug triaging: there are many many bugs in the BTS. We need people that go through them, understand the problem and how to reproduce it, confirm that they are still present in the latest versions. In particular, there are bugs affecting the version in wheezy, and we need people to go through those as well.
• Bug forwarding: we are so understaffed that we have been asking users to forward the bugs upstream themselves. Some users do this, but some don't. It would help us a lot to have people in the team in charge of this.
• Patch forwarding: we have quite a bunch of patches applied in the Debian packages that should be applied upstream. Some need to be generalized instead of being Debian-specific. This work would save us time in the future, so it's very important to get it done.
• Upgrade-testing: in the past, the upgrade from one Debian stable to the other has been quite traumatic for KDE software users. We need people to try upgrading from wheezy to jessie and report any bugs that they might encounter so that we can fix them ahead of the release.
• Creating patches: many of the bugs that we have require writing patches, some are easy and some are harder, but any help here would be really appreciated.
• Packaging other KDE apps: we have packages for the core components of KDE software, but there are many other useful components that still need to get packaged.
• Updating our welcoming wiki page [1], adding these tasks and any future tasks, and unifying the todo lists [2].

If you are interested in helping with any of these, please join our irc channel #debian-qt-kde in irc.oftc.net, or our mailing list [3]. We are happy to help you get started.

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/PkgKde

[2]: https://wiki.debian.org/KDETodo

     https://wiki.debian.org/KdeDebTasks

     http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/todo.html

     gobby://gobby.debian.org/Teams/KDE/TODO

[3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-qt-kde/

-- 

Regards,

Maximiliano Curia

On behalf of the KDE team