Quality Assurance

What needs to be done?

Here's a short list of things that are in our scope:

• When you find bugs - report them instantly! File good bug reports.
• Check if old bugs still exist, and work on them if they do.
• Correct buggy packages (by providing patches and suggestions).
• Provide more documentation where it's lacking.
• Check that all packages are policy conforming in general - Lintian reports might point you to the right problems.
• Check that all packages are well integrated (menu, doc-base, alternatives, diversions, debconf, dhelp, dwww, info manuals, manual pages, etc.).
• Check dependencies, recommends, suggests, and all sorts of inter-package dependencies through configuration files or similar.
• Detect neglected, orphaned, and/or not used packages. Detect new upstream versions, too.
• Remove orphaned packages that nobody wants or nobody uses.
• Make sure that release critical bugs reports are handled and corrected rapidly.
• Simplify installation and upgrade of packages as well as the distribution (hint: debconf).
• Better interoperations between packages.
• Reviewal of the web presentation of Debian.
• All public relations of Debian (press releases, Debian Weekly News, other news, security announces).

(originally written by Joey Schulze and others)

If you want more information about one of these tasks, feel free to ask on the mailing list: debian-qa@lists.debian.org.