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No, I mean contributing to the packaging codebase. That graph is from https://trends.debian.net/#version-control-system , which has information about Debian packaging codebases ("source packages"). If anyone other than the package's maintainer / member of the maintaining team (whether a fellow Debian developer, an upstream author/contributor, or a user) has a contribution to make to the Debian package, they should contact the Debian maintainer. In 2007, for almost every package, the only way to do that would be to send the maintainer a patch file, generally through the Debian bug tracking system. (Nowadays, the majority of Debian packaging repos are on https://salsa.debian.org, a GitLab instance, and you can usually open a merge request there and maintainers will notice and accept them.) The Debian packaging repo consists of, effectively, a build recipe and possibly pre/post install/remove scripts to run on the end user's system. (In practice there are common tools to do the build and to generate those scripts, so you'll find a lot of files to influence the behavior of such tools.) It can also consist of extra changes added by Debian, such as missing manpages or translations, or even patches to the code. If you have a change to make to a piece of software packaged in Debian, but it's unsuitable for the upstream repo, you can send it to the Debian maintainer and ask them to include it in the packaging repo. (It also used to be a vague norm that you would always contact the Debian maintainer, who would forward contributions onto upstream if suitable. It's questionable whether that was the right model, and it's certainly not the norm today.) |