For more details about this exciting new opportunity, please visit the Council blog post:

http://maemo.org/community/council/n...ity_debmaster/

If you have any questions, email council@maemo.org.

Tim

Great idea! whoever will get this job will really enhance user experience. (At least mine - and to me that's all that counts ...)

Hmm... all bullets ticked.. I've got a job already though!
Seriously - this looks like it could be an interesting job for the right person. I'm sure there are several people on this forum alone, with Debian package management / repo experience. Jump on it. You don't even need to relocate, and you're networked already, as you're reading this.

Man I wish I knew how to do this. I could sure use a job. : /

Grr, if this wasn't an official position, I'd help out as a community job for free (I even debianised battery-graph for the author of that program when he said he wasn't sure about debian packaging)

So, Texrat (or Tim), take the job and just pass all the work along to qwerty. Everyone wins!

Heh... if that was actually realistic, I'd do it! But I'm betting Tim would be the better man...

This looks really cool; I'm just learning how to do this myself, it would be great if there were a packaging genius out there to help us newbie packagers get stuff ready to feed to the repositories. At the moment, it's a bit like walking blindfolded into a room full of short boxes; I keep whacking my shins on things I can't see.

For instance; it never occurred to me that you can make your application uninstallable for some people if you have the same icon in your package as in another package. Of course, it makes sense in hindsight... The application manager is (correctly) very cowardly when it comes to overwriting files.

The dirty method to sort that out is to add a Replaces: <package with icon already in it> in your control file :P

Yeah, see, that's why we need a debmaster. I use Khertan's pypackager and there's no way in that app to get access to many of the control file fields.

Also, my app doesn't (necessarily) replace the apps that share the icons...

Hmm, maybe rather than paying someone to help people package their apps, you should work with Khertan to enhance his Pypackager app to help everyone to package maemo apps. It has fallen behind the times with the introduction of the Autobuilder, and it has never had all of the features that I would like, but it is a really good start... It would need to run on a desktop as well as on the tablet, it would need to expose all the control file fields, and it could even hand-hold through the whole autobuilder process...