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Debian: Freexian Monthly Report and Proposal for Git-based Collaboration in Debian
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2025 (by Roberto C. Sánchez)
The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian’s Debian LTS offering] (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/), is pleased to report its activities for October.
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Otto Kekäläinen: DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian
I am a huge fan of Git, as I have witnessed how it has made software development so much more productive compared to the pre-2010s era. I wish all Debian source code were in Git to reap the full benefits.
Git is not perfect, as it requires significant effort to learn properly, and the ecosystem is complex with even more things to learn ranging from cryptographic signatures and commit hooks to Git-assisted code review best practices, ‘forge’ websites and CI systems.
Sure, there is still room to optimize its use, but Git certainly has proven itself and is now the industry standard. Thus, some readers might be surprised to learn that Debian development in 2025 is not actually based on Git. In Debian, the version control is done by the Debian archive itself. Each ‘commit’ is a new upload to the archive, and the ‘commit message’ is the
debian/changelogentry. The ‘commit log’ is available at snapshots.debian.org.In practice, most Debian Developers (people who have the credentials to upload to the Debian archive) do use Git and host their packaging source code on salsa.debian.org – the GitLab instance of Debian. This is, however, based on each DD’s personal preferences. The Debian project does not have any policy requiring that packages be hosted on salsa.debian.org or be in version control at all.