[jnsgruk]

Earlier this year, Canonical’s Ubuntu Engineering organisation gained a new team, seeded with some of our most prolific contributors to Ubuntu. Debcrafters is a new team dedicated to the maintenance of the Ubuntu Archive.

The team’s primary goal is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but its unique construction aims to attract a broad range of Linux distribution expertise; contributors to distributions like Debian, Arch Linux, NixOS and others are encouraged to join the team, and will even get paid to contribute one day per week to those projects to foster learning and idea sharing

[loloquwowndueo]

> others are encouraged to join the team

What are the requirements for joining? Will I be asked about my high-school grades? Pass a psychometric test?

Thanks.

[geodel]

One of the key requirement is high on sarcasm and low on contribution.

[jnsgruk]

Yes, candidates for the team will still be expected to go through our usual hiring process.

[rbanffy]

Does that mean they are reducing work on snaps?

[bArray]

I wish they would stop with snap, snaps have been nothing but a pain. Ubuntu keep pushing half-baked ideas into the wild - who asked for a system that would randomly kill apps without warning? It's like the Rust SSH thing, they are going to make it the default whether you like it or not, even though they know it is not 1:1 and probably never will be.

I'm currently having an issue with Firefox where it will not stop crashing all of the time, even whilst using Hackernews. Not a RAM or CPU issue, just buggy software pushed through a "move fast and break things" attitude.

[jnsgruk]

No, this is an orthogonal effort.

We have two channels for distributing software in Ubuntu: the archive and the snap store. Each are suited to different scenarios.

Irrespective of any view on Snap as a packaging format, the workflow and developer experience is, in my opinion, much simpler to work with. The barrier to contribution is much lower.

The work on debcraft is to try and bring some of the lessons we've learned there to those developers working with debs - while also introducing new primitives that will allow for extended integration testing of the distribution using some of our existing (well tested) machinery.

[OsrsNeedsf2P]

Nope, they're still pushing it:

> In the coming weeks our Starcraft team (responsible for Snapcraft, Rockcraft 1, Charmcraft) will begin prototyping debcraft, which will (in time) become the de facto method for creating, testing and uploading packages to the Ubuntu archive.