Can I get involved?

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

I am a driveby Debian Developer who came across your email in the web
archive, while looking into why clisp was missing from the future stable
release (aka testing), and tought it best to give it a reply.

[David A Cobb]
> My background: 30+ years as a Civil Serpent Computer Scientist
> (overpaid programmer).  First discovered LISP via emacs, back in the
> dark ages.  I am a better-than-average wordsmith; I believe I may be
> most helpful with documentation.  I'm a competent Common-Lisp
> programmer, but still learning.

I do not really know much about LISP in Debian, but looking at the
mailing list activity and the amount of  stuff listed on
<URL: https://udd.debian.org/dmd.cgi?email1=pkg-common-lisp-devel%40lists.alioth.debian.org >,
I suspect the team currently lack contributors with time to spend on the
LISP packages in Debian.  This in turn make me suspect your offer is
very valuable, and should be supported in any way.

If you wonder how to help, I suggest you start by looking at the todo
list in the URL I mention above, and check out the bugs to see if you
can reproduce them (and report your findings to each report) and try to
make sure there are patches submitted to bug tracking system to fix
them.  This will demonstrate your abilities and motivate other team
members to contribute.

I also suggest you subscribe to the mailing list and try to follow up on
any new bug reports.  When the number of release critical bugs is lower
you can even look at old bug reports.

You should also request team membership to the team on Alioth, <URL:
https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-common-lisp >, to gain access to
the VCS, but that might take a while to get (depend on team policy,
which I do not know) as it depend on the team administrators finding
time to process the request.

So to answer your question: Yes, you can get involved, by just help out
where you believe you can. :)

Note, I am not a team member, nor subscribed to this mailing list, so
please CC me if you want me to see the email.

--
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen