Debian Developer's Duties

Maintaining your Debian information
There's a LDAP database containing information about Debian developers at . You should enter your information there and update it as it changes. Most notably, make sure that the address where your debian.org email gets forwarded to is always up to date, as well as the address where you get your debian-private subscription if you choose to subscribe there.
For more information about the database, please see .

Maintaining your public key
Be very careful with your private keys. Do not place them on any public servers or multiuser machines, such as the Debian servers (see ). Back your keys up; keep a copy offline. Read the documentation that comes with your software; read the PGP FAQ.
You need to ensure not only that your key is secure against being stolen, but also that it is secure against being lost. Generate and make a copy (best also in paper form) of your revocation certificate; this is needed if your key is lost.
If you add signatures to your public key, or add user identities, you can update the Debian key ring by sending your key to the key server at .
If you need to add a completely new key or remove an old key, you need to get the new key signed by another developer. If the old key is compromised or invalid, you also have to add the revocation certificate. If there is no real reason for a new key, the Keyring Maintainers might reject the new key. Details can be found at .
The same key extraction routines discussed in apply.
You can find a more in-depth discussion of Debian key maintenance in the documentation of the debian-keyring package.

Voting
Even though Debian isn't really a democracy, we use a democratic process to elect our leaders and to approve general resolutions. These procedures are defined by the Debian Constitution.
Other than the yearly leader election, votes are not routinely held, and they are not undertaken lightly. Each proposal is first discussed on the mailing list and it requires several endorsements before the project secretary starts the voting procedure.
You don't have to track the pre-vote discussions, as the secretary will issue several calls for votes on (and all developers are expected to be subscribed to that list). Democracy doesn't work well if people don't take part in the vote, which is why we encourage all developers to vote. Voting is conducted via GPG-signed/encrypted email messages.
The list of all proposals (past and current) is available on the Debian Voting Information page, along with information on how to make, second and vote on proposals.

Going on vacation gracefully
It is common for developers to have periods of absence, whether those are planned vacations or simply being buried in other work. The important thing to notice is that other developers need to know that you're on vacation so that they can do whatever is needed if a problem occurs with your packages or other duties in the project.
Usually this means that other developers are allowed to NMU (see ) your package if a big problem (release critical bug, security update, etc.) occurs while you're on vacation. Sometimes it's nothing as critical as that, but it's still appropriate to let others know that you're unavailable.
In order to inform the other developers, there are two things that you should do. First send a mail to debian-private@ with [VAC] prepended to the subject of your message[1] and state the period of time when you will be on vacation. You can also give some special instructions on what to do if a problem occurs.
[1] This is so that the message can be easily filtered by people who don't want to read vacation notices.
The other thing to do is to mark yourself as on vacation in the Debian developers' LDAP database (this information is only accessible to Debian developers). Don't forget to remove the on vacation flag when you come back!
Ideally, you should sign up at the GPG coordination site when booking a holiday and check if anyone there is looking for signing. This is especially important when people go to exotic places where we don't have any developers yet but where there are people who are interested in applying.

Coordination with upstream developers
A big part of your job as Debian maintainer will be to stay in contact with the upstream developers. Debian users will sometimes report bugs that are not specific to Debian to our bug tracking system. You have to forward these bug reports to the upstream developers so that they can be fixed in a future upstream release.
While it's not your job to fix non-Debian specific bugs, you may freely do so if you're able. When you make such fixes, be sure to pass them on to the upstream maintainers as well. Debian users and developers will sometimes submit patches to fix upstream bugs — you should evaluate and forward these patches upstream.
If you need to modify the upstream sources in order to build a policy compliant package, then you should propose a nice fix to the upstream developers which can be included there, so that you won't have to modify the sources of the next upstream version. Whatever changes you need, always try not to fork from the upstream sources.

Managing release-critical bugs
Generally you should deal with bug reports on your packages as described in . However, there's a special category of bugs that you need to take care of — the so-called release-critical bugs (RC bugs). All bug reports that have severity critical, grave or serious are considered to have an impact on whether the package can be released in the next stable release of Debian. These bugs can delay the Debian release and/or can justify the removal of a package at freeze time. That's why these bugs need to be corrected as quickly as possible.
Developers who are part of the Quality Assurance group are following all such bugs, and trying to help whenever possible. If, for any reason, you aren't able fix an RC bug in a package of yours within 2 weeks, you should either ask for help by sending a mail to the Quality Assurance (QA) group debian-qa@, or explain your difficulties and present a plan to fix them by sending a mail to the bug report. Otherwise, people from the QA group may want to do a Non-Maintainer Upload (see ) after trying to contact you (they might not wait as long as usual before they do their NMU if they have seen no recent activity from you in the BTS).

Retiring
If you choose to leave the Debian project, you should make sure you do the following steps:
Orphan all your packages, as described in .
Send an gpg-signed email about why you are leaving the project to debian-private@.
Notify the Debian key ring maintainers that you are leaving by opening a ticket in Debian RT by sending a mail to keyring@rt.debian.org with the words 'Debian RT' somewhere in the subject line (case doesn't matter).