I’m currently going through the process of becoming a Debian Maintainer so that I can upload Annodex packages without bugging one of the DDs I know. Thanks to horms and jaq for their help thus far.
As part of this process you need to file a bug against the debian-maintainers package to get your key added. You need to do this using a piece of software called jetring. jetring allows you to create changesets for a gpg keyring, a binary format, to make it easy for the maintainers to add and remove keys and know exactly whats being added and removed. I couldn’t find very much information on how you actually do this and hence the reason for this post.
To start with you need to grab the latest copy of the debian-maintainers keyring and extract the actual keyring from it. You can find the link to the latest version at debian-maintainers, just click on all to download it.
Here is the process I followed with comments along the way
# Download the latest debian-maintainers keyring
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/
debian-maintainers/debian-maintainers_1.38_all.deb
dpkg-deb -x *.deb keyring
mv keyring/usr/share/keyrings/debian-maintainers.gpg .
rm -rf keyring *.deb
# Create a copy of it and add your key to it
cp debian-maintainers.gpg debian-maintainers.gpg.orig
gpg --export johnf@inodes.org |
gpg --import --no-default-keyring --keyring `pwd`/debian-maintainers.gpg
# Create the changset with jetring
jetring-gen debian-maintainers.gpg.orig debian-maintainers.gpg
"Add John Ferlito <johnf @inodes.org> as a Debian Maintainer"
# Check the changeset
jetring-review -d debian-maintainers.gpg.orig add-*
Once you have completed the above you should have a file with something like the following contents
Comment: Add John Ferlito <johnf @inodes.org> as a Debian Maintainer Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2008 14:26:31 +1000 Action: import Data: -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) mQGiBEd6MmQRBADF+BLVChN/AqKVXkrJFU2LtJoiCdYJ <snip> =SSNk -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
You should now add something along the lines of the below to the top of the file.
Recommended-By: Simon Horman <horms @verge,net.au>, Jamie Wilkinson <jaq @spacepants.org> Agreement: http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2008/07/msg00010.html Advocates: http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2008/07/msg00011.html, http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2008/07/msg00012.html
The agreement line should be a URL to your signed email applying to become a DM and the advocates should be the URLs for the signed emails from your advocates.
Once you’ve done that, submit a bug with the file attached and hopefully sometime later you will have become a DM.