Ubuntu Debcrafters Team Formed To Help Ensure The Health Of The Ubuntu Archive

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 30 June 2025 at 11:56 AM EDT. 25 Comments

Jon Seager as the VP of Engineering at Canonical today publicly announced the formation of their "Debcrafters" global team to help ensure the health of the Ubuntu Archive.

The Ubuntu developers part of this Debcrafters team will help ensure the punctual syncing and merging of Debian (DEB) packages from upstream Debian. Seager explained in the Debcrafters announcement:

"This team will take the lead on syncing & merging packages from Debian, reviewing proposed migration issues, upstreaming Ubuntu deltas, and take ownership of major transitions such as upgrades to glibc and past examples such as the t64 and python3 transitions.

They’ll manage the scheduling, triggering and reporting on archive test rebuilds which we conduct when making major changes to critical packages. We did this when we enabled frame pointers by default, and when we switched coreutils to the uutils implementation in Ubuntu 25.10.

They’ll be responsible for the evolution and maintenance of the autopkgtest infrastructure for Ubuntu, as well as taking an instrumental role in introducing more distro-scale integration tests.

They’ll work on improving the reporting and dashboarding of the Ubuntu Archive, its contributors and status, as well as taking a broader interest in shaping the tools we use to build and shape Ubuntu.

What sets this team apart from the likes of Desktop, Server and Foundations is the range of packages they will work on. Members of the Debcrafters team will move thousands of packages every cycle - many of which they will not be intimately familiar with, but will use their growing distro maintenance and packaging skills to perform maintenance where there is no other clear or present owner."

Those wanting to learn more about this new Ubuntu Debcrafters team can do so via the Ubuntu Discourse.