Ubuntu: Introducing Debcrafters

Summary

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 Bootstrapping the team The Debcrafters team is a global team. We have a squad in the Americas, a squad in EMEA and will have a squad in APAC. At present, we’ve staffed the AMER and EMEA teams with existing Canonical employees from our Foundations, Desktop, Server and Public Cloud teams. Each team currently has a manager, and four engineers. The team comprises Debian Developers, Stable Release Updates (SRU) team members and archive administrators, and began working together for the first time at our recent Engineering Sprint in Frankfurt held in early May 2025. Mission The Debcrafters’ primary mission is to maintain the health of the Ubuntu Archive. 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 wor...