4.2. IRC channels

Several IRC channels are dedicated to Debian’s development. They are mainly hosted on the Open and free technology community (OFTC) network. The irc.debian.org DNS entry is an alias to irc.oftc.net.

The main channel for Debian in general is #debian. This is a large, general-purpose channel where users can find recent news in the topic and served by bots. #debian is for English speakers; there are also #debian.de, #debian-fr, #debian-br and other similarly named channels for speakers of other languages.

The main channel for Debian development is #debian-devel. It is a very active channel; it will typically have a minimum of 150 people at any time of day. It’s a channel for people who work on Debian, it’s not a support channel (there’s #debian for that). It is however open to anyone who wants to lurk (and learn). Its topic is commonly full of interesting information for developers.

Since #debian-devel is an open channel, you should not speak there of issues that are discussed in debian-private@lists.debian.org. There’s another channel for this purpose, it’s called #debian-private and it’s protected by a key. This key is available at master.debian.org:~debian/misc/irc-password.

There are other additional channels dedicated to specific subjects. #debian-bugs is used for coordinating bug squashing parties. #debian-boot is used to coordinate the work on the debian-installer. #debian-doc is occasionally used to talk about documentation, like the document you are reading. Other channels are dedicated to an architecture or a set of packages: #debian-kde, #debian-dpkg, #debian-perl, #debian-python…

Some non-English developers’ channels exist as well, for example #debian-devel-fr for French speaking people interested in Debian’s development.

Channels dedicated to Debian also exist on other IRC networks, notably on the freenode IRC network, which was pointed at by the irc.debian.org alias until 4th June 2006.

To get a cloak on freenode, you send Jörg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org> a signed mail where you tell what your nick is. Put cloak somewhere in the Subject: header. The nick should be registered: Nick Setup Page. The mail needs to be signed by a key in the Debian keyring. Please see Freenode documentation for more information about cloaks.