A few weeks ago I volunteered to adopt debmirror. It's a package I've been using for a long time myself and I expect maintaining it will give my (currently very basic) perl skills a boost.

The package is not in bad shape. It mostly just does what it needs to do, but there are a few interesting (wishlist) bug reports.

I've already done one upload (just migrated to testing) with mostly minor changes, mainly modernizing the packaging (using the magic 'dh' command). I'm now preparing another upload with the results of initial bug triaging and some general improvements.

As there already was an alioth project for debmirror, I've started using that. My changes can be seen in subversion, although I have some work-in-progress that I keep in a local git-svn checkout.

One wishlist bug concerned adding support to download the translations of package descriptions. Problem there is that debmirror currently only really supports mirroring files that are listed in the Release file (either directly or indirectly) and the i18n files are currently not listed.

But that may soon be fixed if the FTP-masters accept my patch to dak which adds an Index file for the translation files and lists that file in Release. After that supporting the package translation files in debmirror should be fairly straightforward.

So with that I've doubled the number of packages I maintain: from 1 to 2