Moodle in Debian

Over the past few weeks, i’ve been working with Francois, Penny and Matt to take over maintaining the moodle package for Debian. Unfortunately the previous maintainer could not keep up with maintenance since some time ago, and the package was orphaned (awaiting someone else to take over caring for the package). Penny invited me to get involved & we’ve been hard at work since: Producing a huge security update to debian stable, getting moodle accepted into lenny - the next version of debian (by fixing outstanding bugs which blocked it from being accepted) and getting on top of the debian bugs which were outstanding.

Unfortunately debian was in freeze stage for lenny when we took on maintaining moodle, so we could not upgrade the version from 1.8.2 (however this is much better than 1.6 which is currently in debian stable). Its great to keep moodle in debian with security support and a lot of thanks is owed to Francois Marrier (the debian developer who has taken this on) to make this happen. I’m hopeful i’ll be able to buy francois a drink in thanks sometime soon. :-)

Personally, I use Debian in my leisure & working life extensively (indeed, its the platform we use to provide moodle for 1000 schools), its a project close to my heart (and saves me so much time) so i’m really pleased to be able to contribute back to debian (as well as moodle). I have been interested in getting involved with debian for quite some time - doing this as part of the moodle packaging team is a great way to begin to get involved.

I’m confident that the moodle community will benefit from increased exposure of debian bug reports and the closer exposure of perspectives of upstream distribution packagers will also help the moodle development community. :-)