Interested in adopting the RPi images for Debian?

Back in June 2018, Michael Stapelberg put the Raspberry Pi image building up for adoption. He created the first set of “unofficial, experimental” Raspberry Pi images for Debian. I promptly answered to him, and while it took me some time to actually warp my head around Michael’s work, managed to eventually do so. By December, I started pushing some updates.

Not only that: I didn’t think much about it in the beginning, as the needed non-free pacakge was called raspi3-firmware, but… By early 2019, I had it running for all of the then-available Raspberry families (so the package was naturally renamed to raspi-firmware). I got my Raspberry Pi 4 at DebConf19 (thanks to Andy, who brought it from Cambridge), and it soon joined the happy Debian family. The images are built daily, and are available in https://raspi.debian.net.

In the process, I also adopted Lars’ great vmdb2 image building tool, and have kept it decently up to date (yes, I’m currently lagging behind, but I’ll get to it soonish™).

Anyway… This year, I have been seriously neglecting the Raspberry builds. I have simply not had time to regularly test built images, nor to debug why the builder has not picked up building for trixie (testing). And my time availability is not going to improve any time soon.

We are close to one month away from moving for six months to Paraná (Argentina), where I’ll be focusing on my PhD. And while I do contemplate taking my Raspberries along, I do not forsee being able to put much energy to them.

So… This is basically a call for adoption for the Raspberry Debian images building service. I do intend to stick around and try to help. It’s not only me (although I’m responsible for the build itself) — we have a nice and healthy group of Debian people hanging out in the #debian-raspberrypi channel in OFTC IRC.

Don’t be afraid, and come ask. I hope giving this project in adoption will breathe new life into it!