Debian has just announced a so-called COVID-19 Biohackathon that will take place online in April and whose purpose is to help improve biomedical FOSS and all the related solutions that are supposed to support such projects.

The idea of the online event is to bring the Linux world together in order to improve the way Debian can help the health industry fight against the new coronavirus, and Debian says anyone can contribute with bug triage, testing, documentation, CI, translations, packaging, and code contributions.

“You can also contribute directly to the upstream packages, linked from the Debian Med COVID-19 task page at [covid-19-packages]. Note: many biomedical software packages are quite resource limited, even compared to a typical FOSS project. Please be kind to the upstream author/maintainers and realize that they may have limited resources to review your contribution. Triaging open issues and opening pull requests to fix problems is likely to be more useful than nitpicking their coding style,” the Debian developers explain.

Tech events canceled due to new coronavirus

Furthermore, it’s recommended to focus on amd64, as this is the architecture that biomedical software most often uses.

The event will take place online because of obvious reasons – as a matter of fact, several tech conferences have already moved to a digital version due to the coronavirus outbreak, including Microsoft’s Build and Apple’s WWDC.

Full information on the upcoming Debian biohackathon is available in the official announcement here.

“It is very easy to contribute to Debian Med team. We have a lowNMU policy for all our packages. Merge requests on Salsa are usually processed quickly (but please ping some of the latest Uploaders of the package to make sure it will be noticed). Even better if you ask for membership to the team and push directly to the salsa repository,” the Debian team explains.