Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

If you look into the details for some these packages, you will see that it is a dead discussion forgotten even by the person who initiated it, a decade ago.

E.g. the discussion about Libreoffice is not about Libreoffice at all, but Apache Open Office, and you can see that there are people who have offered help, but the OP never responded to their offers.

Just click on the links on the package names and read for yourself.

I have been using it like that almost every day for 15 years now.

First, choose a package that really matters to you. On a daily basis. A package that you yourself would NEED to have it up2date the next day a new version is out.

Get the source deb and try to build it. Usually it's not very hard.

Then, try to do the same on all the debian variants (unstable, stable, ...)

If you succeed and the package works, you have the prerequisite competencies, at least as a beginner.

Then, these are some of the things that you will need to do, quite often.

Change the configuration of the package description so that you can build it with a later version of the source. For all variants of the distro.

Then try the same with the package dependencies, where those dependecies are not needed for other packages.

Then try to push it as close towards the latest source version, as you can without breaking stuff.

Once you do all that without issues and you are confident that you can use the version you built from source as a daily driver and you are not bothered by that, contact the original maintainer directly and offer help, sharing the details what you did as proof that you are competent enough.

If the maintainer is uncollaborative or unresponsive, put up your own repo for public use, and invite the public to install the package from your repo, so that the public will see some benefit and you will receive zillion of bug reports to further streghten your competence level.