Debian Acronyms
| AM | Application Maintainer The person who guides a NM though the NM process and recommend him. |
| AWOL | Away without leave One who is away or absent without leave. |
| BTS | Bug Tracking System The Bug Tracking System is found here. |
| DAM | Debian Account Manager The Debian Developer who actually creates new accounts |
| DDP | Debian Documentation Project A sub-project within Debian covering various documentation issues. |
| DDPO | Debian Developer's Packages Overview This system allows interested people to subscribe to activity on a given package. |
| DDR | Debian Developer's Reference This document describes building of packages for Debian GNU/Linux to the common Debian user (and wannabe developer) in common language, and well covered with working examples. |
| DFSG | Debian Free Software License The DFSG is part of the social contract, initially designed as a set of commitments that the Debian project agrees to abide by. |
| DMUP | Debian Machine Use Policies A document describing the policy for machines in the Debian network. |
| DPL | Debian Project Leader The person who leads the Debian Project and represents it to the outside non-Debian world. |
| DSA | Debian Security Advisory Security Advisory released by the Security Team, fixing a security problem in the stable distribution. |
| DSA | Debian System Administration The people who maintain all the machines that Debian maintains. |
| DWN | Debian Weekly News DWN teams' weekly news for the Debian community. |
| FTBFS | Failure to Build from Source For some reason this package does not build from source on all architectures. |
| IANADD | I am not a Debian developer Originated in IANAL and used in discussions. |
| IANAL | I am not a lawyer Used in discussions to denote that the person is not giving any legally binding advice and that the jurisdiction may decide otherwise. However, even respected people use this and usually demonstrate quite a high understanding of legality. |
| ICE | Internal Compiler Error This should not happen, but since GCC has to support a lot of architectures and operating systems, ICEs are not that unlikely on new architectures (like arm and s390) especially. |
| IRL | in Real Life For people too lazy to type "n |
| ITA | Intend to Adopt When a maintainer intends to adopt a packge from somebody else. See wnpp. |
| ITO | Intend to Orphan When a maintainer intends to orphan one or more packages. See wnpp. |
| ITP | Intend to Package When a maintainer decides to package a new piece of software this is announced to debian-devel. See wnpp. |
| KCD | Kernel Cousin Debian A weekly summary of the most important threads on debian-devel |
| KISS | Keep it simple, stupid Usenet-idiom for the need of simple things (like small and simple setuid programs instead of large emacs-like programs). |
| LCA | Linux.conf.au Australian Linux Conference |
| LISC | Linux Internet Support Coorperative See here. |
| LWN | Linux Weekly News Daily and weekly summaries about what is going on in the community. |
| MIA | Missing In Action A maintainer who is not fixing bugs and responding anymore. |
| NM | New Maintainer Somebody who has applied for maintainership or who was accepted recently. |
| NMU | Non-Maintainer-Upload When somebody else than the regular package maintainer uploads a package. |
| NPOASR | Never part of a stable release An acronym used by the Debian Quality Assurance to indicate that a package was never shipped with a Debian Stable release. |
| NVIU | Newer Version In Unstable There is a newer version of this particular packge in the unstable distribution, perhaps with a different name, so that this package can be removed. |
| OPN | Open Projects Network Network of machines hosting an IRC server for the OPN. |
| P&P | Philosophy and Procedures This is the 3rd step when applying as a Debian Developer (DD). It ensures that the applicant agrees to the Debian philosophy and generally knows how to behave as a DD. |
| PAE | Physical Address Extension With PAE (built into every Pentium-class processor) even 32bit programs are able to access more than 4 GB of RAM. |
| RFA | Request for Adoption When somebody wants to orphan a package he requests somebody els to adopt the to package. See wnpp. |
| RFP | Request for Packaging When somebody requests some software to be packaged and uploaded. See wnpp. |
| RL | Real Life This idiom is contrary to "virtual life" which one spends on the net, in IRC channels, news groups and mailing lists. |
| RTFM | Read the F...ine Manual Telling somebody to not bother others but use the enclosed documentation. |
| RfB | Request for Boot Used by the DSA when a machine has crashed and needs to be rebooted by the site admin. |
| RoM | Request of Maintainer When a package is removed from the archive at the request of its maintainer (e.g. because it has been superseded), it is tagged accordingly. |
| RoQA | Request of QA The Quality Assurance (QA) team has requested this package to be removed from the archive. |
| T&S | Tasks and Skills This is the 4rd step when applying as a Debian Developer (DD). The applicant has to prove that he has the technical knownledge to become a successful DD. |
| TINLA | This is no legal advice An extension to IANAL used in legal discussions. |
| UTSL | Use the Source, Luke Following Star Wars this is term used when one is told to take a look into the source, especially if something's not working or the documentation is not appropriate. |
| WNPP | Work-Needing and Prospective Packages A list of packages that were orphaned, need a new maintainer or were requested to be packaged. See here. |
| Woftam | Waste of Fucking Time and Money Just check out some startups in the so called New Economy... |
| Xu | Herbert Xu When a package is split into a whole bunch of small packages, that's a Xu. |
| yafhci386 | yet another fine hard coded i386 New packages are often blatantly set to Architecture: i386 instead of Architecture: any, most of them are not i386-centric and thus should be distributed through all alrechitectures. For an example, see Bug#125965. |
Some of these abbreviations and many more explanations are found
with the dict command.