Debian on Twitter

Posted on Sun Mar 22, 2009

Or… for those who care about Twitter and Debian :)

We’ve setup a Twitter account for the project to use on Twitter. Go follow it, go now!

Now, the interesting part about this is that any Debian developer with a GPG key on the Debian keyring can tweet to it. You basically only have to do something like this:

$ echo "Squeeze is scheduled for Winter 2014" | gpg --clearsign | lwp-request -m POST http://twitter.debian.net/post

…or, what it’s the same, just send a clearsigned POST data to http://twitter.debian.net/post. If the data is signed by a Debian developer, it’ll go through and post it. The Debian uid is appended on the tweet, as found on Debian’s LDAP DB, so if joetheplumber@d.o is the one posting, it’ll be posted with “(via joetheplumber)” on it.

If you are more interested about this, you can go to http://twitter.debian.net/ (dead link now) where you will find deeper information and details about this service.

I encourage you, Debian user and advocate, to start following the @debianproject account; and I encourage you, Debian developer, to communicate with our users and advocates by using and posting to this service.

More news to follow soon.

UPDATE: Support for Identi.ca has been added and now both Twitter and Identi.ca accounts are updated at once and sync’ed.