Bits from Debian

Bits from Debian

(Unofficial) Debian Perl Sprint 2022

On Fri 15 July 2022 with tags perl sprint minidebconf
Written by gregor herrmann
Artwork by Andrej Shadura, Andres Troya Holst, Jonathan Carter

Three members of the Debian Perl Group met in Hamburg between May 23 and May 30 2022 as part of the Debian Reunion Hamburg to continue perl development work for Bookworm and to work on QA tasks across our 3800+ packages.

The participants had a good time and met other Debian friends. The sprint was also productive:

  • pkg-perl-tools and dh-make-perl were improved and extended.
  • More than 50 uploads were done, and more than 30 bugs were fixed or at least triaged.
  • autopkgtests were added to lots of packages.
  • Some requests to remove obsolete packages were filed as well.

The more detailed report was posted to the Debian Perl mailing list.

The participants would like to thank the Debian Reunion Hamburg organizers for providing the framework for our sprint, all sponsors of the event, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover parts of our expenses.

Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 group photo


Report of the Debian Perl Sprint 2020

On Mon 15 June 2020 with tags perl sprint
Written by Dominic Hargreaves

Eight members of the Debian Perl team met online between May 15 and May 17 2020, in lieu of a planned physical sprint meeting. Work focussed on preparations for bullseye, and continued maintenance of the large number of perl modules maintained by the team.

Whilst an online sprint cannot fully replace an in-person sprint in terms of focussing attention, the weekend was still very productive, and progress was made on a range of topics including:

  • Reducing technical debt by removing unmaintained packages
  • Beginning packaging and QA for the next major release of perl, 5.32
  • Deciding on a team policy for hardening flags
  • Addressing concerns with Alien::*, a set of pacakges designed to download source code
  • Developing a proposal for debian/NEWS.Developer, to complement debian/NEWS
  • Developing a plan to enable SSL verification in HTTP::Tiny by default

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank OpusVL for providing the Jitsi instance for the weekend.


Debian Web Team Sprint 2019

On Tue 16 April 2019 with tags web sprint
Written by Laura Arjona Reina
Artwork by Laura Arjona Reina

The Debian Web team held a sprint for the first time, in Madrid (Spain) from March 15th to March 17th, 2019.

We discussed the status of the Debian website in general, review several important pages/sections and agreed on many things how to improve them.

For the sections we want to reorganise (mainly the homepage and a new section "download" which will group our current "CD" and "distrib" sections) , we have designed this workflow:

  • Create branches in the webwml repo,
  • Agreed on the new or modified content (started already during the sprint), and work on them further after the sprint
  • Review a lot of related open bugs to see if we can address them with the new content (done during the sprint)
  • Create bug reports for the things that cannot be solved quickly to keep them tracked (started during the sprint)
  • We agreed we should get further help from web designers/information architects (pending)
  • Once the English version is more or less settled, call for translations on the branch (pending)
  • If we have English and the main translations ready, merging into the master branch (pending)
  • We will try to have at least the homepage and the download section ready for the Buster release.

We also agreed that the press delegates should decide what new News entry is worth to be posted in the homepage instead of showing the last 6 entries.

For some other pages or areas (e.g. doc/books, misc/merchandise, /users) we found that the content is outdated and the team can not maintain it, we agreed in issuing a call for help (request for adoption) and if we cannot find volunteers for those pages/areas, we'll remove the content or move it to wiki.debian.org at the end of 2019.

We have agreed that we'll need to reduce the size (number of pages) of the website (*see some numbers about statistics at bottom) so it's more sustainable to keep the whole website up-to-date (content wise), so we'll remove some pages having content already covered in other pages, having content that currently is easy discoverable with a web search engine, can be maintained better in the wiki, etc.

We have talked a bit about certain other aspects like point release workflow, the build time of the website, team memberships and governance. In general the sprint has shown that for most of the discussed topics the migration to git as VCS and the existence of Salsa is a huge step forward for the usability and attractiveness for contributors of the webwml repository.

The core webteam is happy that the sprint has also attracted new people to jump in and which are also members of the webteam now. We welcome Thomas Lange and Carsten Schoenert in our team!

Finally, we have passed time together to socialize and knowing each other better, and got very motivated to continue working on the web.

Group photo of the participants in the Web Team Sprint Left to right: Rhonda D'Vine, Laura Arjona Reina, Thomas Lange, Carsten Schoenert, Steve McIntyre

A more detailed report has been sent to the debian-www mailing list.

The participants would like to thank all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.


Debian Cloud Sprint 2018

On Tue 11 December 2018 with tags cloud sprint
Written by Tomasz Rybak

The Debian Cloud team held a sprint for the third time, hosted by Amazon at its Seattle offices from October 8th to October 10th, 2018.

We discussed the status of images on various platforms, especially in light of moving to FAI as the only method for building images on all the cloud platforms. The next topic was building and testing workflows, including the use of Debian machines for building, testing, storing, and publishing built images. This was partially caused by the move of all repositories to Salsa, which allows for better management of code changes, especially reviewing new code.

Recently we have made progress supporting cloud usage cases; grub and kernel optimised for cloud images help with reducing boot time and required memory footprint. There is also growing interest in non-x86 images, and FAI can now build such images.

Discussion of support for LTS images, which started at the sprint, has now moved to the debian-cloud mailing list). We also discussed providing many image variants, which requires a more advanced and automated workflow, especially regarding testing. Further discussion touched upon providing newer kernels and software like cloud-init from backports. As interest in using secure boot is increasing, we might cooperate with other team and use work on UEFI to provide images signed boot loader and kernel.

Another topic of discussion was the management of accounts used by Debian to build and publish Debian images. SPI will create and manage such accounts for Debian, including user accounts (synchronised with Debian accounts). Buster images should be published using those new accounts. Our Cloud Team delegation proposal (prepared by Luca Fillipozzi) was accepted by the Debian Project Leader. Sprint minutes are available, including a summary and a list of action items for individual members.

Group photo of the participants in the Cloud Team Sprint


Debian Perl Sprint 2018

On Wed 27 June 2018 with tags perl sprint hh2018
Written by Dominic Hargreaves

Three members of the Debian Perl team met in Hamburg between May 16 and May 20 2018 as part of the Mini-DebConf Hamburg to continue perl development work for Buster and to work on QA tasks across our 3500+ packages.

The participants had a good time and met other Debian friends. The sprint was productive:

  • 21 bugs were filed or worked on, many uploads were accepted.
  • The transition to Perl 5.28 was prepared, and versioned provides were again worked on.
  • Several cleanup tasks were performed, especially around the move from Alioth to Salsa in documentation, website, and wiki.
  • For src:perl, autopkgtests were enabled, and work on Versioned Provides has been resumed.

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank the Mini-DebConf Hamburg organizers for providing the framework for our sprint, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.


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