Debian Reunion MiniDebConf 2022

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that I’ve had a lot on my plate in the last few years, and that I have a *huge* backlog of little tasks to finish. Just last week, I finally got to all my keysigning from DebConf22. This week, I’m at MiniDebConf Germany in Hamburg. It’s the second time I’m here! And it’s great already. Last year I drafted a blog entry, but never got around to publishing it. So, in order to mentally tick off yet another thing, here follows a somewhat imperfect (I had to delete a lot of short-hand because I didn’t know what it means anymore), but at least published post about my activities from a year ago.

This week (well, last year) I attended my first ever in-person MiniDebConf and MiniDebCamp in Hamburg, Germany. The last time I was in Germany was 7 years ago for DebConf15 (or at time of publishing, actually, last year… for this same event).

My focus for the week was to work on Debian live related stuff.

In preparation for the week I tried to fix/close as many Calamares bugs as I could, so before the event I closed:

• File calamares upstream issue #1944 ‘Calamares allows me to select a username of “root”‘ for Debian bug #976617.
• File calamares upstream issue #1945 ‘Calamares needs support for high DPI’ for Debian bug #992162.
• Comment on calamares bug #1005212 ‘Calamares installer fails at partitioning disks’ requesting further info.
• Close calamares bug #1009876 ‘There is no /tmp item in the list during the partitioning step in the debian calamares installer’ – /tmp partitions can be created, not a bug, really just a small UI issue.
• Close calamares bug #974998 ‘SegFault when clicked on “Create” in manual partitioning’, not reproducible in bullseye.
• Close calamares bug #971266 ‘Debian fails to start when /home is encrypted during installation’ – this works fine since bullseye.
• Close calamares bug #976617 ‘Calamares allows me to select a username of “root”‘ – has since been fixed upstream.

Monday to Friday we worked together on various issues, and the weekend was for talks.

On Monday morning, I had a nice discussion with Roland Clobus who has been working on making Debian live images reproducible. He’s also been working on testing Debian Live on openqa.debian.net. We’re planning on integrating his work so that Debian 12 live images will be reproducible. For automated testing on openqa, it will be ongoing work, one blocker has been that snapshots.debian.org limits connections after a while, so builds on there start failing fast.

On Monday afternoon, I went ahead and uploaded the latest Calamares hotfix (Calamares 3.2.58.1-1) release that fixes a UI issue on the partitioning screen where it could get stuck. On 15:00 we had a stand-up meeting where we introduced ourselves and talked a bit about our plans. It was great to see how many people could benefit from each other being there. For example, someone wanting to learn packaging, another wanting to improve packaging documentation, another wanting help with packaging something written in Rust, another wanting to improve Rust packaging in general and lots of overlap when it comes to reproducible builds! I also helped a few people with some of their packaging issues.

On Monday evening, someone in videoteam managed to convince me to put together a loopy loop for this MiniDebConf. There’s really wasn’t enough time to put together something elaborate, but I put something together based on the previous loopy with some experiments that I’ve been working on for the upcoming DC22 loopy, and we can use this loop to do a call for content for the DC22 loop.

On Tuesday morning had some chats with urbec and Ilu,Tuesday afternoon talked to MIA team about upcoming removals. Did some admin on debian.ch payments for hosting. On Tuesday evening worked on live image stuff (d-i downloader, download module for dmm).

On Wednesday morning I slept a bit late, then had to deal with some DPL admin/legal things. Wednesday afternoon, more chats with people.

On Thursday: Talked to a bunch more people about a lot of issues, got loopy in a reasonably shape, edited and published the Group photo!

On Friday: prepared my talk slides, learned about Brave (https://github.com/bbc/brave) – It initially looked like a great compositor for DebConf video stuff (and possible replacement for OBS, but it turned out it wasn’t really maintained upstream). In the evening we had the Cheese and Wine party, where lots of deliciousness was experienced.

On Saturday, I learned from Felix’s talk that Tensorflow is now in experimental! (and now in 2023 I checked again and that’s still the case, although it hasn’t made it’s way in unstable yet, hopefully that improves over the trixie cycle)

I know most of the people who attended quite well, but it was really nice to also see a bunch of new Debianites that I’ve only seen online before and to properly put some faces to names. We also had a bunch of enthusiastic new contributors and we did some key signing.