Jonathan Carter: MiniDebConf Germany 2023
This year I attended Debian Reunion Hamburg (aka MiniDebConf Germany) for the second time. My goal for this MiniDebConf was just to talk to people and make the most of the time I have there. No other specific plans or goals. Despite this simple goal, it was a very productive and successful event for me.
Tuesday 23rd:
- Arrived much later than planned after about 18h of travel, went to bed early.
- Was in a discussion about individual package maintainership.
- Was in a discussion about the nature of Technical Committee.
- Co-signed a copy of The Debian System book along with the other DDs
- Submitted a BoF request for people who are present to bring issues to the attention of the DPL (and to others who are around).
- Noticed I still had a blog entry draft about this event last year, and posted it just to get it done.
- Had a stand-up meeting, was nice to see what everyone was working on.
- Had some event budgeting discussions with Holger.
- Worked a bit on a talk I haven t submitted yet called Current events (it s slightly punny, get it?) it s still very raw but I m passively working on it just in case we need a backup talk over the weekend.
- Had a discussion over lunch with someone who runs their HPC on Debian and learned about Octopus and Pac.
- TIL (from #debian-python) about pyproject.toml (https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/build-system/pyproject-toml/)
- Was in a discussion about amd64 build times on our buildds and referred them to DSA. I also e-mailed DSA to ask them if there s anything we can do to improve build times (since it affects both productivity and motivation).
- Did some premium cola tasting with andrewsh
- Had a discussion with Ilu about installers (and luks2 issues in Calamares), accessibility and organisational stuff.
- Spent quite a chunk of the morning in a usrmerge BoF. I m very impressed by the amount of reading and research the people in the BoF did and gathering all the facts/data, it seems that there is now a way forward that will fix usrmerge in Debian in a way that could work for everyone, an extensive summary/proposal will be posted to debian-devel as soon as possible.
- Mind was in zombie mode. So I did something easy and upgraded the host running this blog and a few other hosts to bookworm to see what would break.
- Cheese and wine party, which resulted in a mao party that ran waaaay too late.
- Daytrip
- Was very saddened to learn that the Metallica concert in Hamburg that day was not a daytrip option.
- The Museum der Arbeit had lots of interesting machinery and history, there s also a giant drill bit outside it that was used to create the elb tunnels in Hamburg, we had a really nice dinner at a restaurant named after it.
- Attended talks:
- HTTP all the things The rocky path from the basement into the cloud
- Running Debian on a Smartphone
- debvm Ephemeral Virtual Debian Machines
- Network Configuration on Debian Systems
- Discussing changes to the Debian key package definition
- Meet the Release Team
- Towards collective decision-making and maintenance in the Debian base system
- Performed some PGP key signing.
- Edited group photo.
- Had a BoF where we had an open discussion about things on our collective minds (Debian Therapy Session).
- Had a session on upcoming legislature in the EU (like CRA).
- Some web statistics with MrFai.
- Talked to Marc Haber about a DebConf bid for Heidelberg for DebConf 25.
- Closing session.
- Started the morning with Helmut and Jochen convincing me switch from cowbuilder to sbuild (I m tentatively sold, the huge new plus is that you don t need schroot anymore, which trashed two of my systems in the past and effectively made sbuild a no-go for me until now).
- Dealt with more laptop hardware failures, removing a stick of RAM seems to have solved that for now!
Das is nicht gut.
- Dealt with some delegation issues for release team and publicity team.
- Attended my last stand-up meeting.
- Wrapped things up, blogged about the event. Probably forgot to list dozens of things in this blog entry. It is fine.
- Didn t attend the last day, basically a travel day for me.
Thank you to Holger for organising this event yet again!