1. The closure of the Saint-Michel station had a drastic impact on D'Iberville, the station closest to it.
2. The opening of the Royalmount shopping center nearly doubled the traffic of the De La Savane station.
3. The Montreal subway continues to grow, but has not yet recovered from the pandemic. Berri-UQAM station (the largest one) is still below 1 million entries per quarter compared to its pre-pandemic record.

• Orange line (top10)
• Green line (top10)
• Blue line
• Yellow line
• Global Top 10

• The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in the public domain.
• The R code I wrote is licensed under the GPLv3+. It's pretty much the same code as last year. STM apparently changed (again!) the way they are exporting data, and since it's now somewhat sane, I didn't have to rely on a converter script.

• migrated to a new Yubikey
• merged a lintian MR

• fought with the Supersonic flatpak to fix build with latest placebo (failed), but managed to update to the latest upstream
• realized that keyring-pass does the inverse of what he needs, whereas pass_secret_service, which does, is poorly maintained and depends on the dead pypass library
• uploaded new upstream versions of etckeeper, mdformat and python-internetarchive
• improved a lintian warning
• opened yet another sbuild bug
• started playing with sfwbar

• worked on the 2024 Advent of Code in Rust

• installed Debian on an oooollld (as in, with a modem) laptop
• debugged a FTBFS on jruby

• did some simple packaging QA
• added basic salsa CI and some RFA for a bunch of packages (python-midiutil, antimony, python-pyo, rakarrack, python-pyknon, soundcraft-utils, cecilia, nasty, gnome-icon-theme-nuovo, gnome-extra-iconsg, nome-subtitles, timgm6mb-soundfont)

• hanged out and did some stuff :)

• February 22^nd-23^rd-24^th (Montreal Madhouse 2024): Scorching Tomb, Bruiserweight, Scaramanga, Cloned Apparition, Chain Block, Freezerburn, B ton Arm , Mil-Spec, NUKE, Friction, Reality Denied, SOV, Deathnap, Glint, Mulch, Stigmatism, Plus Minus, Puffer, Deadbolt, Apes, Pale Ache, Total Nada, Verify, Cross Check
• March 16^th: Kavinsky
• April 11^th: Agriculture
• April 26^th-27^th (Oi! Fest 2024): Bishops Green, The Partisans, Mess, Fuerza Bruta, Empire Down, Unwanted Noise, Lion's Law, The Oppressed, Ultra Sect, Reckless Upstarts, 21 Gun Salute, Jail
• May 4^th: MASTER BOOT RECORD
• May 16^th: Wayfarer, Valdrin, Sonja
• May 25^th: Union Thugs
• June 15^th: Ultra Razzia, Over the Hill, Street Code, Mortier
• September 5^th-6^th (Droogs Fest 2024): Skarface, Inspecter 7, 2 Stone 2 Skank, Francb tards, Les Happycuriens, Perkele, Blanks 77, Violent Way, La Gachette, Jenny Woo
• September 16^th: Too Many Zoos
• September 27^th: The Slads, Young Blades, New Release, Mortier
• October 2^nd: Amorphis, Dark Tranquility, Fires in the Distance
• October 7^th: Jordi Savall & Hesp rion XXI, accompanied by La Capella Reial de Catalunya
• October 11^th-12^th (Revolution Fest 2024): Ren Binam , Dirty Old Mat, Union Thugs, Gunh Twei, Vermine Kaos, Inner Terrestrials, Ultra Razzia, Battery March, Uzu, One Last Thread, Years of Lead
• October 19^th (Varning from Montreal XVI): Coupe Gorge, Flash, Imploders, Young Blades, Tenaz, M torw lf
• November 2^nd: Kon-Fusion, Union Thugs
• November 12^th: Chat Pile, Agriculture, Traindodge
• November 25^th: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• November 27^th: Zeal & Ardour, Gaerea, Zetra
• December 7^th: Perestro ka, Priors, White Knuckles, Tenaz

• Thanks to Nicolas Peugnet, the author of lintian-ssg, who handed us this custom static site generator on a silver platter. I'm happy I didn't have to code this myself :)
• Thanks to Otto Kek l inen, maintainer of the lintian-ssg package in Debian, who worked in tandem with Nicolas to iron out problems.
• Thanks to Philipp Kern, who did the work on the DSA side to put the website back online.

• reproduced puppetdb FTBFS #1084038 and reported the issue upstream
• uploaded a new upstream version for pgpainless (1.6.8-1)
• uploaded a new revision for ruby-moneta (1.6.0-3)
• sent an inquiry to the backports team about #1081696

• reviewed & merged many lintian merge requests, clearing out most of the queue
• uploaded a new lintian release (1.120.0)
• worked on unblocking the revival of lintian.debian.org (many thanks to anarcat and pkern)
• apparently (kindly) told people to rtfm at least 4 times :)

• figured out he still can't figure out how to do 3D printing and should probably just delegate these prints, currently in his wishlist:
  • k4vp VHF HT radio case (fits on your phone)
  • (tr)uSDX HF radio (fits in your hand!)
  • framework expansion card holder (fits in my bag!)
  • Ortlieb QUICK-LOCK1 compatible inserts (fits on my bike?)
• fixed an RC bug in python-ulid
• sponsored fuzzel 1.11.1+ds-2 upload, resolving a FTBFS on non-x86 arches
• tried to move the sigal packaging forward a little, failing in obscure pybuild land

• opened an RFS on the ruby team mailing list for the new upstream version of ruby-necromancer
• worked on packaging the new upstream version of ruby-pathspec

• did AM (Application Manager) work

• explored the Debian Jr. project (website, wiki, mailing list, salsa repositories)
• played a few games for Nico's entertainment :-)
• built and tested a Debian Jr. live image

1. Customizing your Linux icons
2. A Free Speech tracker by SFLC.IN
3. Desktop computing is irrelevant
4. An introduction to wcurl
5. Aliasing in dpkg
6. A DebConf art space
7. Tiny Tapeout, Fomu, PiCI
8. Data processing and visualisation in the shell

• did some clerical work for the DebConf videoteam
• tried to book a plane ticket for DC24
• triaged #1067620 (dependency problem with whipper)
• closed #1067121 (flaky test in supysonic)
• closed #1065514 (qpdfview crossbuilding)

• organized his custom Application Manager stuff in a private repo
• did some coding for the New Maintainers website to make sure applicants agree with the Debian Code of Conduct alongside the SC/DFSG/DMUP
• closed #1057910 (new apticron upload)

• planned & brainstormed for the upcoming Debian usability tests
• mentored a student/new contributor (justin)
• babysat a future contributor!
• closed #1067649
• learnt about fabre.debian.net & element.debian.social (thanks, pollo!)

• uploaded puppet-strings 4.1.2-1 to unstable
• updated various services in personal infra
• cleaned vagrant-hostmanager and worked on packaging the new upstream release (1.8.10)
• extended GPG key expiry
• looked at options for a new backup machine

• updated puppetdb to 8.4.1

• opened #1068152 after a misfortune with #1068151
• created new contributor accounts (salsa & wiki)

Assignment FooBar/
  Student A_21100_assignsubmission_file
    graded paper.pdf
    Student A's perfectly named assignment.pdf
    Student A's perfectly named assignment.xopp
  Student B_21094_assignsubmission_file
    graded paper.pdf
    Student B's perfectly named assignment.pdf
    Student B's perfectly named assignment.xopp
  Student C_21093_assignsubmission_file
    graded paper.pdf
    Student C's perfectly named assignment.pdf
    Student C's perfectly named assignment.xopp
 

#!/usr/bin/python3
# Copyright (C) 2023, Louis-Philippe V ronneau <pollo@debian.org>
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
"""
This script aims to take a directory containing PDF files exported via the
Moodle mass download function, remove everything but the final files to submit
back to the students and zip it back.
usage: ./moodle-zip.py <target_dir>
"""
import os
import shutil
import sys
import tempfile
from fnmatch import fnmatch
def sanity(directory):
    """Run sanity checks before doing anything else"""
    base_directory = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(directory))
    if not os.path.isdir(directory):
        sys.exit(f"Target directory  directory  is not a valid directory")
    if os.path.exists(f"/tmp/ base_directory .zip"):
        sys.exit(f"Final ZIP file path '/tmp/ base_directory .zip' already exists")
    for root, dirnames, _ in os.walk(directory):
        for dirname in dirnames:
            corrige_present = False
            for file in os.listdir(os.path.join(root, dirname)):
                if fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    corrige_present = True
            if corrige_present is False:
                sys.exit(f"Directory  dirname  does not contain a 'graded paper.pdf' file")
def clean(directory):
    """Remove superfluous files, to keep only the graded PDF"""
    with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as tmp_dir:
        shutil.copytree(directory, tmp_dir, dirs_exist_ok=True)
        for root, _, filenames in os.walk(tmp_dir):
            for file in filenames:
                if not fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    os.remove(os.path.join(root, file))
        compress(tmp_dir, directory)
def compress(directory, target_dir):
    """Compress directory into a ZIP file and save it to the target dir"""
    target_dir = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(target_dir))
    shutil.make_archive(f"/tmp/ target_dir ", 'zip', directory)
    print(f"Final ZIP file has been saved to '/tmp/ target_dir .zip'")
def main():
    """Main function"""
    target_dir = sys.argv[1]
    sanity(target_dir)
    clean(target_dir)
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

• tested a laptop that had a defective battery with a known good one (the problem was indeed with the battery :D)
• renewed his expiring OpenPGP key
• worked on removing trapperkeeper-scheduler-clojure from the DebCI reject_list
• helped anarcat with packaging sigal
• managed to feed most of the people present :)

• worked with lavamind to upload new upstream release of smokeping

• migrated from lxd to incus on his servers
• helped anarcat with flashing his AirGradient

• submitted a bug report on r-cran-rserve (promptly fixed/uploaded by maintainer!)
• reviewed and uploaded smokeping
• bug triaged the facter package
• worked on puppet-agent new upstream version 8.4.0

• updated puppet-strings from 2.9.0 to 4.2.1
• reported upstream test failures on puppet-strings with recent versions of mdl

• drafted a call & request for funding for the Vanier College FLOSS Club hardware marathon at Eastern Bloc
• worked on an application to conduct research at Vanier College on Debian usability
• babysitted :-)

• worked on his AirGradient
• debugged the WiFi and VPN setup on his new laptop

• worked on packaging sigal
• worked on flashing his AirGradient boards
• rewrote a Prometheus exporter for Airgradient devices
• brought over a car full of old computer gear to donate

• Orange line (top10)
• Green line (top10)
• Blue line
• Yellow line
• Global Top 10

• The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in the public domain.
• The R code I wrote is licensed under the GPLv3+. It's pretty much the same code as last year. I tweaked last's year converter script and although I had to clean some of the data by hand, it worked pretty well.

• March 8th: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• April 11th: Alexandra Str liski
• April 12th: Bikini Kill
• April 21th: Brigada Flores Magon, Union Thugs
• April 28th: Komintern Sect, The Outcasts, Violent Way, Ultra Razzia, Over the Hill
• May 3rd: First Fragment
• May 12th: Rhapsody of Fire, Wind Rose
• May 13th: Aeternam
• June 2nd: Mortier, La Gachette
• June 17th: Ultra Razzia, Total Nada, BLEMISH
• June 30th: Avishai Cohen Trio
• July 9th: Richard Galliano
• August 18th: Gojira, Mastodon, Lorna Shore
• September 14th: Jinjer
• September 22nd: CUIR, Salvaje Punk, Hysteric Polemix, Perestroika, Ultra Razzia, Ilusion, Over the Hill, Asbestos
• October 6th: Rancoeur, Street Code, Tenaz, Mortimer, Guernica, High Anxiety

Previous findings In 2006, the Flosspols survey searched to explain the role of gender in free/libre/open source software (F/LOSS) communities because an earlier [study] revealed a significant discrepancy in the proportion of men to women. It showed that just about 1.5% of F/LOSS community members were female at that time, compared with 28% in proprietary software (which is also a low number). Their key findings were, to name just a few:

• that F/LOSS rewards the producing code rather than the producing software. It thereby puts most emphasis on a particular skill set. Other activities such as interface design or documentation are understood as less technical and therefore less prestigious.
• The reliance on long hours of intensive computing in writing successful code means that men, who in general assume that time outside of waged labour is theirs , are freer to participate than women, who normally still assume a disproportionate amount of domestic responsibilities. Female F/LOSS participants, however, seem to be able to allocate a disproportionate larger share of their leisure time for their F/LOSS activities. This gives an indication that women who are not able to spend as much time on voluntary activities have difficulties to integrate into the community.

We also know from the 2016 Debian survey, published in 2021, that a majority of Debian contributors are employed, rather than being contractors, and rather than being students. Also, 95.5% of respondents to that study were men between the ages of 30 and 49, highly educated, with the largest groups coming from Germany, France, USA, and the UK. The study found that only 20% of the respondents were being paid to work on Debian. Half of these 20% estimate that the amount of work on Debian they are being paid for corresponds to less than 20% of the work they do there. On the other side, there are 14% of those who are being paid for Debian work who declared that 80-100% of the work they do in Debian is remunerated.

So, if a majority of people is not paid, why do they work on F/LOSS? Or: What are the incentives of free software? In 2021, Louis-Philippe V ronneau aka Pollo, who is not only a Debian Developer but also an economist, published his thesis What are the incentive structures of free software (The actual thesis was written in French). One very interesting finding Pollo pointed out is this one:

Indeed, while we have proven that there is a strong and significative correlation between the income and the participation in a free/libre software project, it is not possible for us to pronounce ourselves about the causality of this link.

In the French original text:

En effet, si nous avons prouv qu il existe une corr lation forte et significative entre le salaire et la participation un projet libre, il ne nous est pas possible de nous prononcer sur la causalit de ce lien.

Said differently, it is certain that there is a relationship between income and F/LOSS contribution, but it s unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software. I would like to scratch this question a bit further, mostly relying on my own observations, experiences, and discussions with F/LOSS contributors.

Volunteer work is unpaid work We often hear of hackathons, hack weeks, or hackfests. I ve been at some such events myself, Tails organized one, the IETF regularly organizes hackathons, and last week (June 2022!) I saw an invitation for a hack week with the Torproject. This type of event generally last several days. While the people who organize these events are being paid by the organizations they work for, participants on the other hand are generally joining on a volunteer basis. Who can we expect to show up at this type of event under these circumstances as participants? To answer this question, I collected some ideas:

• people who have an employer sponsoring their work
• people who have a funder/grant sponsoring their work
• people who have a high income and can take time off easily (in that regard, remember the Gender Pay Gap, women often earn less for the same work than men)
• people who rely on family wealth (living off an inheritance, living on rights payments from a famous grandparent - I m not making these situations up, there are actual people in such financially favorable situations )
• people who don t need much money because they don t have to pay rent or pay low rent (besides house owners that category includes people who live in squats or have social welfare paying for their rent, people who live with parents or caretakers)
• people who don t need to do care work (for children, elderly family members, pets. Remember that most care work is still done by women.)
• students who have financial support or are in a situation in which they do not yet need to generate a lot of income
• people who otherwise have free time at their disposal

So, who, in your opinion, fits these unwritten requirements? Looking at this list, it s pretty clear to me why we d mostly find white men from the Global North, generally with higher education in hackathons and F/LOSS development. ( Great, they re a culture fit! ) Yes, there will also always be some people of marginalized groups who will attend such events because they expect to network, to find an internship, to find a better job in the future, or to add their participation to their curriculum. To me, this rings a bunch of alarm bells.

Low diversity in F/LOSS projects a mirror of the distribution of wealth I believe that the lack of diversity in F/LOSS is first of all a mirror of the distribution of wealth on a larger level. And by wealth I m referring to financial wealth as much as to social wealth in the sense of Bourdieu: Families of highly educated parents socially reproducing privilege by allowing their kids to attend better schools, supporting and guiding them in their choices of study and work, providing them with relations to internships acting as springboards into well paid jobs and so on. That said, we should ask ourselves as well:

Do F/LOSS projects exacerbate existing lines of oppression by relying on unpaid work? Let s look again at the causality question of Pollo s research (in my words):

It is unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software.

Maybe we need to imagine this cause-effect relationship over time: as a student, without children and lots of free time, hopefully some money from the state or the family, people can spend time on F/LOSS, collect experience, earn recognition - and later find a well-paid job and make unpaid F/LOSS contributions into a hobby, cementing their status in the community, while at the same time generating a sense of well-being from working on the common good. This is a quite common scenario. As the Flosspols study revealed however, boys often get their own computer at the age of 14, while girls get one only at the age of 20. (These numbers might be slightly different now, and possibly many people don t own an actual laptop or desktop computer anymore, instead they own mobile devices which are not exactly inciting them to look behind the surface, take apart, learn, appropriate technology.) In any case, the above scenario does not allow for people who join F/LOSS later in life, eg. changing careers, to find their place. I believe that F/LOSS projects cannot expect to have more women, people of color, people from working class backgrounds, people from outside of Germany, France, USA, UK, Australia, and Canada on board as long as volunteer work is the status quo and waged labour an earned privilege.

Wait, are you criticizing all these wonderful people who sacrifice their free time to work towards common good? No, that s definitely not my intention, I m glad that F/LOSS exists, and the F/LOSS ecosystem has always represented a small utopia to me that is worth cherishing and nurturing. However, I think we still need to talk more about the lack of diversity, and investigate it further.

Paid internships are one key to countering lines of oppression Lots of projects, even Outreachy and GSoC, require one contribution to F/LOSS to be made prior to be able to apply for a paid internship. I do well understand the incentive of this, but it s quite a high entry barrier. In 2014/2015 I was able to have 3 months of work on Debian paid for via an Outreachy internship. I was extremely grateful for that opportunity because without this paid internship I would never have found the time to engage with the Debian and F/LOSS ecosystem in depth simply because I would have had to work on my usual day job; I have rent to pay, and a health insurance which is really not cheap. These programs are key because they help counter existing lines of oppression at a strategic point: they buy someone s time by providing them a small income. Back then, the internship was paid 5,500USD gross for 3 months, meaning after taxes and paying social/health insurance, I was left with roughly 1100 per month, really not much money for living decently in Western Europe, but enough to get started. By the way, to my knowledge, 4 women who did an Outreachy internship subsequently became Debian Developers. 3 other female Debian Developers are or were part of Outreachy on the organizer side. I think this shows that this program is a success that we don t celebrate enough!

Some types of work are never being paid Besides free work at hacking events, let me also underline that a lot of work in F/LOSS is not considered payable work (yes, that s an oxymoron!). Which F/LOSS project for example, has ever paid translators a decent fee? Which project has ever considered that doing the social glue work, often done by women in the projects, is work that should be paid for? Which F/LOSS projects pay the people who do their Debian packaging rather than relying on yet another already well-paid white man who can afford doing this work for free all the while holding up how great the F/LOSS ecosystem is? And how many people on opensourcedesign jobs are looking to get their logo or website done for free? (Isn t that heart icon appealing to your altruistic empathy?) In my experience even F/LOSS projects which are trying to do the right thing by paying everyone the same amount of money per hour run into issues when it turns out that not all hours are equal and that some types of work do not qualify for remuneration at all or that the rules for the clocking of work are not universally applied in the same way by everyone.

Not every interaction should have a monetary value, but Some of you want to keep working without being paid, because that feels a bit like communism within capitalism, it makes you feel good to contribute to the greater good while not having the system determine your value over money. I hear you. I ve been there (and sometimes still am). But as long as we live in this system, even though we didn t choose to and maybe even despise it - communism is not about working for free, it s about getting paid equally and adequately. We may not think about it while under the age of 40 or 45, but working without adequate financial compensation, even half of the time, will ultimately result in not being able to care for oneself when sick, when old. And while this may not be an issue for people who inherit wealth, or have an otherwise safe economical background, eg. an academic salary, it is a huge problem and barrier for many people coming out of the working or service classes. (Oh and please, don t repeat the neoliberal lie that everyone can achieve whatever they aim for, if they just tried hard enough. French research shows that (in France) one has only 30% chance to become a class defector , and change social class upwards. But I managed to get out and move up, so everyone can! - well, if you believe that I m afraid you might be experiencing survivor bias.)

Not all bodies are equally able We should also be aware that not all of us can work with the same amount of energy either. There is yet another category of people who are excluded by the expectation of volunteer work, either because the waged labour they do already eats all of their energy, or because their bodies are not disposed to do that much work, for example because of mental health issues - such as depression-, or because of physical disabilities.

When organizing events relying on volunteer work please think about these things. Yes, you can tell people that they should ask their employer to pay them for attending a hackathon - but, as I ve hopefully shown, that would not do it for many people, especially newcomers. Instead, you could propose a fund to make it possible that people who would not normally attend can attend. DebConf is a good example for having done this for many years.

Conclusively I would like to urge free software projects that have a budget and directly pay some people from it to map where they rely on volunteer work and how this hurts diversity in their project. How do you or your project exacerbate pre-existing lines of oppression by granting or not granting monetary value to certain types of work? What is it that you take for granted? As always, I m curious about your feedback!

Worth a read These ideas are far from being new. Ashe Dryden s well-researched post The ethics of unpaid labor and the OSS community dates back to 2013 and is as important as it was ten years ago.

• Kienan & Gabriel worked on the libinfluxdb-http-perl package (now in Sid!), which is needed for smokeping.
• J r me worked on updating JRuby to the latest upstream version.
• I failed to update monitoring-plugins-systemd to the latest upstream version. It seems the entire test suite has been re-written and I couldn't make it work in sbuild...
• Tiago and Tassia worked on the Debian Contributors website. More specifically, they added a DSA domains data source and created a scheduler on dcf.debian.net to make daily updates on the data sources in the dc-sources repository.
• Michael worked on the 2024 NorthSec badge.
• Gerard worked on debugging his broken AirGradient board.

• I triaged and closed a bunch of bug reports and started packaging labwc, a Wayland compositor heavily inspired by Openbox.
• J r me did some work on Clojure libraries that broke when Java 21 became supported in Sid.
• Gabriel worked on the libinfluxdb-http-perl library.
• Tiago and Tassia continued their work on the new DC Sources project and Tiago applied for a debian.net VM for this service.

• 6 different pages for the supported weather data¹, accessible via the key0 button
• Alerting² on the PM2.5 page when the defined threshold has been crossed
• Automatic screen blanking after a defined amount of time to save the OLED screen from burn-in
• Manual screen blanking using the key1 button

• MicroPython is close enough to regular Python that I don't mind it. The standard library is much smaller, but there are ways to work around that.
• The Raspberry Pi Pico W is a fantastic board. At around 10 CAD (~7 USD), it's much cheaper than anything Arduino offers, much more powerful than those boards and gives you the option of not having to code in some terrible and weird C variant. It also has a nice ecosystem of compatible modules and hats.
• Displays, even if they advertise being "batteries included", often are not. I had the bad surprise of discovering the MicroPython driver for the Waveshare Pico OLED 1.3 was pretty bad and lacked a ton of features compared to their C code driver. Thankfully, I was lucky enough that the OLED panel it uses (the SH1107) is common enough for folks to have written their own drivers.
• thonny, a Python IDE, is probably the best tool to transfer files to the Raspberry Pico and to debug code, as it provides a file manager and a shell³. I'm a little annoyed by it not being vim, but I got used to its quirks fairly quickly.

• Now that Debian Bookworm has been released, we updated our ansible repository to work with Debian Bookworm. This encountered some issues, but nothing earth-shattering, and almost all of them are handled. The one thing that is still outstanding is that jibri requires OpenJDK 11, which is no longer in bookworm; a solution for that will need to be found in the longer term, but as jibri is only needed for online conferences, it is not quite as urgent (Stefano, Louis-Philippe).
• In past years, we used open "opsis" hardware to do screen grabbing. While these work, upstream development has stalled, and their intended functionality is also somewhat more limited than we would like. As such, we experimented with a USB-based HDMI capture device, and after playing with it for some time, decided that it is a good option and that we would like to switch to it. Support for the specific capture device that we played with has now also been added to all the relevant places. (Stefano, Carl)
• Another open tool that we have been using is voctomix, a software video mixer. Its upstream development has also stalled somewhat . While we managed to make it work correctly on Bookworm, we decided that to ensure long-term viability for the team, it would be preferable if we had an alternative. As such, we quickly investigated Nageru, Sesse's software video mixer, and decided that it can everything we need (and, probably, more). As such, we worked on implementing a user interface theme that would work with our specific requirements. Work on this is still ongoing, and we may decide that we are not ready yet for the switch by the time DebConf23 comes along, but we do believe that the switch is at least feasible. While working on the theme, we found a bug which Sesse quickly fixed for us after a short amount of remote debugging, so, thanks for that! (Stefano, Nicolas, Sesse)
• Our current streaming architecture uses HLS, which requires MPEG-4-based codecs. While fully functional, MPEG-4 is not the most modern of codecs anymore, not to mention the fact that it is somewhat patent-encumbered (even though some of these patents are expired by now). As such, we investigated switching to the AV1 codec for live streaming. Our ansible repository has been updated to support live streaming using that codec; the post-event transcoding part will follow soon enough. Special thanks, again, to Sesse, for pointing out a few months ago on Planet Debian that this is, in fact, possible to do. (Wouter)
• Apart from these big-ticket items, we also worked on various small maintenance things: upgrading, fixing, and reinstalling hosts and services, filing budget requests, and requesting role emails. (all of the team, really).