Mini DebConf Paris 2010

So, I’m (almost) back from the first edition of MiniDebConf Paris, which was a success thanks to the great organizing skills in panic mode of Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy. I think that everybody is already looking forward to the next edition.

I met lots of people, and it was great to be able to finally put faces on names from the french free software community. I gave two talk there, the first one on Debian and Ubuntu (slides), the second one on Debian Quality Assurance (slides), which both went well (I think).

I also hacked a bit:

  • I added tags and “claimed by” to UDD Bugs Search.
  • I worked on my piuparts replacement (which really needs a sexy name ; I’m open to suggestions), processing the results, making some improvements to the script, and filing 16 RC bugs.

If you want to help me, here are some easy tasks that need takers (it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to tackle them anytime soon):

  • One missing thing in UDD Bugs Search is information about the deferred/delayed queue. Unfortunately, the ftp-masters’ status information is not available in a machine-parseable format.
    • Improve dak code to also export the data in a machine-parseable format (JSON, YAML). I was told the changes are to be done in dak/show_deferred.py.
    • Write the corresponding UDD importer (actually, that’s a 30 mins job for me, so I could easily find time to do it if the data was available).

    Update: done!

  • Another missing thing is comments (as on bts.turzimmer.net). I don’t really have good ideas about how to implement them, so if you want to tackle that with your own idea, go ahead. (It’s probably easy to setup a copy of bugs.cgi on alioth if you are not a DD). The CGI is in Ruby.
  • Help me process the logs of my piuparts replacement, and file the bugs. I don’t have any good scripts to automate bug filings yet. You need a good understanding of packages dependencies and maintainers scripts, but it’s a good way to learn, too. (I would need to regenerate the full results first, so talk to me if you are interested)

One of the other things I’d like to do is discuss ways to improve the synchronization of UDD (currently, it’s synchronized at arbitrary times, while we could sync Sources+Packages just after dinstall, for example).