spwhitton/ blog/ entry/ DebCamp/DebConf17: reports on sprints and BoFs
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In addition to my personal reflections on DebCamp/DebConf17, here is a brief summary of the activities that I had a hand in co-ordinating.

I won’t discuss here many other small items of work and valuable conversations that I had during the two weeks; hopefully the fruits of these will show themselves in my uploads to the archive over the next year.

Debian Policy sprint & BoF

  • released version 4.0.1.0 of the Policy Manual

  • figured out documenting reproducibility in policy. Formulating the wording turned out to be easier than I had expected

  • approx. ten years after they were first published, incorporated marga’s maintscript flowcharts into policy proper

  • converted policy from docbook to rST built with the Sphinx toolchain. Many, many thanks to Hideki Yamane and David Bremner for helping Russ and I get this merged to our master branch

  • triage of every single bug against policy, and mass closure of inactive bugs, bringing the total down from more than 200 to around 125

  • conversations with Technical Committee members about how the two teams can help each other’s work (mainly us helping them to help us!)

  • conversations about how we handle disagreement and plans to streamline our overly complex BTS usertags (watch this space)

  • very useful input from policy consumers about how the upgrading checklist is formatted, and how we can recruit more people to get patches written

Debian Emacs Team meeting/sprint

  • plans to finally drop our emacsXY binary packages, and just have a single version of Emacs in the archive, so that we no longer have to deal with bugs due to someone still having emacs21 installed (David’s idea; Rob’s implementation; Sean’s mostly-helpful comments)

  • other plans to simplify and otherwise improve the Debian Emacsen policy

  • finally finished off the work needed to RM emacs24—nine months later—including a lot of NMUs

  • mentoring a junior team member

Unfortunately we didn’t make any significant progress towards converting all addons to use dh_elpa, as the work is not that much fun. Might be worth a more focused sprint next year.

Report on team website

Git for Debian packaging BoF & follow-up conversations

The BoF was far more about dgit than I had wanted; however, I think that this was mostly because people had questions about dgit, rather than any unintended lecturing by me.

I believe that several people came away from DebConf thinking that starting to use dgit would improve Debian for themselves and for users of their packages.