Debconf 14 activity

Before I start a short listing of (some of) the stuff I did during Debconf 14, I’d like to say how much I enjoyed everyone there. You guys (all of you, really!) are just awesome, and it’s always a real pleasure to see you all, each time.

Anyway, here’s a bits of the stuff I did.

1/ packaging of Google Cloud Engine client tools.

Thanks to the presence of Eric and Jimmy, I was able to finish the work I started at Debconf 13 last year. All python modules are packaged and uploaded. Only the final client (the “gcloud” command line utility) isn’t uploaded, even though it’s already packaged. The reason is that this client downloads “stuff” from internet, so I need to get the full, bundled, version of it, to avoid this. Eric gave me the link, I just didn’t have time to finish it yet. Though the (unfinished) package is already in the Git in Alioth.

2/ Tasksel talks

We discussed improvements in Tasksel both during the conference, and later (in front of beers…). I was able to add a custom task on a modified version of the Tasksel package for my own use. I volunteered myself for adding a “more task” option in Tasksel for Jessie+1 because I really would like to see this feature, and nobody raised hand, but honestly, I have no idea how to do it, and therefore, I’m not sure I’ll be able to do so. We’ll see… Anyway, before this happen, we must make sure that we know what kind of tasks we want in this “more tasks” screen, otherwise it’d be useless work for nothing. Therefore, I have setup a wiki page. Please edit the page and drop your ideas there. I’ve already added entries for desktops and Debian blends, but I’m sure there’s more that we could add.

3/ Custom Debian CD

I started experimentation on building my own Debian Wheezy CD image (well, DVD, since the resulting image is nearly 2GB). This was fun, but I am still having the issue that the installer fails to install Dash, so the CD is still unusable. I’ll try to debug it. Oh…  I nearly forgot… “of course”, the ISO image aims at including all OpenStack Icehouce packages backported to Wheezy, and the goal was to include the above custom Tasksel task, with an “OpenStack proxy node” task, and a “OpenStack compute” task. Let’s hope I can figure out what the issue is, and finally release it.

4/ OpenStack talk

Nothing special to say, just watch the video. I hope my talk was interesting enough. Of course, after watching myself, I hate everything I see, and would like to correct so many mistakes, but that’s the usual, I guess.

5/ Some RC fixing

Thanks to the nice work of our DPL rebuilding all the archive, I had to fix a couple of FTBFS issues on my own packages. 3 of them have been easy to fix (2 missing build-dependencies which I missed because my automated build environment has them by default, and a unit test failure), I still don’t understand what’s going on with Ceilometer. I also NMU-ed transmission (switching from 2.82 to 2.84, as upstream had the bugfix, and current maintainer was not responsive) which was the last blocker for the miniupnpc transition to Jessie. After the 5 days delay of the upload, it went in Sid, then migrated to Jessie, together with the miniupnpc library. I also fixed a trivial RC bug with python3-webob.

6/ Python team meeting

It was nice to see everyone, and hopefully, we’ll soon implement what we discussed. I hope to start migrating some of my OpenStack dependencies to the team once we move to Git (though please don’t expect this to happen before the Juno release, which keeps me very busy these days).

There’s probably more stuff which I did during Debconf 14 (hacking or otherwise), but either it’s not worth sharing, or I can’t remember… :)