Making jam from bugs

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:41:57 -0600
debian, ubuntu

This weekend, we held a combined Debian Bug Squashing Party and Ubuntu Local Jam in Portland, OR. A big thank you to PuppetLabs for hosting!

Thanks to a brilliant insight from Kees Cook, we were able to give everyone access to their own pre-configured build environment as soon as they walked in the door by deploying schroot/sbuild instances in "the cloud" (in this case, Amazon EC2). Small blips with the mirrors notwithstanding, this worked out pretty well, and let people start to get their hands dirty as soon as they walked in the door instead of spending a lot of time up front doing the boring work of setting up a build environment. This was a big win for people who had never done a package build before, and I highly recommend it for future BSPs. You can read about the build environment setup in the Debian wiki, and details on setting up your own BSP cloud in Kees's blog.

(And the cloud instances were running Ubuntu 11.10 guests, with Debian unstable chroots - a perfect pairing for our joint Debian/Ubuntu event!)

So how did this curious foray into a combined Ubuntu/Debian event go? Not too shabby:

Roughly 25 people participated in the event - a pretty good turnout considering the short notice we gave. Thanks to everyone who turned up!

Multiarch patches were submitted for 14 library packages by 9 distinct contributors

Four of these people submitted their first patch to Debian!

Three more contributors worked on patches that were not submitted to Debian by the end of the event, but we will stalk them and see to it that their patches make it in ;)

8 Ubuntu Stable Release Updates were looked at for verification of fixes

7 of these fixes were successfully verified (one bug was not reproducible)

6 of those packages have already been moved to the -updates pocket, where all of Ubuntu's users can now benefit from them

When all was said and done, we didn't get a chance to tackle any wheezy release critical bugs like we'd hoped. That's ok, that leaves us something to do for our next event, which will be bigger and even better than this one. Maybe even big enough to rival one of those crazy, all-weekend BSPs that they have in Germany...