• weather: It was just too warm. Pre-season in November things looked hopeful with early snow, but December 2015 was absurdely warm. According to the weather station Damüls Hertehof (1580m above sea level) there were only three days in December when temperatures fell below 0° Celsius. I had my first snow day on December 6 followed by 3 more days in December (12, 19 and 20) with continuously worsening conditions. I gave it another chance on January 6th, but things had not improved and I paused until January 21, which was the first good day.
• On February 7th 2016 I had a small accident at luging, resulting in a (partially) torn ligament at my left ankle joint. Joy. No snowboarding until March 13. My season ended on April 10, when Warth/Schröcken closed.

Here is the balance sheet:

https://people.debian.org/~ametzler/exim-dsa/
git repo on alioth

Changes:

• Improve on NEWS file, identical to the respective change in sid.
• Cherrypick Cutthrough: Fix bug with dot-only line
• Cherrypick Expansions: Fix crash in crypteq: On OpenBSD a bad second-arg results in an error-return from crypt(). Errorcheck that return. to fix #812585.

Please send your feedback to ametzler(at)debian.org or exim4(at)packages.debian.org.

What worked was to

1. take the liner out of the boot,
2. pull on the liner,
3. step into the outer shell.

It turned out to be unnecessary, it is straightforward.

1. Install Windows and leave some space for Linux. (I used rufus to build a UEFI USB install image).
2. Install Debian. Stretch-Alpha4 di just worked and adds a entry for Windows to the grub menu
3. Reboot and enter UEFI setup, and select the Debian installation as boot option.

We had about zero snow until after christmas, and not just down in the valley, but also at 2000m in the mountains. My first run was therefore very late, on January 1st, followed by two short excursions (8:45 - 11:20) due to too many people on January 5th and 6th.

After that we had more than enough snow which allowed me to go to Diedamskopf most of the time (basically only natural snow there, which makes better slopes). I went there almost exclusively until they closed on Easter sunday after heavy snowfall in Holy week, and had 5 more days therafter In Damül;s and Warth/Schröcken. Last run was on April 19.

Here is the balance sheet:

What does not show up here is the number of times I walked (with and without snowshoes) up the mountain and used the lift down and obviously also tobogganing.

It is a rather sporty rodel (Torggler TS 120 Tourenrodel Spezial 2014/15, 9kg weight, with fast (non stainless) "racing rails" and 22° angle of the runners) but not a competition model. I wish I had bought this years ago. It is a lot more comfortable than a classic sled ("Davoser Schlitten"), since one is sitting in instead of on top of the sled somehow like in a hammock. Being able to steer without putting a foot into the snow has the nice side effect that the snow stays on the ground instead of ending up in my face. Obviously it is also faster which is a huge improvement even for recreational riding, since it makes the difference between riding the sledge or pulling it on flattish stretches. Strongly recommended.

FWIW I ordered this via rodelfuehrer.de (they started with a guidebook of luge tracks, which translates to "Rodelführer"), where I would happily order again.

It started from a bad position: Since 2011 we had co-installable gnutls26 and gnutls28 in Debian with separate (and conflicting) development packages. Simply providing libgnutls-dev from gnutls28 was not possible because there are some incompatibilities and because we had license problems. So we ended up gradually switching packages over by sourceful uploads.

Looking back, this worked both well and badly: On one hand it played nicely with testing migration. It did not break a lot of important packages at a single time or block packages from migration to testing. On the other hand over a 100 sourceful uploads are a lot, and the transition took a long time.

Thanks to a national holiday combined with rainy weather this should look even better soon:
ametzler@argenau:~$ w3m -dump https://ftp-master.debian.org/deferred.html | grep changes | wc -l
26
ametzler@argenau:~$ w3m -dump https://ftp-master.debian.org/deferred.html | grep Metzler | wc -l
18


This had me going snowboarding a lot, but almost exclusively in Damüls since it is characterized by a) grassy terrain (no stones) and b) huge numbers of snow cannons.

I started early (December 7) with another 6 days on piste in December. If there had been more snow the season would have been a long one, too. - Season's end depends on the timimg of easter (because of the holidays) which would have been late. However I again stopped rather early, last day was March 30.

In addition to the days listed below I had an early season's opening at the glacier in Pitztal. I attended the pureboarding event in November (21st to 23rd). Looking back at the season I am not quite satisfied with my progress, I just have not managed to implement and practise the technique I should have learned there. It is next to impossible when the slopes are full, and when they aren't one likes to give it a run. ;-)

Here is the balance sheet: