Quick recap of 2017

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 12:00:00 +0100
debamax, debian

I haven’t been posting anything on my personal blog in a long while, let’s fix that!

Partial reason for this is that I’ve been busy documenting progress on the Debian Installer on my company’s blog. So far, the following posts were published there:

Debian Installer: Stretch Alpha 8 released with details on the release process, and on the debootstrap attempt regarding merged-/usr (granted, that one was from late 2016).

Debian Installer: Stretch RC 2 released: wrapping up both RC 1 and RC 2 for Stretch, mentioning major changes instead of all the tiny details one would usually find in the release announcements published on the debian-devel-announce@ mailing list.

Debian Installer: Stretch released: aggregating RC 3 to RC 5 this time, since the last few weeks before the Stretch release date were quite busy!

After the Stretch release, it was time to attend DebConf’17 in Montreal, Canada. I’ve presented the latest news on the Debian Installer front there as well. This included a quick demo of my little framework which lets me run automatic installation tests. Many attendees mentioned openQA as the current state of the art technology for OS installation testing, and Philip Hands started looking into it. Right now, my little thing is still useful as it is, helping me reproduce regressions quickly, and testing bug fixes… so I haven’t been trying to port that to another tool yet.

I also gave another presentation in two different contexts: once at a local FLOSS meeting in Nantes, France and once during the mini-DebConf in Toulouse, France. Nothing related to Debian Installer this time, as the topic was how I helped a company upgrade thousands of machines from Debian 6 to Debian 8 (and to Debian 9 since then). It was nice to have Evolix people around, since we shared our respective experience around automation tools like Ansible and Puppet.

After the mini-DebConf in Toulouse, another event: the mini-DebConf in Cambridge, UK. I tried to give a lightning talk about “how snapshot.debian.org helped saved the release(s)” but clearly speed was lacking, and/or I had too many things to present, so that didn’t work out as well as I hoped. Fortunately, no time constraints when I presented that during a Debian meet-up in Nantes, France. :)

Since Reproducible Tails builds were announced, it seemed like a nice opportunity to document how my company got involved into early work on reproducibility for the Tails project.

On an administrative level, I’m already done with all the paperwork related to the second financial year. \o/

Next things I’ll likely write about: the first two D-I Buster Alpha releases (many blockers kept popping up, it was really hard to release), and a few more recent release critical bug reports.