The Debian Web team held a sprint for the first time, in Madrid (Spain) from March 15th to March 17th, 2019.

We discussed the status of the Debian website in general, review several important pages/sections and agreed on many things how to improve them.

For the sections we want to reorganise (mainly the homepage and a new section "download" which will group our current "CD" and "distrib" sections) , we have designed this workflow:

• Create branches in the webwml repo,
• Agreed on the new or modified content (started already during the sprint), and work on them further after the sprint
• Review a lot of related open bugs to see if we can address them with the new content (done during the sprint)
• Create bug reports for the things that cannot be solved quickly to keep them tracked (started during the sprint)
• We agreed we should get further help from web designers/information architects (pending)
• Once the English version is more or less settled, call for translations on the branch (pending)
• If we have English and the main translations ready, merging into the master branch (pending)
• We will try to have at least the homepage and the download section ready for the Buster release.

We also agreed that the press delegates should decide what new News entry is worth to be posted in the homepage instead of showing the last 6 entries.

For some other pages or areas (e.g. doc/books, misc/merchandise, /users) we found that the content is outdated and the team can not maintain it, we agreed in issuing a call for help (request for adoption) and if we cannot find volunteers for those pages/areas, we'll remove the content or move it to wiki.debian.org at the end of 2019.

We have agreed that we'll need to reduce the size (number of pages) of the website (*see some numbers about statistics at bottom) so it's more sustainable to keep the whole website up-to-date (content wise), so we'll remove some pages having content already covered in other pages, having content that currently is easy discoverable with a web search engine, can be maintained better in the wiki, etc.

We have talked a bit about certain other aspects like point release workflow, the build time of the website, team memberships and governance. In general the sprint has shown that for most of the discussed topics the migration to git as VCS and the existence of Salsa is a huge step forward for the usability and attractiveness for contributors of the webwml repository.

The core webteam is happy that the sprint has also attracted new people to jump in and which are also members of the webteam now. We welcome Thomas Lange and Carsten Schoenert in our team!

Finally, we have passed time together to socialize and knowing each other better, and got very motivated to continue working on the web.

Left to right: Rhonda D'Vine, Laura Arjona Reina, Thomas Lange, Carsten Schoenert, Steve McIntyre

A more detailed report has been sent to the debian-www mailing list.

The participants would like to thank all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.

The Debian Cloud team held a sprint for the third time, hosted by Amazon at its Seattle offices from October 8th to October 10th, 2018.

We discussed the status of images on various platforms, especially in light of moving to FAI as the only method for building images on all the cloud platforms. The next topic was building and testing workflows, including the use of Debian machines for building, testing, storing, and publishing built images. This was partially caused by the move of all repositories to Salsa, which allows for better management of code changes, especially reviewing new code.

Recently we have made progress supporting cloud usage cases; grub and kernel optimised for cloud images help with reducing boot time and required memory footprint. There is also growing interest in non-x86 images, and FAI can now build such images.

Discussion of support for LTS images, which started at the sprint, has now moved to the debian-cloud mailing list). We also discussed providing many image variants, which requires a more advanced and automated workflow, especially regarding testing. Further discussion touched upon providing newer kernels and software like cloud-init from backports. As interest in using secure boot is increasing, we might cooperate with other team and use work on UEFI to provide images signed boot loader and kernel.

Another topic of discussion was the management of accounts used by Debian to build and publish Debian images. SPI will create and manage such accounts for Debian, including user accounts (synchronised with Debian accounts). Buster images should be published using those new accounts. Our Cloud Team delegation proposal (prepared by Luca Fillipozzi) was accepted by the Debian Project Leader. Sprint minutes are available, including a summary and a list of action items for individual members.

Three members of the Debian Perl team met in Hamburg between May 16 and May 20 2018 as part of the Mini-DebConf Hamburg to continue perl development work for Buster and to work on QA tasks across our 3500+ packages.

The participants had a good time and met other Debian friends. The sprint was productive:

• 21 bugs were filed or worked on, many uploads were accepted.
• The transition to Perl 5.28 was prepared, and versioned provides were again worked on.
• Several cleanup tasks were performed, especially around the move from Alioth to Salsa in documentation, website, and wiki.
• For src:perl, autopkgtests were enabled, and work on Versioned Provides has been resumed.

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank the Mini-DebConf Hamburg organizers for providing the framework for our sprint, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.

Six members of the Debian Perl team met in Zurich over the weekend from May 19 to May 22 to continue the development around perl for Stretch and to work on QA across 3000+ packages.

The participants had a good time, met friends from local groups and even found some geocaches. Obviously, the sprint was productive this time too:

• 36 bugs were filed or worked on, 28 uploads were accepted.
• The plan to get Perl 5.24 transition into Stretch was confirmed, and a test rebuild server was set up.
• Cross building XS modules was demoed, and the conditions where it is viable were discussed.
• Several improvements were made in the team packaging tools, and new features were discussed and drafted.
• A talk on downstream distribution aimed at CPAN authors was proposed for YAPC::EU 2016.

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank the ETH Zurich for hosting us, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.

The Debian Perl team had its first sprint in May and it was a success: 7 members met in Barcelona the weekend from May 22nd to May 24th to kick off the development around perl for Stretch and to work on QA tasks across the more than 3000 packages that the team maintains.

Even though the participants enjoyed the beautiful weather and the food very much, a good amount of work was also done:

• 53 bugs were filed or worked on, 31 uploads were accepted.
• The current practice of patch management (quilt) was discussed and possible alternatives were shown (git-debcherry and git-dpm).
• Improvements were made in the Debian Perl Tools (dpt) and discussed how to get track of upstream git history and tags.
• Team's policies, documentation and recurring tasks were reviewed and updated.
• Perl 5.22 release was prepared and src:perl plans for Stretch were discussed.
• autopkgtest whitelists were reviewed, new packages added, and IRC notificacions by KGB were discussed.
• Outstanding migrations were reviewed.
• Reproducibility issues with POD_MAN_DATE were commented.

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank the Computer Architecture Department of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya for hosting us, and all donors to the Debian project who helped to cover a large part of our expenses.