Debian Bug Squashing Party, Toronto version

Heya!

This past Saturday, April 27th, 2019, Samuel Vale, Alex Volkov and I organized the Toronto Bug Squashing Party here in the city. I was very happy with the outcome, especially the fact that we had more than 10 people attending, including a bunch of folks that came from Montréal!

The start

It was a cold day in Toronto, and we met at the Mozilla Toronto office at 9 in the morning. Right there at the door I met anarcat, who had just arrived from Montréal. Together with Alex, we waited for Will to arrive and open the door for us. Then, some more folks started showing up, and we waited until 10:30h to start the first presentation of the day.

Packaging 101

Anarcat kindly gave us his famous “Packaging 101” presentation, in which he explains the basics of Debian packaging. Here’s a picture of the presentation:

And another one:

The presentation was great, and Alex recorded it! You can watch it here (sorry, youtube link…).

During the day, we’ve also taught a few tricks about the BTS, in order to help people file bugs, add/remove tags, comment on bugs, etc.

Then, we moved on to the actual hacking.

Bug fixing

This part took most of the day, as was expected. We started by looking at the RC bugs currently filed against Buster, and deciding which ones would be interesting for us. I won’t go into details here, but I think we made great progress, considering this was the first BSP for many of us there (myself included).

You can look at the bugs we worked on, and you will see that we have actually fixed 6 of them! I even fixed a JavaScript bug, which is something totally out of my area of expertise ;-).

I also noticed something interesting. The way we look at bugs can vary wildly between one DD and another. I mean, this is something I always knew, especially when I was more involved with the debian-mentors effort, but it’s really amazing to feel this in person. I tend to be more picky when it comes to defining what to do when I start to work on a bug; I try really hard to reproduce it (and spend a lot of time doing so), and will really dive deep into the code trying to understand why some test is failing. Other developer may be less “pedantic”, and choose to (e.g.) disable certain test that is failing. In the end, I think everything is a balance and I tried to learn from this experience.

Anyway, given that we looked at 12 bugs and solved 6, I think we did great! And this also helped me to get my head “back in the Debian game”; I was too involved with GDB these past months (there’s a post about one of the things I did which is coming soon, stay tunned).

Look at us hacking:

Wrap up

At 19h (or 7p.m.), we had to wrap up and prepare to go. Because we had a sizeable number of Brazilians in the group (5!), the logical thing to do was to go to a pub and resume the conversation there :-). If I say it was one of the first times I went to a pub to drink with newly made friends in Toronto, you probably wouldn’t believe, so I won’t say anything…

I know one thing for sure: we want to make this again, and soon! In fact, my idea is to do another one after Buster is released (and after the summer is gone, of course), so maybe October. We’ll see.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mozilla Toronto for hosting us; it was awesome to finally visit their office and enjoy their hospitality, personified by Will Hawkins. It is impossible not to thank anarcat, who came all the way from Montréal to give us his Debian Packaging 101 talk. Speaking of the French-Canadian (and Brazilian), it was super awesome meeting Tiago Vaz and Tássia Camões, and it was great seeing Valessio Brito again.

Let me also thank the “locals” who attended the party; it was great seeing everybody there! Hope I can see everybody again when we make the second edition of our BSP :-).