Otto Kekäläinen

Merge Request based Collaboration for Debian packages

While single-maintainer packages will continue to exist, there are also many maintainers who feel that working collaboratively is more motivating, helps prevent burnout, and offers more opportunities to learn new things, improve package quality and deliver more value to Debian users.

With ubiquitous use of salsa.debian.org, some patterns have emerged for workflows in importing new package versions, preparing packaging changes, testing and reviewing them. The lowest denominator principles are drafted in DEP-18.

In this BoF session people who are interested in exploring this area will discuss what these patterns are, and how they can be further optimized and documented for more maintainers to benefit from them. Having better workflows that are properly documented may also help lower the barrier of entry for new maintainers.

Using Salsa CI to guard large and complex packages from regressions - case MariaDB

MariaDB is a large package with many parallel releases maintained, extensively used libraries and the packages carry along a data directory that needs to stay intact upgrade after upgrade. Packaging MariaDB is a complex task and ensuring smooth upgrades and avoiding regressions requires a lot of work.

However, with the by using Salsa CI with custom extensions, every commit in MariaDB packaging is has been extensively tested. The extremely low number of MariaDB packaging bugs in Debian from the past 8 years is a testament of it.

In this talk I explain how Salsa CI is being applied for MariaDB packaging in Debian, and what maintainers of other large and complex packages may want to adopt in their own Salsa CI pipelines.

Optimizing the Debian packaging workflow for easier collaboration and fewer burnouts

As a long-term Debian community member I am concerned about the dropping number of active maintainers. When I have asked friends of mine why they stopped contributing to Debian, many have shared their frustration with ineffective processes and slow progress which made them feel their time is not well spent. When mentoring new contributors I often see people struggling with outdated and fragmented documentation, and the challenge to learn how to doto common and simple tasks in Debian packaging the right way. There is also a clear gap between a generation of developers who prefer email and IRC based collaboration, and a generation that feel more productive with browser based rich interfaces.

In this talk I present how I navigate this landscape, and how I structure my collaboration to be effective with various people using many different workflows, while at the same time having a clear, tried and tested workflow for myself, and how I help my mentees to learn Debian community and package maintenance work effectively.

Salsa CI BoF

A meeting for discuss about salsa-ci project, its current state and future work. Let’s talk how to improve salsa-ci.

Whether you’re using salsa-ci or you would like to be involved in salsa-ci team, this BoF is for you!

Salsa CI Sprint

Audience

• People interested to learn more about Salsa CI.
• People interested to contribute to Salsa CI.

Activities

• Mentoring newcomers.
• Fixing bugs.
• Reviewing MRs.
• Working in new features.