[Previously: day 1]

Thanks to Valhalla and other members of LIFO, a bunch of fine Debian folks have convened in Laveno, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, for a nice weekend of relaxing and sprinting on various topics, a SnowCamp.

Today’s pièce de résistance was the long overdue upgrade of the machine hosting mentors.debian.net to (jessie then) stretch. We’ve spent most of the afternoon doing the upgrades with Mattia.

The first upgrade to jessie was a bit tricky because we had to clean up a lot of cruft that accumulated over the years. I even managed to force an unexpected database restore test ?. After a few code fixes, and getting annoyed at apache2.4 for ignoring VirtualHost configs that don’t end with .conf (and losing an hour of debugging time in the process…), we managed to restore the functonality of the website.

We then did the stretch upgrade, which was somewhat smooth sailing in comparison… We had to remove some functionality which depended on packages that didn’t make it to stretch: fedmsg, and the SOAP interface. We also noticed that the gpg2 transition completely broke the… “interesting” GPG handling of mentors… An install of gnupg1 later everything should be working as it was before.

We’ve also tried to tackle our current need for a patched FTP daemon. To do so, we’re switching the default upload queue directory from / to /pub/UploadQueue/. Mattia has submitted bugs for dput and dupload, and will upload an updated dput-ng to switch the default. Hopefully we can do the full transition by the next time we need to upgrade the machine.

Known bugs: the uscan plugin now fails to parse the uscan output… But at least it “supports” version=4 now ?

Of course, we’re still sorely lacking volunteers who would really care about mentors.debian.net; the codebase is a pile of hacks upon hacks upon hacks, all relying on an old version of a deprecated Python web framework. A few attempts have been made at a smooth transition to a more recent framework, without really panning out, mostly for lack of time on the part of the people running the service. I’m still convinced things should restart from scratch, but I don’t currently have the energy or time to drive it… Ugh.

More stuff will happen tomorrow, but probably not on mentors.debian.net. See you then!

My attendance to SnowCamp is in part made possible by donations to the Debian project. If you want to keep the project going, please consider donating, joining the Debian partners program, or sponsoring the upcoming Debian Conference.