Last Sunday, our local Debian user group gathered to chat, to work on Debian and to do other, non-Debian related hacking. A "Debian & Stuff"!
It had been a while since we held a proper meetup. Our last event was the Montreal BSP we organised back in March 2023... We somewhat missed the window for a June meetup and summer events never seem to gather a good crowd, so I didn't try to organise one.
All this to say it was nice to see folks from the Montreal Debian community :)
This event was also the first time we were hosted by L'Espace des possibles - Petite Patrie, a social venue that aims to provide a space for not-for-profit activities, like repair cafés, sowing classes, board game nights, etc. It was really nice and we will surely meet there again in the future.
Many people came to the event, including some new ones. Although people always tend to come and go during the day, a total of 12 people attended the event.
As always, people worked on very different projects! One of the focus of this D&S was assembling AirGradient DIY basic kits. Our local community has been talking a lot about air quality metrics in the past few months1. Tiago thus decided to have a company print the PCBs for this kit and graciously gave away a few spares. Michael then took upon himself to order parts on AliExpress and a few of us ended up soldering the kits together while chatting.
Otherwise, some Debian work was also done:
- I triaged and closed a bunch of bug reports and started packaging labwc, a Wayland compositor heavily inspired by Openbox.
- Jérôme did some work on Clojure libraries that broke when Java 21 became supported in Sid.
- Gabriel worked on the
libinfluxdb-http-perllibrary. - Tiago and Tassia continued their work on the new DC Sources project and Tiago applied for a debian.net VM for this service.
The whole event was super fun, the tacos we had for lunch were delicious (and very authentic!), and we ended up at a local microbrewery to share a pint later in the evening.
Looking forward to the next event!