Last weekend, 4 people (3 DDs and 1 soon to be, hopefully in coming months) sit together for a Bug squashing party in Kochi. We fixed lot of things including my broken autopkgtest setup.

It all began from a discussion in #debian-in of not having any BSPs in the past in India. Then twisted in to hosting a BSP by me. I fixed the dates to 3rd & 4th May to get packages migrate naturally to testing with NMUs before the hard freeze on 15th May.

Finding a venue was a huge challenge. Unlike other places, we have very limited options on hackerspaces. We also had some company spaces (if we asked), but we may have to follow their office timings and finding accommodation near by was also a challenge.

Later we decided to go with a rental apartment where could hack all night and sleep. We booked a very bare minimal apartment for 3 nights and 3 days. I updated wiki page and sent announcement.

Not even Wi-Fi was there in the apartment, so we setup everything by ourselves (DebConf style :p ). I short listed some newbie bugs, just in case if newcomers joined the party. But it was only we 4 people and Kathara who joined remotely.

We started from May 2nd night, stacked our cabin with snacks, instant noodles and drinks. Arranged beds, tables and started hacking and having discussions. My autopkgtest-lxc setup was broken. I think its related to #1017753, which got fixed magically and now I started using autopkgtest-podman.

I learned

• reportbug tool can use its own SMTP server by default
• autoremovals can be extended if we pinged to the bug report.

On last day, we went to a nice restaurant and had food. There was a church festival nearby, so we were able to watch wonderful procession and fireworks at night.

All in all we managed to touch 46 bugs of which 35 is now fixed/done and 11 is open, some of this get status done when it reaches testing. It was a fun and productive weekend. More importantly we had fun.