Oldenburg

This is my last morning in Oldenburg, I'm up obscenely early hacking on quik-installer on an oldworld powerpc machine that Gaudenz left with a failing d-i run when he went to bed around 5 am, just as I was getting up. I cannot explain my sleep schedule here (I'm been waking up at midnight EST), but the Oldenburg developer's meeting is like that, old hardware, wacky sleep schedules, and an informal, relaxed, and very productive atmosphere. The trip has certianly been worthwhile despite the airline's worst.

I wrote before about how much more work seems to get done at Oldenburg than at other meetings, and this year has just borne that out again to me. Rather than focusing on any one problem, I've been floating between a dozen different areas of d-i work, mostly working with the people who are themselves expert or very interested in that area, so I've worked with Anton on partman stuff, with Colin on powerpc (floppies), With fjp on countrychooser and the manual, with Jeff on build system stuff, with markos on localis^Hzation-config and termwrap. In many cases just being someone to bounce ideas off of. My main work by myself has not been on large problems, just things like fixing the size of the i386 floppies, coordinating a release planning meeting, and fiddling with root on software RAID. So yeah, these meetings really work out well, there are more people working on d-i here than at the last DebConf, and on such a variety of things.

I also like the continuity of having the meeting in the same place every year, of going to the same restaurants. I enjoy traveling around to new places attending other meetings, but not feeling obligasted to go out and see the sights, not needing to learn where things are, these cut down on the stress and along with the excellent management by otherJoey[TM] (who's been doing this for 10 years after all), make everything go very smoothly. I hope I'll be back in Oldenburg next year.