Birger Schacht: Status update, December 2025

December 2025 started off with a nice event, namely a small gathering of Vienna
based DDs. Some of us were at DebConf25 in
Brest and we thought it might be nice to have a get-together of DDs in Vienna.
A couple of months after DebConf25 I picked up the idea, let someone else
ping the DDs, booked a table at a local cafe and in the end we were a group of
6 DDs. It was nice to put faces to names, names to nicknames and to hear what
people are up to. We are definitely planning to repeat that!

December also ended with a meeting of nerds: the 39th Chaos Communication
Congress in Hamburg.
As usual, I did not really have that much time to watch many talks. I tend to
bookmark a lot of them in the scheduling app in advance, but once I’m at the
congress the social aspect is much more important and I try to only attend
workshop or talks that are not recorded. Watching the recordings afterward is
possible anyway (and I actually try to do that!).

There was also a Debian Developers meetup at day 3, combined with the usual
time confusion regarding UTC and CET. We talked about having a Debian table at
40c3, so maybe the timezone won’t be that much of a problem in the next time.

Two talks I recommend are CSS Clicker Training: Making games in a “styling”
language
and To sign or not to sign: Practical vulnerabilities in GPG &
friends.

Regarding package uploads this month did not happen that much, I only uploaded
the new version (0.9.3) of labwc.

I created two new releases for carl. First a
0.5 release that adds Today and SpecifiedDate as properties. I forwarded an
issue about dates not being parsed correctly to the icalendar issue
tracker and this was fixed a
couple of days later (thanks!). I then created a 0.5.1 release containing that
fix. I also started planning to move the carl repository back to codeberg,
because Github feels more and more like an AI Slop platform.

The work on debiverse also continued. I removed the tailwind CSS framework,
and it was actually not that hard to reproduce all the needed CSS classes with
custom CSS. I think that CSS frameworks make sense to a point, but once you
start implementing stuff that the framework does not provide, it is easier if
everything comes out of one set of rules. There was also the article Vanilla
CSS is all you
need which goes
into the same direction and which gave me some ideas how to organize the CSS
directives.

I also refactored the filter generation for the listing filters and the HTML
filter form is now generated from the FastAPI Query Parameter
Model.

For navigation I implemented a sidebar, that is hidden on small screens but can
be toggled using a burger menu.

I also stumbled upon An uncomfortable but necessary discussion about the
Debian bug
tracker,
which raises some valid points. I think debiverse could be a solution to the
first point of “What could be a way forward?”, namely: “Create a new web
service that parses the existing bug data and displays it in a “rich” format”.

But if there is ever another way than email to interact with bugs.debian.org,
than this approach should not rely on passing on the commands via mail. If
I click a button in a web interface to raise the severity, the severity should
be raised right away – not 10 minutes later when the email is received. I think
the individual parts (web, database, mail interface) should be decoupled and
talk to each other via APIs.