We recently held a Debian bug squashing party (BSP) in Perth, Western Australia. Over the weekend we had about 10 or so people show up to participate, learn about fixing bugs in Debian and try to fix some. The BSP co-incided with a weekend heat wave with temperatures reaching 38°C and the venue lacked air conditioning. Most of the attendees were new to Debian development but were Debian users. Our focus was on release critical bugs highlighted by rc-alert and the UDD bugs list, but we also discussed IPv6 bugs in CUPS and some bugs that were affecting UCC infrastructure. The UCC president also worked on fixing their door-locking system, replacing the broken system based on an ancient modem with an Arduino board. We managed to fix, work on or investigate 12 or more bugs. I was hoping we would get through more, but the weather and the average experience level conspired against us. After we were done on Sunday a few of us went down to the local pub to have a meal, a beer and some geeky conversation. All in all we had a good time and got some bugs fixed.

The UCC president seemed to be keen on doing another BSP, hopefully we can do another one before the freeze happens. There were a few people who missed the BSP so it would be good to give them a chance to work on some bugs.

Thanks go to the UCC folks for the venue and to PLUG folks for helping with organisation and promotion of the event.