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.