SaltSprint Halle (Saale, Germany) June 22 - 26 2026 [crosspost]

Announcements
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[So, I didn’t want to cross-post spam, but was asked to post this even here, too as people seem to have missed it in the other category but wanted to see it … so here we go]

SaltSprint is happening again this year! So grab your project, your ideas, your questions and join in.

A full week of intense Nix hacking, collaboration, and knowledge sharing during SaltSprint – all skill levels welcome.

When: June 22 – 26, 2026 (Monday-Friday)
Where: Werkhalle, SaltLabs, Halle (Saale), Germany
Seats: space is limited to 30 participants
Apply by: May 17, 2026 (registration required; free of charge) Apply now!

We provide a nice working environment, fast internet, as well as breakfast, snacks, and coffee.

Travel, accommodation, and lunch as well as dinner costs are not covered.

See saltsprint.org for detailed travel tips and accommodation options.

See you in Halle!

This sprint format is - aside from being fun and productive - intended to show how a sprint can be run quite economically. We’re inviting more sponsors and will increase the range of services (food, social, merchandise) depending on the budget.

We’ll provide a budget review here in this thread after the event showing the options and decisions so more people might feel inspired to run an event like this.

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SaltSprint Halle (Saale, Germany) June 22 - 26 2026
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To put some substance into the planning, I’ve already gone through a couple of things that our team wants to work and maybe this inspires others to join with related issues:

  1. We’re still doing a lot of heavy lifting with scripted networking and we know the writing is on the wall for it. Nevertheless, when we poked systemd-networkd in the past, we quickly ran into issues that made it a no-go for our use cases mostly around reliable convergent, one-shot configuration and shoehorning in some more or less advanced use cases that didn’t fit the systemd modelling.

    We’ll take some time to revisit what it means for us to switch to systemd-networkd and/or discuss with other people whether there are valid use cases in the future for scripted networking and would then consider providing some upstreaming of enhancements we made and assist in maintaining it.

  2. We know we want to contribute more and yes - sometimes time is a bit on the short side - but we’re also a bit lost around establishing good processes how to take properly keep up with packages and modules we care about on a team level. We’d love to discuss with others how they approach this. Maybe we’re just holding it wrong - or maybe we should put some tooling out there to help with this challenge.

  3. We noticed a few incidents in the last years where default password configurations have bitten us. We’d like to investigate whether adding a global config option (security.noDefaultPasswordsmaybe?) could be used to ensure that no default passwords would be enabled implicitly.

  4. And a few smaller items, more hands down items that have accumulated:

    1. Getting the updated grub reinstall conditions PR merged
    2. Review, understand and homogenize the situation around separate client package outputs for the various MySQL flavours (mysql/percona/mariadb )
    3. Contribute autoconfig settings to the simple mailserver project

Feel free to use this thread to start planning your sprint topics, and also join us on #saltsprint:matrix.org.

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The SaltSprint (which we might need to call Why-Do-We-Always-Hit-The-Hottest-Week-Sprint next year) is about to wrap up.

For me it’s been a fantastic opportunity to (re-)connect and I enjoyed having everyone around, learning a lot of new stuff and having discussions trying to come up with new ideas.

There’s a pad where I asked everyone to make quick notes about what they worked on:

As this sprint is not only about producing code, we also want to inspire everyone to run smaller sprints in a more distributed fashion. There will be more reporting done at a later time to help people estimate what the effort (time and money wise).

I hope everyone makes it home safely and would love if my fellow sprinters would summarize their experience hier a bit to also underline the relevance of these smaller events for the community at large.

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I had a fun time there. Thank you for hosting it .

Working with other (more) experienced nix-tinkerers is really useful when you’re stuck with a problem