[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Baz/Bazaar, updating libraries (Sept 2022)

[Paul Nijjar]

Happy September! The theme of this month's KWLUG meeting is
"problems, and how to solve them".

Doug Moen has a packaging problem. He has a great FLOSS product to
distribute (the functional 3D modelling language Curv) but packaging
it in a cross-platform way that is easy for end-users is a big pain.
All the existing packaging systems make him unhappy, so he is
proposing an alternative: Baz, the goal of which is to make installing
desktop applications as easy as using web applications. In addition to
the packaging format, Doug wants there to be a decentralized,
cross-platform app store for these apps, which he has named (quite
appropriately) Bazaar. In this month's presentation, Doug wants to
introduce us to Baz and Bazaar, justify why the project needs to
exist, share his plans and solicit helpers for the project. 

Andrew Cant has a library problem. As a Ruby program he sometimes
crafts Gems, and those Gems have dependencies. Deciding which
libraries to update is not a trivial tasks. Andrew will share with us
some helpful rules of thumb he uses in his projects to own the libs.
Although the specific examples he uses will all be from
Rubyland, many of the underlying principles apply across languages. 

And KWLUG? KWLUG sure has problems, but it also has opportunities --
the opportunity for you to share a presentation with the group.
Presentation slots are 40 minutes long, and can be any topic connected
to free and open source software. You can talk about something that
you have worked on, or something you would like to learn more about. 

(Another opportunity is to help with organizing the group. Get in
touch if you are interested in that.)

For the next few months (probably for the rest of 2022 at least)
KWLUG is remaining virtual. Some other groups are resuming in-person
meetings, so if you are craving the opportunity to associate with
others (and hopefully not breathe in too much of their carbon
dioxide), check out the listings at https://watcamp.com .

That's all I got for the month. Our meeting will start at 7pm on our
BigBlueButton instance:

https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug 

- Paul
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