Final Report Gunnar Wolf
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Margarita Manterola Richard Darst Ana Beatriz Guerrero López, Andrew McMillan, Ángel Vivas Vivas, Anto Recio, Ben Hutchings, Christian Perrier, Cyril Brulebois, Damyan Ivanov, Gregor Herrmann, Gunnar Wolf, Holger Levsen, Jonathan McDowell, Margarita Manterola, Michael Banck, Michael Schultheiss, Michal Čihař, Mike Hommey, Steve McIntyre Moray Allan Damyan Ivanov, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki, Gunnar Wolf, Judit Foglszinger, Moray Allan Aigars Mahinovs, Gerfried Fuchs, Moray Allan, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz Copyright © 2010 by the contributing authors. You may redistribute and/or modify this work under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.0, or (at your option) any later version. Trademarks and associated logos are property of their respective owners and subject to different licensing as specified by the owner. STEVE MCINTYRE ebian is one of the largest and most influ- make plans for future work and solve some Dential distributed software development of their existing development issues. As organisations in the world, and right from the usual, we took the time to mingle and meet very beginning of the project we have effect- friends old and new. ively worked together remotely using a variety of means: email, IRC, phone, etc. But, no mat- “We bring people together from ter how well we have learnt to use these meth- all over the world for a week or ods they will never compare with the two, helping them to work and bandwidth and efficiency of face-to-face meet- play better, sharing ideas, code ings. As the largest of those meetings, Deb- and beer.” Conf will always be important to us. We bring people together from all over the world for a As always, DebConf depended on a week or two, helping them to work and play bet- number of dedicated volunteers. The organ- ter, sharing ideas, code and beer. ising team included people from future and The government of Extremadura in previous DebConfs, along with the local Spain has hosted a number of Debian devel- people who spent so much of their time opment meetings over the last few years, making things happen before and during but this was the first time that they had com- the conference itself. And, lest we forget, mitted to something the size of DebConf. year on year our video team continues to With their help and continuing generous provide a very professional service, provid- support from many of our key sponsors, we ing live video streams of the talks and again managed to run a successful confer- downloadable video afterwards. Planning ence for several hundred attendees despite and running such a large conference takes a the looming financial problems affecting lot of work, and the team deserves a great much of the world this year. round of thanks from the project as a whole We saw the usual collection of technical for their efforts. sessions and workshops this summer, cover- Looking back at DebConf9, I have lots ing most of the areas that are important in of fond memories to take forward. I can't Debian. Many of the core teams held meet- wait to meet many of you again in New ings at the conference, helping them to York next summer for DebConf10! PICTURE BY AIGARS MAHINOVS 6 DEBCONF9 FINAL REPORT GUNNAR WOLF he academic committee is charged with One of the most interesting events was the Tmaintaining the high quality standards of keynote by the release team. Their proposal the attendee talks at DebConf. This is quite a was fascinating, but new and controversial. long task, reviewing and scoring countless sub- The ability to have a group discussion and get missions. Once we are done, the entirely separ- feedback from people in real time allowed a ate long process of scheduling all talks begins, quicker and better resolution than discussion requiring coordination of rooms and speaker online could have produced. schedules, trying to minimize the overlap LiMux also had a keynote describing the in- between talks interesting to the same subset of stallation of a Debian derivative on over people. While this is a long task, we do get a 14,000 of Munich government's computers. preview of DebConf before DebConf. Such large installations produce a lot of useful Talks are rated based on relevance to Debi- feedback for the body of Debian developers, an, technical merit, and usefulness to fostering which made this keynote very useful for cur- discussion within the community. Most offi- rent Debian developers as well as others inter- cial track talks have some relevance to Debian. ested in large scale Debian deployments. The talk selection process begins many Another talk that was a great success was months before DebConf, when speakers draft the presentation about the new debhelper fea- and submit an abstract. We have events of all tures. A tool that has been helping packaging types, from keynote lectures to birds-of-a-feath- since more than a decade has recently added er, small discussion sections. Talks are not lim- quite a number of new features and all the de- ited to those from current developers, users velopers were eager to share ideas about the often hold discussion sessions to share wisdom new work that could be done with it. or explain significant deployments to the Debi- There were also many smaller events, an community. presentation of several interesting new tools, re- The talk committee meets and evaluates all search that has been going on, problems found submissions based on technical merit and relev- and their solutions. As well as quite a number ance to Debian. Reviewing more than 100 sub- of workshops that allowed members of many missions is hard work, but it is well worth it for different teams in Debian to get together and the preview of what is to come. share their ideas with a fluency that can't be ob- While not every talk can be selected, luckily tained through the internet. DebConf can accommodate many more events. The talk selection team is proud of the tech- This is especially useful since not every event nical program that went on at DebConf9, and can be planned and submitted in advance. Any- we encourage all interested people to consider one may consult the schedule, find an unoccu- reviewing talks in future years – if you can't at- pied room, and arrange a spontaneous tend them all, at least you can read summaries gathering of developers. As such, there is no of them all! such thing as a complete rejection -- only unoffi- cial and not scheduled in advance. DEBCONF9 FINAL REPORT 7 These are the key technical talks given during DebConf9 , and the estimated number of attendees Steve McIntyre 100 Don Armstrong 50 This talk dealt with what makes Debian different from The newly introduced features to the bug tracking other distributions, and what new or not so new developers system, including the affects, summary, and local debbugs can do to help make Debian better, introducing ideas to mirror were be presented and demonstrated during this make work done for Debian cooler and more fun. talk, as well as some of the underlying architectural changes to the codebase. Luk Claes and Adeodato Simó 90 This talk presented plans and ideas for Debian future releases, ensuing a lot of further discussion. Steve Langasek 50 pam-auth-update allows to automatically enable PAM modules when installing. This talk provided an Joey Hess 90 introduction to what it is, how to use it, and how to get debhelper v7, dh sequences, pluggable buildsystems -- good results with it. debhelper has added many new features while staying true to its decades-plus roots. This talk covered the new features, how to use then, and how it compares to cdbs. Agnieszka Czajkowska 50 This presentation introduced new concepts and ideas for an innovative yet controversial image campaign for Holger Levsen, Lars Wirzenius 60 Debian, including boot sequence, wiki and webpages. This talk showed how packages and maintainers can benefit from piuparts and piuparts.debian.org. Steve Langasek, Hector Oron 45 Simon Richter 50 Multiarch design and implementation discussion. The * NM AM FD DAM BOF results, Enrico Zini current state of multi-arch was presented with a lot of * Internationalisation sessions results, Christian Perrier enthusiasm of the audience. * Genesis of an installer, Christian Perrier * Redirecting require, Joachim Breitner * Mastering po4a in 5 minutes, Nicolas François Sam Hartman, Mario Lang, Enrico Zini 45 * Dpkg vs Microsoft Installer, Simon Richter An overview of accessibility features present and * MMUless systems, Simon Richter missing in Debian, from the user and developer point of * Free Software concept map, Rene Merou view. * apt-xapian-index, Enrico Zini Aurelien Jarno 50 Michael Banck 45 This talk showed many potential uses of QEMU, a generic and open source machine emulator, for Debian This BoF focused on the problems perceived with the Developers, particularly useful because it supports a good debian-devel mailing list. It discussed what can be done to subset of official Debian architectures. make debian-devel be again a better place and the central point of Debian development. Bdale Garbee 50 Enrico Zini 40 This talk presented the relationship between HP and Debian from the perpective of a large corporation working Debian Data Export is a standard for publishing Debian with Free Software. information. This talk aimed to explain how the tool works, how it can be used to extract information from all the different data in Debian. 8 DEBCONF9 FINAL REPORT Joerg Jaspert 40 Guido Günther 35 This talk presented the history and description of the Libvirt is a library that aims to make virtualization work of the FTP team, and the people behind it, and an easier.