Columbia University New York 2010-07-24 2010-08-08 16 0.5 00:00 00:15 14:00 01:30 Interschool Lab DebCamp workshop en Eric Dantan Rzewnicki 14:00 01:30 Davis Auditorium DebCamp workshop en Eric Dantan Rzewnicki 09:45 00:45 Davis Auditorium Welcome to Debian Day! other en Welcoming people to Debian Day We will explain what is Debian, what is Debian Day and provide an overview of what the day entails, the speakers and events for the rest of the day and any necessary logistical information. Gabriella Coleman Hans-Christoph Steiner 10:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium Establishing and carrying through a commitment Community Outreach lecture en This talk looks at both successful and unsuccessful attempts to adopt open source software (the term is preferred to "free software" in government) and lays out some principles for people inside and outside government agencies to promotes its use. In particular, I will discuss the assessment of costs and benefits done for the city of Munich in Germany, the creation of Forge.mil by the Department of Defense, and the process used to choose OpenOffice.org for the state of Massachusetts (a project that was defunded). The importance of using explicitly political arguments for the adoption of open source software, and for agency managers to understand the community and workings of open source at a deep level, will be stressed. Free and open source software has been used by government agencies for quite a while, although often without fanfare, and prospects for increased use have been greeted enthusiastically by both knowledgeable government employees and free software communities. But mobilizing the necessary forces in government to move ahead has proven difficult. Cost savings, the naive enticement, don't provide good enough motivation in the end. Although proprietary software tends to come with high licensing fees whereas free software can be downloaded without payment, monetary arguments for deploying free software are usually unsuccessful because of the high costs of conversion, retraining, and developing an adequate base for support. More subtle arguments citing the public interest are required. Some themes I will highlight include: Rational considerations (cost, and even public access) are not enough to drive adoption of open source. It must be pursued in a politically and even morally motivated way. Open source software is inherently borderless, so advocacy should draw on support from international sources. To successfully promote open source within an agency, a manager cannot simply like open source software in the abstract, but must have a direct understanding of its modes of development, its strengths and weaknesses, and its relation to users and communities. Proponents must be alert to an ever-growing range of creative unethical methods and backroom maneuvers used to squash open source adoption by proprietary software companies, who see its adoption by government as an existential threat to their own businesses. Topics in this talk (and the paper I am currently revising) include: 1) Reasons for adopting free software that are particular compelling in a government setting 2) The importance of the open government or government transparency movement and its relation to free software 3) The relation of open standards to free software and the importance of standards 4) The importance of starting with a profound insight into the community and development processes for open source 5) The value of explicit political goals 6) Processes for establishing government agency requirements Andy Oram 11:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium how to have fun via NMU campaigns and RC bug fixing bof en In recent release cycles, it has become more and more evident that a "selfish" approach in which maintainers only care about their own (team maintained) packages does not scale. To keep up with our principle of releasing RC-bug-free software we all need to care about the packages of other, in particular when they are RC-buggy. That, of course, involves actions such as NMU-ing properly, but timely too. This BoF aims will bring together people that care about keeping the RC bug count low not only for what concerns their own packages, but also when it comes to packages of other fellow DDs. Topics of discussion include: - How to spot packages that need NMU from other maintainers. - Official guidelines for when and how do NMUs (devref §5.11.1). - Best practice and invidual work-flow for NMU campaign (the guidelines used by the BoF proponent are in the links section). - How (and if?) communicate about NMU campaigns to get other fellow developers involved. - How to train new/forthcoming Debian developers to care more about packages other than theirs. - etc. Stefano Zacchiroli NMU guidelines, devref §5.11.1 RCBW guidelines and sample NMU workflow working questions 14:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium Presentation of the projects and their status Community Outreach podium en This event will gather the admins, mentors and students of the 2010 Google Summer of Code at Debian to present our organization work, the students, their projects and how they are doing. At the time of Debconf10, our students should be way into their projects. The Debian organization of the 2010 run of the Summer of Code will be presented and discussed, gathering feedback, especially in regard of the relation between the projects and the rest of the community. This event will be an opportunity for mentor and student pairs to present the projects they have been working on and update about their progress, and for the Debian community to give face to face feedback and help. Obey Arthur Liu 15:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium Community Outreach lecture en Project Caua is an Open project to create millions of private sector, environmentally friendly jobs in urban areas of Latin America utilizing FOSS, with implications of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in North America and millions more around the world. In addition, Project Caua will open an avenue for free (as in beer) wireless Internet to help defeat the digital divide, and to provide low-cost training to get even more people off unemployment and create taxpayers. The specifications for Project Caua can be found at www.projectcaua.org. While Project Caua is distribution neutral, Debian would be a natural choice as the underlying distribution and sample implementation. This talk will outline Project Caua and hopefully open the discussion for actual implementation details. This is a project that I had been formulating slowly for about five years. Two years ago it picked up steam when a Brazilian friend of mine called and said that he felt it would work in Brazil and we started fine-tuning it. One year ago we applied for some grants to do the pilots and those are still being fine-tuned. We are still figuring a way to finance it, but we also want to start turning our attention to the finer aspects of the technical issues. I would like to present this on Sunday (Deb Day) as it does have a lot of social impact, shows how FOSS is about the only way this can be done, and would be good for people in the general audience to see that. However I would also like to have a BoF to discuss some of the technical details, which software could be used and why...etc. on Monday. Jon Anderson Hall, Esq. Project Caua Website 16:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium en Hon. Gale A. Brewer, former Chair of the Committee on Technology in Government, current Chair on Committee on Governmental Operations will discuss the ways that government can foster freedom in technology. Hon. Gale Brewer 17:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en One of the first programmable devices was the Jacquard loom, which used "punched cards" to control fabric designs. One of the next main programmable devices was the player piano (pianola) that used a spool of punched paper to control a mechanical device. There are a lot of similarities between Free Software and the Player Piano, and a lot of lessons to be learned about copyrights and patents, including the person who first invented spread-spectrum radio. This talk illustrates these similarities and lessons, leading up to a discussion of the Opus I organ at Trinity Church on Wall Street, perhaps the greatest organ in the world, driven by GNU/Linux. This is a talk of about an hour's length. I will need an LCD projector and an amplifier with a 1/8" stereo jack to plug into my notebook. It is a "fun talk", but does have some deep meanings. Jon Anderson Hall, Esq. 19:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium Welcome to Debconf! lecture en The opening plenary would be the first thing that would be scheduled to kick-off Debconf (after debcamp). It would be the general welcoming to the conference, providing a opening cohesion and hitting a few key things. Ideally the plenary would be scheduled first thing, and not in competition with other things. It would be brief (30 minutes probably). The opening plenary would be the first thing that would be scheduled to kick-off Debconf (after debcamp). It would be the general welcoming to the conference, providing a opening cohesion and hitting a few key things. Ideally the plenary would be scheduled first thing, and not in competition with other things. It would be brief (30 minutes probably). * welcoming to debconf * general information * highlights of what is to come * something funny * introduce the conference team * logistical overview * columbia rules/regulations * questions/comments/heckling (please add others!) Gabriella Coleman 10:30 01:00 414 Schapiro Notes and tricks from an amateur sysadmin lecture en How to provide friends and family with reliable Debian-based machines without spending all of your evenings maintaining them. Many Debian developers find themselves providing some form of technical support to friends and family. Achieving the mystical five nines is well beyond the means of an amateur sysadmin like myself, but giving my dad reliable boxes to use can be achieved without eating all of my free time. This talk will draw on my experience supporting and maintaining my dad's Debian-based computers. I will briefly describe the hardware setup, introduce some useful packages and share some configuration hints. Areas of focus will include system updates, reliability, monitoring and security. I intend to keep the initial presentation short so that other Debian users and developers can share their own tips and experiences. Experienced sysadmins are more than welcome to come share their wisdom with us mere mortals, but are unlikely to benefit as much as users and developers who do not make a living keeping the lights on. Francois Marier Slides (direct download) Slides (slideshare) 14:00 01:00 414 Schapiro Activism, development, and education Community Outreach lecture en The FSF works for user freedom on several fronts, including activist political campaigns, educational resources, and support for software development. All of these areas intersect with Debian -- activist campaigns like Defective by Design, PlayOgg, and Windows 7 Sins are supported by many Debian participants and relate to the goals and values of the DFSG. Resources like the Free Software Directory, Hardware Database, and Licensing & Compliance Lab provide important information for free software users and developers. Through the GNU Project and the High Priority Projects list, the FSF directly supports upstream free software development. As the Operations Manager at the FSF, I can give an overview of these projects, and focus on the most timely ones. It's labelled as a lecture, but I would hope to have a significant amount of discussion, including thoughts about our existing efforts and suggestions for what more we could do. John Sullivan 15:00 01:00 414 Schapiro bof en Debconf attendees love Debian. For some, our pride in the project combines with self-confidence to become a sense of empowerment. For others, we fear we are not quite worthy. Let's discuss how prospective contributors feel welcomed or scared-off by the new maintainer process and debian-mentors, how existing contributors see Debian, and what we can do to help technically-sharp but socially-shy people give Debian their best. Half a decade ago, I searched Debian for a place to contribute. I wanted to join the community, but since I held Debian developers in such high regard, was afraid to step on their toes or make mistakes. This shyness slowed me down in the process to becoming an active contributor. In this BoF: * Prospective contributors can share their experiences with the sponsorship process, with particular focus on which parts feel alienating or welcoming. * Existing developers can discuss which parts of Debian they see as unfriendly or arcane. * We will discuss efforts that demystify Debian, such as the creation of a staging Debian bug tracker for attendees of a recent conference, and how well they work. After the BoF, attendees will leave with a sense of who they can ask for help without feeling embarrassed, the parts of Debian that scare off prospective contributors, and if similar efforts could cause existing contributors to participate more. Concrete results might include the creation of an interest group within Debian, a shy-people-oriented mentorship effort, and specific changes we can make so Debian feels more welcoming. Asheesh Laroia 11:30 01:00 Interschool Lab Debian, Free Software, and Education Community Outreach Educational contexts are powerful testimonies to the value and importance of free software. This panel will discuss various ways that Debian and free software are currently being used to help improve education, in the broadest sense of of the term. Free software is being used effectively across educational institutions, libraries, and grassroots advocacy efforts. We will examine various ways that new media and technology are being used to transform teaching, learning, access, and communication. * Jonah Bossewitch (http://alchemicalmusings.org), Technical Architect at CCNMTL (http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu) and doctoral student in Communications at Columbia's School of Journalism. * Mallory Knodel (http://malloryknodel.net), May First/People Link (http://mayfirst.org) * Professor Matt Curinga (http://matt.curinga.com), Adelphi University * Professor Alycia Sellie (http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pub/Faculty_Details5.jsp?faculty=968), Brooklyn College * Ahamed Shameem (http://www.projectfedena.org), Fedena is an Open Source School Management System based on RoR technology. It is a one stop solution for all teaching and school management related issues and it helps to manage all school related activities online. Details and panelists to follow. Jonah Bossewitch 14:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Community Outreach lecture en The paper and and presentation I propose will concentrate on the importance of Debian products for the University of Groningen, one of the major Dutch Universities. To summarize: - The university's Center of Information Technology (CIT) is responsible for the correct functioning of the University's Information Technology facilities. This involves making available `standard working environments' for its 5000 staff members and 20,000 students, monitoring and maintaining the integrity of its 10Gb Internet connection as well as the computers that are responsible for providing the facilities that are considered essential for the university. The University uses various means to protect and monitor the well-being of its computers. Among other means the Stealth File Integrity Control program, a Debian package, is used to monitor the file integrity of its core computer systems. - The standard working environment offered by the university to its employees and students has always been a non-Linux system. Fortunately that has changed by now and Linux systems are now deployed in more and more departments of the university. This `Linux Working Place' (LWP) as it is affectionately called is strictly speaking not Debian but Ubuntu, but the close links Ubuntu has with Debian result in a de-facto use of Debian (see also below). In addition to this `official' acceptance of Linux, several departments (Astronomy, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, to name a few) have been using Debian Linux for a long time. - Various programming languages are actively being taught by the University. Since the mid-80s I have organized a course on the C programming language, augmented with C++ since the early 90s. The addition of C++ resulted in the `C++ Annotations', which became the main text-book for that course. The C++ Annotations have also found their way into Debian and are used by many individuals and organizations on a world-wide basis for teaching and honing knowledge about C++. - Students reaching the advanced levels of the C++ course use a parser generator specifically designed to be used with C++ when when designing and implementing their own grammars. This parser generator is Bisonc++, also a Debian package. - Students of my class `Information Security' use classes and templates of my `Bobcat' software library to implement algorithms requiring computations with integral values of unlimited sizes. They usually prefer using these specially designed classes over the raw use of the underlying OpenSSL library functions. Bobcat is not only used in this context, but many C++ programs developed during the C++ course or used by the C++ course students rely on Bobcat. Bobcat is also used in other sections of the University. The departments of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence customarily have Bobcat installed on their systems as well. - Various generic tools (Icmake for program development, Xd for fast directory changes and other Debian-based tools) are used by students and staff-members to simplify their daily activities. Spin-offs of these projects were developed or are being developed right now by others, like `ccbuild' (Bram Neijt) and `flexc++' (Jean-Paul van Oosten, Richard Berendsen, and myself). Moreover, the Debian Developer George Danchev visited us last fall when the CIT organized a course on Debian Package Construction. Frank B. Brokken 15:00 01:00 Interschool Lab What are the challenges for the collaborative design process? Community Outreach lecture en Keywords: design, collaboration, interface, community “Design by committee”, “too many cooks in the kitchen” and other terms have been used derogatively to imply that the creative process breaks when it involves too many individuals. At the same time, the software world has been completely revolutionized by the open source, networked collaborative process. When it comes to graphic and interaction designs (two fields critical to software development) Open Source software seem to lag behind the more conventional production models. It seems like in design the Open Source community have not managed to nourish robust collaboration models. One could argue that even successful free software design projects like Firefox or Ubuntu are often developed in a more traditional process. What are the challenges of networked collaboration in the creative process? Can and how might they be solved? Or is it just that designers don’t like to work together? I will be tackling these questions in the light of my collaborative work as founding designer of ShiftSpace.org and my educational research leading the Open Source Design class at Parsons’ AAS Program in Graphic Design. 6mins version of this talk is available here: http://www.mushon.com/2009/12/18/shortaudio-my-open-source-design-slides/ *Disclaimer: I am not a Debian community insider, that's a part of what I want to talk about. I would love to submit this as a full paper if the abstract is excepted. Mushon Zer-Aviv 6mins version of the talk - Wordcamp NYC 09 Mushon.com ShiftSpace.org http:// 17:00 01:00 Interschool Lab History of a Bold Idea to produce "free manuals for free software" Community Outreach lecture en Started in 2005, FLOSS Manuals has been the locus for over 40 volunteer-produced books and ties together a worldwide community of over 1,000 people who care about free software and free documentation. This presentation describes the value of FLOSS Manuals, its development processes and leadership style, and its strengths and weaknesses as seen from its key organizers. Started in 2005, FLOSS Manuals has been the locus for over 40 volunteer-produced books and ties together a worldwide community of over 1,000 people who care about free software and free documentation. This presentation describes the value of FLOSS Manuals, its development processes and leadership style, and its strengths and weaknesses as seen from its key organizers. Although I'm currently listing it as a lecture, if it is accepted, I will encourage other FLOSS Manuals volunteers to attend and try to turn it into a panel. Like all community-based projects, the success of FLOSS Manuals cannot be attributed to any single facet. Its technology is not whiz-bang, but focuses on staying supple and on always evolving. The site offers "good enough" tools for authoring, coordination, remixing, and printing. Leadership remains loose and the impetus for projects come from community members, new and old alike. The FLOSS Manuals site offers books in two stages: an open wiki that anyone can contribute to, and a more controlled stable site for versions vetted by the projects responsible for the books' production and maintenance. Many books are produced through an innovative process called a book sprint, which is refined with each project and documented in a FLOSS Manuals book of its own. The community also stresses translation projects and offers support to people setting up sites for translations and books in other languages. Andy Oram 20:30 01:00 Other Location meeting We will discuss how keysigning will work at DebConf10. You may also want to join us for the Classical Keysigning Party on the evening of August 6th. Aníbal Monsalve Salazar DC10 Keysigning 09:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en Bits from the DPL, you know the drill :) Some topics that will addressed: - how are we? - are we aging properly? - what's our role in the (always changing) ecosystem of FLOSS distributions? - are we doing well in (continuously) attracting new developers? - are we doing well in communicating within the project and with the external world? - how's doing the (newbie) DPL? - how are we wrt to ... ? - total world domination is *just* around the corner Stefano Zacchiroli 10:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en Many developers have not yet investigated the new suite of GPLv3 licenses. This presentation helps developers already familiar with GPLv2 and LGPLv2 to improve their understanding of GPLv3, LGPLv3, and AGPLv3. This presentation covers changes in the patent provisions, improved license compatibility, improved source code provision terms, the internationalization of GPL and many other changes. Many developers have not had the time to investigate the new suite of licenses in depth, and understand the differences between the GPLv3-based and the GPLv2-based licenses. This talk will help developers who are generally familiar with the GPLv2 and LGPLv2 to improve their understanding of GPLv3, LGPLv3, and AGPLv3. Specifically, this talk will cover in detail the changes in the in various parts of the license. The following is the list of changes that will be explained in detail during the talk: * Changes to improve the details regarding distribution between GPLv2 and GPLv3. Traditionally, GPLv2 has been interpreted to mean what GPLv3 says on this topic, but does not say so in the letter of the license. v3 makes it clear how distribution can happen under a copyleft license. * GPLv2, while aware of the software patent issue, is extremely naive in its provisions regarding patents. GPLv3 patent provisions are much improve. This talk will explain how. * GPLv2 is a USA-centric license. GPLv3 is internationalized. * The termination provision in v2 extremely aggressive. GPLv3 has friendlier termination provisions more consistent with community practices. * License exceptions are nearly always necessary under GPL. They existed under GPLv2, but the system for adding exceptions was clunky and non-uniform. GPLv3 provides an exceptions framework. * GPLv2 does not handle embedded software situations well. GPLv3 much improves this situation. * GPLv2 has no web services clause. GPLv3 does not either, but GPLv3's structure makes one possible through the Affero GPLv3. Bradley M. Kuhn 11:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium Meet the SPI Board bof en Debian is an Associated Project of SPI and this BoF is a chance to meet the SPI Board members who are present at DebConf 10 and learn more about SPI and why you should become or continue to be involved in SPI. Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) is a New York not-for-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. It encourages programmers to use any license that allows for the free modification, redistribution and use of software, and hardware developers to distribute documentation that will allow device drivers to be written for their product. Michael Schultheiss 14:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium present and future of Python helper tools lecture en This talk briefly introduces current and future Python packaging helper tools. Python 3.2 allows sharing source code files among multiple different versions of Python interpreter, new dh_python will take advantage of it. * python-support, python-central - how to use them? What problems do they have? * new dh_python / PEP 3147 proposal - can it solve our problems? * Debian Python Modules Team and Python Applications Packaging Team, what do we do? How to join us? Piotr Ożarowski PEP 3147 PEP 3149 PEP 384 PEP 382 slides 15:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium Past. Present. And Future? lecture en This talk will present the status of the GNU/Hurd OS and of the Debian port, its future, and how you can help it. What is this Hurd thing? Why another OS? What is the status of the Debian port? Will we ever see it in a stable Debian release? What are the plans for the future? What can I do to help? Michael Banck GNU Hurd Debian GNU/Hurd port 16:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium A New Desktop Experience for Netbooks Ad Hoc lecture en Mark will present the work that Canonical has done on netbook user interfaces. The netbook is a significant force in Linux adoption, and Canonical's design team has made netbook user experience its priority. This talk will cover work done to improve the experience people have with Linux on small screen laptops, and examine the possibilities for convergence between netbook and large-screen desktop environments. Mark Shuttleworth 17:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium Community Outreach lecture en I would like to cover how maintainers from both projects can coordinate over patches, bug, version control systems, roadmaps, etc. I am also going to include some lessons learned about what it's like to be a derivative distro of Debian, so I will use examples from the past where things went well (or didn't go well at all!) so that both Debian Developers and derivative's from Debian can learn what works and what doesn't. Jorge O. Castro Slides 10:30 01:00 414 Schapiro Ad Hoc bof en Discussion about which kind of merchandise Debian-associated people/community produce, also to let people attending conferences/meetings/whatever how to get merchandise. Currently Alexander Formorer, Debian Brasil, debian.ch and Debian UK produce merchandise for Debian. Merchandise: - backpacks -> Debian Brasil - foilstickers -> Alexander Wirt, Debian Brasil, debian.ch - mugs -> Debian Brasil - pins -> Debian Brasil, debian.ch - Swiss Army knife (design/model to be decided) -> debian.ch - T-Shirts -> Alexander Wirt, Debian Brasil, debian.ch, Debian UK, Joost van Baal - umbrellas -> Adrian Von Bidder (maybe soon debian.ch) - wine -> Anto Recio & Holger Levsen Please look at <http://wiki.debian.org/Merchandise/BoFDebConf10> for a list of things to be discussed. Luca Capello Announcement on debconf-discuss debian.ch merchandise page T-Shirts in Netherlands Debian UK T-Shirts Wiki merchandise page Official merchandise page Wiki page about this BoF 11:30 01:00 414 Schapiro creation of complex chroots and rootfs systems with multistrap tutorial en Multistrap is a multiple repository bootstrapping package which uses apt to resolve the dependencies and a series of configuration files and custom scripts to prepare a complex chroot or a bootable rootfilesystem in a single process. This talk describes the current multistrap process. debootstrap is tied to a single repository and a single suite and does not easily support customising the bootstrap environment as part of the debootstrap process. Multistrap uses apt to resolve inter-repository and inter-suite dependencies and supports detailed configuration and custom scripts to create both complex chroots (e.g. including a cross-building toolchain) or bootable root filesystems (with or without typical Debian bootstrap packages). For root filesystem development, multistrap is gaining support for creating device nodes, omitting Priority: required packages, pre-seeded configurations (including creating a rootfs where dpkg and apt are no longer installed) and can prepare the final tarball. For chroot development, multistrap supports extending the package selection with automatic dependency resolution and mixing multiple repositories (e.g. to get Emdebian toolchains for Lenny installed in a Squeeze chroot). Configurations can be "cascaded" so that specialised configurations can inherit options from more general configurations. This talk will cover the multistrap process, configuration and usage to create a complex chroot and a pre-configured root filesystem. Also included is a description of pdebuild-cross, an extension to pbuilder which is able to use multistrap to create a cross-building disposable chroot usable with pbuilder, pdebuild and svn-buildpackage. Neil Williams 14:00 01:00 414 Schapiro bof en General discussion of the current state and workflow for Debian Policy, possible future changes to the document structure and workflow, and general discussion of how to get more people involved and how to help Policy evolve at the pace desired by the project. Debian Policy is one of the features that makes Debian relatively unique: it tries to be thorough and comprehensive and is very widely followed by the project. However, it perpetually suffers from a lack of resources and slow adaptation to new project directions and needs. This is an open general discussion about the current state, challenges, and hopes for the future, including discussion of the current workflow and whether or how it could be changed or improved. Also part of the discussion will be how others can jump in and help. Russ Allbery Debian Policy team Debian Policy change process 15:00 01:00 414 Schapiro Want a better wiki? Get Involved! bof en You want a better wiki? You have some ideas? You want a feature... Come, Discuss, Contribute! Everyone is welcome to this ''Bird of Feather'' session. Current topics: * What happened over last year. (est. 5min) * MoinMoin 1.9 upgrade (squeeze). (est. 5min) * Getting more people and more DDs into the team (est. 5min) * The future of the DebianWiki (est. 10min) * Bits from wikiadm preparation/discussion * How to solicit notifications of spam/spammers from users (est. 10min) * Fixing wiki bugs and RT tickets (as long as needed) * Discussion on updating the layout for proposal (est. 10min) Other topics will be welcome: just come and discuss! Try to add the topic you want to discuss in advance (to the wiki page http://wiki.debian.org/DebConf10/DebianWikiBof ), so we can reserve more time-slots if needed. Franklin Piat DebianWiki BoF topics 17:00 01:00 414 Schapiro Recent changes in the world of Debian Autobuilding lecture en Philipp Kern Kurt Roeckx 10:30 01:00 Interschool Lab Java bof en The Debian Java Maintainers [1] team has 50+ members and currently maintains close to 500 packages [2], including OpenJDK [3] and the Java Policy [4]. In this birds-of-a-feather session we will discuss issues related to Java and Debian. Anybody interested in learning more about it is welcome to attend. People who maintain Java packages outside the team maintenance umbrella are highly encouraged to attend as their feedback is most appreciated. [1] https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-java/ [2] http://pkg-java.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/pet.cgi [3] http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/openjdk-6 [4] http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/java-policy/ Pablo Ariel Duboue Alioth page Debian Java policy 11:30 01:00 Interschool Lab Java lecture en Until this year Debian Java policy has been stagnant for quite a long time. With the changes in the Java ecosystem, particularly the arrival of openjdk, a lot of changes are necessary. Niels Thykier has pushed through a lot of the changes which had been discussed, but lost momentum. This talk covers those changes which have been made and lead discussion into what policy changes are further desirable. Changes that Niels made were largely to bring policy in line with current practices. We will also review what things are not in policy but which are part of current packaging practices. Discussion on future policy changes will . We will also review what things are not in policy but which are part of current packaging practices. Future policy changes to be discussed will focus on simplifying library transitions, dependencies and other issues. Matthew Johnson 14:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Java lecture en Programs and libraries written in Java have a lot of special packaging requirements in common. When I started packaging Java programs I was annoyed at the lack of tools to automate some of these tasks and hence Javahelper was born. Javahelper provides tools to help with the workflow right from processing upstream releases (which can be tricky with some Java upstreams) through building packages where upstream doesn't have a sane build system to generating packaging metadata and installing files into packages. This talk gives an overview of the dh7 and cdbs integration, how to use the various helper tools available in javahelper and finishes with example packages of a selection of simple Java programs and libraries. The aim of Javahelper is to provide tooling to implement Debian Java policy, automate common tasks required by Java packages that aren't provided for by debhelper and to simplify the packaging of Java software. Matthew Johnson 15:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Java lecture en The talk shows the problems of packaging Java code in a way that the result conforms to minimal packaging standards. Sometimes code does not get build completely from source, sometimes non-free software gets used and sometimes the license terms are not correct. Ways to improve that situation will be shown on the example of Maven. Debian is the largest free software distribution and ships a large variety of software products. Unfortunately we ship only a small part of the huge amount of Java software that often uses free licenses like Apache-2.0, (L-)GPL, EPL, and BSD. The talk tries to find the reasons for the situation and shows some ways to improve the situation. The number of source packages maintained by the Java packaging team has increased a lot during the lasts years to about 500 but important packages like the popular JBoss application server are still missing. Compared to Java the Perl group is maintaining about 1600 source packages. This talk won't cover the JDK like OpenJDK and it won't criticize the Java programming language. The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) are some basic requirements that any software must fulfil in Debian's main archive component. The software must be built from source only and all build dependencies must be part of main, too. Every single source code will be checked for correct licensing before it will be accepted into the package archive. There have been many improvements in the GNU compiler collection, the eclipse compiler, and the classpath library during the last years but the most important change was the GPL relicensing of Sun's JDK which is called OpenJDK now. Almost every Java software can be built with free compilers and run with free virtual machines on the most important architectures. This is a huge step forward compared to the Etch release. But you need some complex build tool and a growing number of libraries to build a modern Java software package. O Out of lazyness such tools and libraries are often shipped in binary form only or just downloaded as binaries during the build process. This violates the DFSG requirements obviously. Apache Maven has become a very popular build system in the Java world. The talk will discuss all the problems that needed to be resolved before it could be integrated into Debian. It will show how Maven can be used as a packaging tool now. Java developers will get directions on how to improve their own upstream packaging to help the Debian maintainers. Torsten Werner blog post from Vincent Fourmond presentation slides 16:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Java lecture en If you are running an ant build, trying to get it right, how many times do the Java API methods Just-in-Time compile from Java bytecodes into machine code? For every invocation of /usr/bin/ant, a JVM is spanned and relevant methods are compiled. This is a clear waste of work. Moreover, just-in-time compilation is one of the main reasons of Java perceived sluggishness. As Java is enjoying a sort of renaissance in the Free Software world after the release of OpenJDK, we can expect more and more times our system will be just-in-time compiling yet another copy of java.util.regexp.Pattern. A better solution would be to have system-wide JVM where well behaved (also known as "Debian packaged") programs and libraries can co-exist. Luckily, researchers at Sun Research Labs were working five years ago in project Barcelona [1] (now concluded) which produced a research prototype of a system level JVM (they call this a Multi-tasking Virtual Machine or MVM for lack of a more confusing name) to address this very issue. Their approach resulted in JSR 121 (isolates) [2] for JVM extensions allowing multiple Java applications (classes with a public static void main) to be executed concurrently in the same JVM. Implementing JSR 121 inside OpenJDK is clearly outside the scope of Debian but even in the presence of a JVM with isolation capabilities, there is plenty of system-specific work that needs to be tackled (what happens with /usr/bin/java? it is really system-wide or user-specific? how "well behaved" do the applications need to be?). In this talk, we will summarize relevant bits of project Barcelona's ample list of publications and focus on simple, JSR 121-alike simulations to show what can we expect from having this technology incorporated into Debian. The hope is that we can spearhead the use of isolates within GNU/Linux systems so as to contribute back this knowledge to other distros. [1] http://research.sun.com/projects/barcelona/ [2] http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr121/index.html Pablo Ariel Duboue Project Barcelona JSR 121 17:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Java lecture en Extending the modularity of Free Java to match Debian. Debian took us out of dependency hell. Sun liberated Java and the community packaged OpenJDK for Debian. The Jigsaw project of OpenJDK aims to take us out of the JAR hell that is imposed by the JVM and associated baggage. And this lecture is an update on efforts to use Jigsaw to match the Java module dependency graph to the Debian package dependency graph for a more intimate, and appropriate, matching of Java to GNU/Linux. Why is solving this puzzle important? Because many Java applications don't need things like CORBA, SNMP and XML which currently are part of every Java Runtime Environment. Those applications should not have to pay the price in terms of slower startup time, greater memory footprint and larger (dependent) package space. The Free Software world needs Java to tease apart component modules so that applications can be appropriately refactored and maintained individually. The immediate performance gains will be complemented by a mature evolution of Java applications (based on dependent components -- as other programming languages are packaged in Debian) and by improvements in the ability to address security (finally we will be able to fix a Java bugs in the one responsible package). Come learn about Jigsaw in Debian and possible futures for this modular JDK: such as opportunistic module loading in alternate languages on top of the JVM such as Groovy and Clojure. Tom Marble Tom Marble on identi.ca Tom Marble on LinkedIn Project Jigsaw video (not available yet) Jigsaw Presentation (older) The Free Java Jigsaw Puzzle SLIDES 21:00 02:00 Other Location Evening and Social other This is the now traditional Cheese and Wine party of Debconf. As usual, things are simple: people do their best to bring cheese, wine and other beverages from all around the world, and share them. USA food import regulations may make this a little bit tricky, this time. But nothing that can really stop motivated geeks, right? The Cheese and Wine party will take plane in the Havemeyer 7th floor lounge. (http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/havemeyer.html). Turn right upon entering (east) and take the elevator to the 7th floor. Christian Perrier 09:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en Freedom and privacy are endangered in the cloud, but we can save them. In this, the second part of my analysis of Freedom in the Cloud[0], I show how the Debian community can play the central role in changing the future of Net, again. Contact: press@softwarefreedom.org Software Freedom Law Center[1] (Abbreviated) Bio and link to a full version on the SFLC website[2] Eben Moglen is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center[3]. Since 1993 he has served pro bono publico as General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. He was awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 2003 Pioneer Award for contribution to freedom in the electronic society. Further writings by Eben are available online[4]. Eben Moglen Freedom in the Cloud Eben Moglen Software Freedom Law Center Eben Moglen's writings 10:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium en The graphics stack has once again seen massive changes in squeeze. After going for auto-configuration in lenny, squeeze introduces kernel mode setting. The input subsystem was not left alone, with support for device hotplug and multi-pointer X. This talk will cover what's new in X in squeeze, what that means for the Debian packaging, and what we can expect in the future. Cyril Brulebois Julien Cristau 11:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium How empirical research can help Debian maintainers with license compliance lecture en In this presentation I'll describe some of the major issues affecting both free software developers and Debian package maintainers, and some results that we believe can improve the license compliance of both packages and distributions, such as Debian. One of the major accomplishments of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is the specialization of software packages and their relatively easy integration into complex products. One of the major challenges of this integration is the legal issues derived from the existence (and proliferation) of free and open source licenses. In this presentation I will describe current empirical research we have performed in the study of the challenges and problems faced by developers and, particularly integrators of FOSS (such as Debian). In particular, I'll describe some of the issues regarding: - The change of licensing of some packages (eg. an upgrade to newer license), and how that affects the ability of other packages to depend on them, and why package maintainers should be aware of it. - The challenges of creating automatic (or semiautomatic) tools for licensing analysis of dependencies. - A proposal to create binary packages with a single license, whenever possible, and to unify the way licenses of Debian packages are described. - I will also describe some of the efforts around the standardisation of licensing data, such as those spearheaded by Fossbazaar. I will also present Ninka, a lightweight sentence-based license identification tool, released under the GPLv2+. This presentation is based on research my research group, and colleagues have been performing in the area of software licensing. This includes: (most of these papers are available at http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/papers/ - A sentence-matching method for automatic license identification of source code files by D.M. German, Y. Manabe and K. Inoue. Under review. - Di Penta M., German, D., Gueheneuc Y. and Antoniol, G "Tracking the Evolution of Software Licensing: An Empirical Study", International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2010) - Di Penta M., German, D. and Antoniol, G. "Identifying Licensing of Jar Archives using a Code-Search Approach", International Working Conference in Mining Software Repositories, (MSR 2010). Pages 86–89. - German D., Di Penta M. and Davies J. "Understanding and Auditing the Licensing of Open Source Software Distributions", International Conference in Program Comprehension (ICPC 2010) To be presented. - Di Penta, Massimiliano and German, Daniel M. Who are Source Code Contributors and How do they Change?, in Proc. 14th Working Conf. on Reverse Engineering, pp. 11-20, 2009. - German, D., Di Penta M., Gueheneuc Y. and Antoniol, G ``Code Siblings: Technical and Legal Implications'', 6th International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2009), May 2009. - German, D.M., and Hassan, A. "License Integration Patterns: Dealing with Licenses Mismatches in Component-Based Development", International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE) 2009, May 2009. - Robles, G., J.M. Gonzalez-Barahona, J.J. Amor, M. Michlmayr, and D.M. German, "Macro-level software evolution: a case study of a large software compilation" Extended version of Best Paper Award at MSR 2006. Journal of Empirical Software Engineering, Vol. 14, No. 3. (1 June 2009), pp. 262-285. About myself: I am associate professor of computer science at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia Canada. My main research areas are software licensing, free and open source software engineering, and software evalution. A complete list of my papers can be found at: http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/papers I have been a user and authors of free software for more than 13 years. I currently maintain libpano (panotools.sourceforge.net) a package currently in Debian, and participate in many other free software projects as a contributor. Daniel German Daniel M German Our research papers in the area of software licensing http:// 14:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en In this talk, I will discuss the use of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to analyze Debian mailing lists in order to discover political, social, and technical patterns that could be used to inform project decisions. I will concentrate on a class of techniques known as statistical topic models, which automatically infer groups of semantically-related words, known as topics, from word co-occurrence patterns in documents. The resultant topics can then be used to detect emergent areas of technical activity, identify subcommunities, and track trends over time. In addition to providing a brief overview of statistical topic models and their application to Debian mailing list data, I will present examples of topics inferred from Debian mailing lists, as well as some preliminary political, social, and technical findings discovered via these topics. In this talk, I will discuss the use of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to analyze Debian mailing lists in order to discover political, social, and technical patterns that could be used to inform project decisions. I will concentrate on a class of techniques known as statistical topic models, which automatically infer groups of semantically-related words, known as topics, from word co-occurrence patterns in documents. The resultant topics can then be used to detect emergent areas of technical activity, identify subcommunities, and track trends over time. In addition to providing a brief overview of statistical topic models and their application to Debian mailing list data, I will present examples of topics inferred from Debian mailing lists, as well as some preliminary political, social, and technical findings discovered via these topics. Hanna Wallach is a senior postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she develops machine learning techniques for identifying and answering social science questions. In her not-so-spare time, Hanna used to maintain some Debian packages and has run several projects that encourage and promote women's involvement in free software development -- most notably Debian Women, with Erinn Clark and Helen Faulkner. Hanna Wallach 15:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium What is this FreeBSD thing anyway? lecture en This talk briefly introduces the history and the goals of the FreeBSD Project and its development model. For most of the history of the FreeBSD Project, FreeBSD was "the" distribution. In recent years, a number of people have taken on the task of taking the FreeBSD operating system, or in the case of Debian only the kernel, and making it part of a different project. The FreeBSD Project encourages these endeavors and is pleased to see exposure to new environments. Debian/kFreeBSD is unique in the FreeBSD distribution "ecosystem" in that it takes only the kernel and replaces the entire userspace, this poses some interesting new problems that we have not seen in the past but also brings new opportunities. tbd Philip Paeps 16:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium GNU SIP Witch and peer-to-peer secure telephony lecture en The GNU Telephony secure calling project, built around GNU SIP Witch and the GNU ZRTP stack, offers the means for anyone to create and deploy network scalable and secure peer-to-peer VoIP collaboration solutions to enable privacy without the need for a central service provider, undocumented protocols, or proprietary software to achieve these goals. Our overall vision is to facilitate both solutions that are privately built, such as for organizations that wish to have secure communication as a foundation, and especially which can be autonomously assembled bottom-up directly by users over the public Internet as a full public alternative to Skype, using only free software and that depends purely on existing DNS for user lookup, rather than requiring a mediating service provider. To be added... David Alexander Sugar 17:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium or building blocks to design a system that will make your network administrators very nervous lecture en Networking is still very much a domain in which big proprietary computing equipments dominate. The Linux kernel, though, has some very neat networking features, and is increasingly being used to replace those systems with something more open and more adaptable to "strange" needs. During this talk we will explore some less-known Linux networking features, such as NBMA networks over unbound GRE tunnels, policy routing, or anycast that will allow systems administrators to take control of the network, and even sometimes make something slightly crazy with it, and make some of those networking people, who only trust those closed machines on which they're certified, a bit (or a lot) nervous. Guido Trotter Slides http:// 15:00 01:00 414 Schapiro Open discussion of bug resolution in Debian bof Open discussion about possible improvements and current issues with http://bugs.debian.org Don Armstrong 16:00 01:00 414 Schapiro Learning about and building hobby rockets to fly on the weekend... Ad Hoc workshop en http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/RocketLaunch As promised in the wiki page at http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/RocketLaunch, Bdale and Keith have brought rocket kits that need to be assembled and decorated, and various electronic bits to fly in them... see http://altusmetrum.org for more details. This session will including bits of presentation about what's going on, group construction of rocket kits, and discussion of logistics for joining the METRA rocket launch in rural New York state on the weekend. Keith Packard Bdale Garbee Wiki Page about Rocket Launch Bdale and Keith's Rocket Electronics Site 17:00 01:00 414 Schapiro Users and Maintainers of R and its related packages in Debian Meet and Greet bof en R is the GNU clone of S, and is heavily used in statistics and multiple scientific disciplines. Discussion about maintenance, packaging, and usage coupled with meeting others who use R. Don Armstrong 10:30 01:00 Interschool Lab How enterprise technologies such as Kerberos, LDAP, Samba, etc can work better together in Debian Enterprise bof en A BOF to explore enterprise infrastructure software such as LDAP, Kerberos, Samba etc and how these packages can work better together to make Debian be a better building block for groups of computers Debian does a really great job of integrating packages within a single system. It also packages a lot of the enterprise software that you'd want to cause a Debian system to be part of an enterprise infrastructure. However, Debian is not so great at integrating a computer into a larger infrastructure. Certainly we do that with Debian all the time, and there are even tools to help build solutions--debconf databases, parts of d-i, fai,puppet, parts of samba, etc, etc. However it's nothing like Windows in its simplicity. This BOF discusses how these enterprise infrastructure packages can work together to create a better user experience. We will also explore ways in which the cross-package integration that makes using a single Debian system so successful can serve as a model for longer-term solutions to the problem of building infrastructure out of Debian. Sam Hartman 11:30 01:00 Interschool Lab Group discussion of using puppet to manage systems Enterprise bof en From the puppet upstream site, "Puppet is an open source data center automation and configuration management framework. Puppet provides system administrators with a simplified platform that allows for consistent, transparent, and flexible systems management." We will discuss using puppet on Debian, the state of puppet and related packages in Debian, and share best practices and puppet modules. Puppet Birds of a Feather session. All levels of puppet users and developers are welcome. We plan to * share information about the environments we're using puppet to manage * discuss the services we have puppet manage * share locations for puppet module code we are using * discuss the state of puppet in debian and related packages and add ons * ask and answer questions about puppet * hack on puppet modules to make them easier to share and more robust NOTE: users of Chef and other large installation management tools are welcome as long as they promise to sit quietly and not heckle people :) Matt Taggart Puppet Upstream http:// 14:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Stanford University: A Case Study Enterprise lecture en A discussion of Debian as the server platform of choice for enterprise-wide infrastructure, using Stanford University as a case study. Topics covered will include packaging and package modification for site-specific needs, challenges in packaging software for local deployment, repository management and local documentation issues, and ways that Debian can better support this use case. Stanford University has used Debian as its preferred operating system for all central campus UNIX infrastructure since migrating from Solaris to Debian sarge, currently with only a few rare exceptions. This includes authentication infrastructure (Kerberos, WebAuth, Shibboleth), directory services (OpenLDAP), network file systems (AFS), and most of the mail system (Postfix, Cyrus IMAP), as well as many other services both developed at Stanford and developed elsewhere. This talk will discuss the advantages and challenges for Debian as the underlying operating system, packaging environment, and distribution for this use case, using Stanford University as a case study. Discussion will include the challenges of training staff on packaging, requirements around packaging software for local deployment, the frequency of package forking for local needs, the infrastructure required to maintain a layer of local packages and forks on top of Debian, and some discussion of the places where Debian could do better. Russ Allbery 15:00 01:00 Interschool Lab using GOsa and FAI Enterprise lecture en Fully Automatic Installation (FAI) is a well-known project to automatically install multiple machines using Debian. Those machines can further be kept uptodate via the "softupdate" mechanism. This has been proven very successful for big cluster installation at acedemic institutions where the adminstrators have a good Linux/Unix background. However, for small/medium business or smaller acedemic work groups, FAI might be to obscure or difficult to setup. The GOsa project provides an LDAP-based web administration tool to install, configure and administrate machines via FAI. GOsa makes furthermore possible to administrate users and groups via the same LDAP backend, and to some extent user sessions. This makes it possible for people who are no specialists to administrate smaller sets of users and machines via a centralized web frontend. This talk will present FAI and GOsa and explain how they work together and what is needed to install and adminstrate Debian machines via GOsa/FAI. Michael Banck 16:00 01:00 Interschool Lab a case study in the Greek Research and Technology services and the use of Debian Enterprise lecture en The talk will describe the services that the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) provides to its customers in the Greek academic community, with a target group of hundred of thousands of users. It will focus on the challenges faced when providing these services and the almost exclusive use of Debian to solve those. GRNET offers a multitide of services to its customers, both on the Internet and computing fronts, on a multi-vendor environment. Over two hundred physical servers and twice as that on virtual servers are being operated by a handful of people, all but few running Debian. Topics that will be mentioned are ranging from networking monitoring and identity to virtualization and cloud. The use and integration of multiple free software components on a Debian platform to accomplish those will be described along with a focus on high availability and automation of system administration tasks out of necessity and the ways and tools (e.g. d-i, puppet, Ganeti) to accomplish that. Faidon Liambotis is on the Server & Services team of the Greek Research and Technology Network's Network Operations Center. He is also a Debian Developer. Faidon Liambotis 17:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Free Software as a Platform for a New Technology Enterprise lecture en The world is filled with consumer and web-focused federated authentication solutions. However as federations grow to hundreds of identity providers, enterprises begin to see strain of the current design. Moonshot combines four key security technologies (EAP, SAML, RADIUS and GSS-API) to address these scaling challenges and to bring federation to any software, not just the web browser. This talk describes the Moonshot technology as well as the ongoing community-driven free-software effort to realize the technology. One key focus is the role of Debian in particular and distributions in general in driving coherent technology evolution. The world is filled with consumer and web-focused federated authentication solutions. However as federations grow to hundreds of identity providers, enterprises begin to see strain of the current design. Moonshot combines four key security technologies (EAP, SAML, RADIUS and GSS-API) to address these scaling challenges and to bring federation to any software, not just the web browser. This talk describes the Moonshot technology as well as the ongoing community-driven free-software effort to realize the technology. One key focus is the role of Debian in particular and distributions in general in driving coherent technology evolution. Sam Hartman 19:30 01:30 Other Location An Artist Tries the Free Software Way and Wins Big (in Pupin 301, NW corner of campus, next to Shapiro) Evening and Social movie en "Sita Sings the Blues" is a popular film released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The filmmaker, Nina Paley, consciously chose a Free license in order to achieve the same dynamics for her film as software has in the free software world, and she succeeded. By the end of 2009, "Sita Sings the Blues" was the best-reviewed new release in the country (http://moviereviewintelligence.com/index.aspx?BID=27&RID=805&CID=0) and audiences love it. We will hold a talk afterwards with the filmmaker and myself (Nina Paley is now artist-in-residence at our non-profit QuestionCopyright.org, and we helped her do the free release), both answering questions from the audience and talking about how free software methods can work for artists in general. In late 2008, acclaimed animator Nina Paley had a copyright problem. She'd completed a brilliant, feature-length animated film, "Sita Sings the Blues", and it was a huge hit at festival screenings -- but she couldn't distribute it, because it used recordings of jazz songs from the late 1920s. Although the recordings were in the public domain, the compositions (the songs themselves) were not, and the corporations that held the copyrights to these 80-year-old songs wanted $220,000.00 USD in licensing fees to allow Paley to distribute the film. She negotiated them down to $50,000.00 and paid it, but the experience caused her to question the wisdom of monopolies in the arts. She decided that having made her film legal for her to distribute, she'd make it legal for everyone to distribute. She released it under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, and then, working with the non-profit QuestionCopyright.org (where she is now Artist-in-Residence), she developed an economic model that allows the audience to support her: * Encourage people to share the film freely; * Sell endorsed DVDs and other merchandise, showing how much money goes to the author; * Make it easy to get involved (e.g., the subtitles on the endorsed DVD were done by fans) * Make it easy to donate too; * Allow commercial use (e.g., screenings) without requiring anyone to ask permission first; * Use non-exclusive distributor arrangements to get the film into theaters; * Encourage remixes and creative re-use. All of these have direct parallels in free software, and that's no accident: Paley consciously adopted the methods of the free software movement to distribute the film. Our talk after the screening will explain in depth how and why, and discuss what Paley and QuestionCopyright.org are doing next to encourage more artists to try the Free route. Meanwhile, "Sita Sings the Blues" continues to spread over the Internet and in theaters. By the end of 2009 it had not only become the best reviewed new release in the country (http://moviereviewintelligence.com/index.aspx?BID=27&RID=805&CID=0), it had brought in more money for Paley than any distributor had offered for a traditional, monopoly-based arrangement. Unlike in a "burst-and-fade" distribution model, it keeps going for as long as audiences want, because they own it too. Nina Paley Karl Fogel 16:00 01:00 477 CSB Discuss common issues among derivatives, particularly with respect to cooperating with Debian itself Ad Hoc bof Debian provides a base for many derivative distributions. These distributions are often run as distinct projects with their own goals, but are nonetheless closely tied to Debian and depend on it in order to thrive. Many of them face similar challenges in building on, tracking and coordinating work with Debian itself. The purpose of this BoF is to share experiences among derivatives, identify common challenges and generate ideas for how to work better together with Debian. Matt Zimmerman 09:00 13:00 Other Location sun! sand! food! rides! other We will all be going to Coney Island for fun and adventure. Explore historic Brighton Beach! Ride the Cyclone rollercoaster! Swim in the ocean! See the circus sideshow! Enjoy a baseball game! Fly kites! Eat food! Play Frisbee! Or do none of the above and just hang out with your friends outside and have a good time. Clint Adams 09:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium How Debian can utilize the FOSSology software analysis framework lecture en The FOSSology Project is a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) project built around an open and modular architecture for analyzing software. Existing modules include license and copyright analysis, package analysis, meta data extraction, and MIME type identification. Presented will be an overview of how the FOSSology framework works, how Debian can benefit from it and participate in the project, and a short demonstration of FOSSology analysis of Debian. This talk may especially interest Debian package maintainers and members of the ftpmaster, legal, and QA teams. Matt Taggart FOSSology Upstream Site http:// 10:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium Community Outreach lecture en This talk provides a humorous description of an argument in favor of Debian, and free software more generally, based on what I call "antifeatures:" functionality that users hate and that technology developers will often charge users to not include. From DRM to crippled non-free operating systems to digital cameras, I will show off many of the worst antifeatures and, describe how Debian and free software both makes them impossible and helps users work around them. This talk provides a humorous description of an argument in favor of Debian, and free software more generally, based on what I call "antifeatures:" functionality that users hate and that technology developers will often charge users to not include. From DRM to crippled non-free operating systems to digital cameras, I will show off many of the worst antifeatures and, describe how Debian and free software both makes them impossible and helps users work around them. Benjamin Mako Hill Links to video of previous version. 11:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium Crash-test-virtual-machines lecture en A common problem in any complex computational environments are stale instructions. Software systems change but their related instructions are left unmodified. This problem is made further complicated in Debian by the large number of human languages supported by the project. Branavan et al. (2009) describe an automated way to translate human, textual instructions into executable actions. [1] Their approach involves reinforcement learning with no human intervention, by probing alternative interpretations of the instructional text in a virtual machine. The computer learns which different actions (such as "choose third option from the menu") correspond to different English words in the instructions. Their system also learns how to re-order instructions (as text presentation doesn't necessarily imply execution order, e.g. "click done after selecting /dev/usb"). They are also making their code available (targeted towards a MS Windows VM). [2] In this talk, I will sketch their approach, show a prototype of a Debian-adapted system and seek out collaborators to put this technology to use in different parts of the project, especially in d-i and i18n. [1] Reinforcement Learning for Mapping Instructions to Actions ACL 2009 [Best paper award] S.R.K. Branavan, Harr Chen, Luke Zettlemoyer, Regina Barzilay. <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/branavan/papers/acl2009.pdf">http://people.csail.mit.edu/branavan/papers/acl2009.pdf</a> [2] <a href="http://groups.csail.mit.edu/rbg/code/rl/">http://groups.csail.mit.edu/rbg/code/rl/</a> Pablo Ariel Duboue Reinforcement Learning for Mapping Instructions to Actions ACL 2009 [Best paper award] S.R.K. Branavan, Harr Chen, Luke Zettlemoyer, Regina Barzilay. code 14:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium How software patents broke the system movie en "Patent Absurdity: How software patents broke the system" explores the case of software patents, the history of judicial activism that led to their rise, and the harm being done to software developers and the wider economy. The film, directed by independent filmmaker Luca Lucarini and funded by a grant from the Free Software Foundation, is based on a series of interviews conducted during the Supreme Court's review of in re Bilski, a case that could have profound implications for the patenting of software. The film was produced and edited using free software tools on GNU/Linux, and is being distributed in the free Ogg Theora format. I had a part in its creation as part of my work at the FSF, and could be available to answer questions and give some background both about the process behind the film and an update on the work of the FSF's End Software Patents campaign. The Bilski decision should have come down by the time Debconf happens, so there should be much to talk about with regard to what the outcome means for patents, free software, and Debian. The film is about 30 minutes long. John Sullivan http://patentabsurdity.com http:// 15:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium A look at the enterprise class distribution combining the power of OpenSolaris with the usability of GNU The Nexenta project started in 2005 as a port of Ubuntu LTS (Dapper Drake 6.06) to OpenSolaris. It is now the most popular non-Sun distribution based on OpenSolaris. It also forms the basis of multiple community and commercial distributions. This talk traces the history of the Nexenta project, it's relationship with the Debian project, and the opportunities for collaboration. The Nexenta project started in 2005 as a port of Ubuntu Edgy Eft to OpenSolaris. It is now the most popular non-Sun distribution based on OpenSolaris. It also forms the basis of multiple community and commercial distributions. This talk traces the history of the Nexenta project, it's relationship with the Debian project, and the opportunities for collaboration. The talk is divided into the following parts: (Non technical) * History of the project : Traces the project to it's current state. Talks about milestones, community, and the statistics reached. (Technical) * How does Nexenta project combine OpenSolaris with GNU/dpkg/apt - integration of apt packaging system, and challenges faced. * Changes/modifications made to existing Debian tools * Additional tools written - apt-clone: how Nexenta provides worry free upgrades. * Advantages OpenSolaris beings to the table * How the OpenSolaris kernel and packages are built * The Devzone and Autobuilder projects - Easy provisioning of developer zones on Nexenta - Nexenta's autobuilder - building 8000 packages in a month on 2 nodes. (Non technical) * History with the Debian project : Traces previous discussions with the Debian community, and the results. Will tackle the concerns raised by the developers, and talks about the existing collaboration that exists * Current possiblities for collaboration: Can we get over some of the existing challenges, and work more closer * Official Port: Nexenta project is interested in working towards becoming an additional kernel provided by the Debian project. This is mutually beneficial to both projects. Will discuss the main challenges faced, and thoughts on tackline these. Anil Gulecha 16:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium Maintaining Debian packages in Git tutorial en A distributed version control system like Git can ease common packaging tasks like importing new upstream versions or backporting. The tutorial will give an introduction into maintaining Debian packages in Git supported by the tools from git-buildpackage. Git-buildpackage is one of many packages in Debian that help with maintaining and developing Debian packages in a version control system (VCS). In this case Git is used as underlying VCS. The tools provided help with importing Debian packages and new upstream versions, cloning and updating from remote repositories and patch management. The talk uses real life examples to show how this works. Guido Günther Git-buildpackage Slides of talk 17:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en This talk will provide an overview of the current state of Linux live systems. How do the various ways to boot a live system work and which ways exist? Which ways exist to build a live system and what steps are involved? Where are chances for improvement and what's needed for the future of live systems? What is Grml and its unit testing framework and how could it be used for Q/A stuff within Debian? The main challenges for Linux live systems 5-10 years back were mainly about hardware recognition. Nowadays udev and the kernel itself do most of what's needed and developers of Linux live systems can concentrate on the main purposes of the live system. Today there are more than 125 Debian based (meta-)distributions[1] and several of them have a live system (or even exclusively just provide it as a live system). One of them is Grml[2], which is an Open Source live system specialised for system administrators. The first release of Grml dates back in 2004. Currently the Grml project is working towards a unit test framework which allows automated Q/A testing for a live ystem. Runing within the live system it provides developers who work on low level stuff like partitioning, installers,... with the necessary tools to test their software. Besides presenting the unit test framework which might be of interest to Debian(-live) developers, the author of the talk wants to address the following topics: * What's possible with todays bootloaders (isolinux/syslinux/grub2)? * How do the various ways to boot a live system work and which ways exist? * Which ways exist to build a live system and what steps are involved? * Which live system focused teams exist and how do they coorporate? Which problems do they have to face with? * Where are chances for improvement and what's needed for the future? [1] http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=independence [2] http://grml.org/ Michael Prokop Grml Project Slides of the Talk (PDF) 09:30 01:00 414 Schapiro bof en Discussion about #debian (and maybe #debian-devel) channel operation. What to do about non-english channels, what should be considered on- and off-topic, and how strict to enforce it, etc. Michael Banck 11:30 01:00 414 Schapiro Federated avatar hosting Ad Hoc lecture en Introducing a new project to provide an open and federated alternative to the centralized Gravatar avatar hosting service. As more and more computing moves into someone else's data center (i.e. the Cloud), users and companies are losing direct control over their data and processes. The risks they used to be able to mitigate by using Free and Open Source software are starting to become apparent. So what can be done to continue to enjoy the software freedom that we have come to appreciate in the desktop computing world? Just like the task of building a completely FOSS operating system in the 1980s looked like an impossible dream, having a completely free online life appears to be quite a big task. Thankfully, many people are now tackling this problem and starting to build freedom-respecting options, one service at a time. This talk will introduce Libravatar, a Django-based project to provide a federated alternative to the Gravatar profile image hosting service, a centralized web service used by a very large number of social sites around the world. While Libravatar looks like a fairly simple service, there are a number of challenges in implementing a Gravatar-compatible API in a highly scalable way. The naive webapp approach will not handle the amount of traffic that Gravatar is subject to every hour and a number of technical tricks are necessary. These topics will be touched on - domain-based federation - scalability - space optimization - security - compatibility with Gravatar - free culture extensions Francois Marier Homepage 14:00 01:00 414 Schapiro bof en Discussion of the current status of Lintian, the current Lintian architecture, desired future architectural and testing changes, and how you can help. Lintian is increasing in importance as a core QA tool for the Debian archive now that package uploads can be automatically rejected based on Lintian results. Its architecture has also seen significant improvements in the past year, with additional significant improvements planned. And there is always the never-ending flood of new possible tags, new types of analysis, and new issues that Lintian can help with. This BoF is for anyone interested in knowing more about the Lintian architecture, the current maintenance strategy, or Lintian's current and future capabilities. Possible topics of discussion include architectural issues and changes, documentation, the new Lintian test suite mechanism, desired tags, and how you can contribute. Russ Allbery lintian.debian.org Lintian team 15:00 01:00 414 Schapiro bof en Notmuch is a mail indexer and user agent by Carl Worth that seems to have caught the fancy of several "Debian people". We will talk about and/or hack on prioritizing existing patches for the next release, identifying missing functionality and nailing down the design of some of the more complex proposed features like better maildir integration, synchronization (including ideas like tag logs). It could also be useful to brainstorm about our patch management process and in general whether technical or social improvements could be made to the development process. Notmuch is a mail indexer and user agent by Carl Worth that seems to have caught the fancy of several "Debian people". It could be fun and productive to talk about and/or hack on prioritizing existing patches for the next release, identifying missing functionality and nailing down the design of some of the more complex proposed features like better maildir integration, synchronization (including ideas like tag logs). It could also be useful to brainstorm about our patch management process and whether technical or social improvements could be made. Carl hopes he can make it, but this description is totally my fault. David Bremner 16:00 01:00 414 Schapiro bof Year in, year out we use a similar process to chose which attendees to give money to help offset travel expenses. There is always discussion about improving the process but when the time comes it is very difficult to do it plus improve. Let's start a year earlier this time! Anybody that helped rank people this year or previous year is expected to attend this meeting. People who requested travel sponsorship are also welcomed as their feedback about the process will also enrich the discussion. Pablo Ariel Duboue 17:00 01:00 414 Schapiro What variability management can do for Debian Maintainers Ad Hoc bof en Reinhard Tartler 09:30 01:00 Interschool Lab bof en A discussion about what needs to be done for Debian to adopt the Upstart replacement init system Scott James Remnant 10:30 01:00 Interschool Lab Tell us about your DC12 proposal plans. podium en Gunnar Wolf Jimmy Kaplowitz 11:30 01:00 Interschool Lab Science bof en An open discussion about how to make Debian a better system for mathematicians. Mathematical software is software that is useful to people doing mathematics. Examples include: computer algebra packages; interactive geometry software (e.g. kig); specialized software for e.g. graph isomorphism. For much of mathematics, exact or verifiable computation is an important feature, so packages like GMP are crucial. Natural questions to discuss include what we are doing well, what we could do better, and how could we cooperate more effectively both with each other and with mathematician upstream developers. This is a bit more more specialized spinoff of the Debian Science round table. I'd like to talk about how to make Debian a better system for mathematicians. Mathematical software is software that is useful to people doing mathematics. Examples include: computer algebra packages; interactive geometry software (e.g. kig); specialized software for e.g. graph isomorphism. From my point of view, exact or verifiable computation is an important feature, so packages like GMP are crucial. I think there are quite a few of us working on software like this either as packagers or as upstreams, and it would be good to get together and chat about what we are doing well, what we could do better, and maybe how we could cooperate more effectively both with each other and with mathematician upstream developers. David Bremner 14:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Science lecture en Debian is a reference in the scientific world. This distribution provides a wide range of scientific software and many fields. While some specific teams existed (Debichem, Deb Med, pkg-scicomp...), there was no generic Science Team. However, helped with Debian Pure Blend, a general Debian Science team started almost two years ago. The goal of this presentation is to present the team and its past and ongoing actions and its work on various subjects like MPI management or the improvement of the linear algebra libraries system. Sylvestre Ledru David Bremner Debian Science QA Wiki page of Debian Science Debian Science Mailing List Debian Science Maintaineres Mailing List Debian Science project 15:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Science lecture en Over the past decade the neuroimaging research community has fortunately converged on the open source software development model, with the vast majority of all widely used applications and libraries being available as source code, and a substantial proportion covered by free software licenses. Today, there exists a large code base for data collection (e.g. behavioral psychological experiments), data analysis (e.g. of functional magnetic resonance imaging; fMRI), and data visualization that is productively used in everyday research activities. A representative list of available tools is provided on the NITRC portal [0]. Initially, most of these tools were mere by-products of actual neuroscience research projects, developed by students, and scholars who are, in general, not trained software engineers. As a result, software development in this field still differs significantly from established good practices in the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Many projects start without a clear deployment or management concept, and due to lack of man-power are later on forced into an \textit{ivory tower development} model -- restricting the ``supported'' environment as an attempt to reduce the required maintenance effort. They try to decouple themselves from ongoing developments and include specific versions of all external dependencies into their source distributions. The result is too often a fork that is no longer updated with bugfixes or enhancements. Many useful projects die because it becomes too expensive to update them. However, it is hard to blame the respective developers, because the sheer number of existing combinations of operating systems, hardware, and library versions makes it almost impossible to verify that a particular software is working as intended. Restricting the ``supported'' runtime environment is one approach of making verification efforts feasible. On the other hand, development in the free software community sometimes proceeds at an enormous pace, and many projects do frequent releases with sometimes backward-incompatible changes. Forcing a dependency on an outdated release shifts the burden of maintenance and deployment onto users, as it gets increasingly difficult to have older releases available. On the other hand, continuously updating software to the latest developments is a time-consuming task for which there is no immediate scientific benefit. I will argue that Debian is the ideal solution to this problem. This talk will provide an overview of current projects and individual efforts within Debian that help researchers to maintain a fully-functional Debian-based environment for neuroscience research with minimal effort (e.g. Debian Med, Debian Science). Moreover, it introduces NeuroDebian [1] -- a platform specifically targeting the neuroscience community. I'm going to show several case examples of packaging efforts that illustrate typical problems, such as non-commercial/non-standard licenses, non-existing upstream bugtracker and unavailable version control systems. Furthermore, I will offer some evidence that a substantial migration towards Debian is already under way. Popularity statistics and personal communication indicates that a growing number of researchers see it as 1) making neuroscience software (e.g. for medical imaging) accessible to a larger user-base, and reducing the required maintenance effort on the user side, 2) improving software quality, and 3) enabling developers to spend more time on developing new scientifically relevant features. The talk will conclude with thoughts on what Debian could do to further facilitate its adoption as the ultimate platform for scientific research, such as tailored guidelines for deployment and project management, possibility to run complete regression test suites, as well as reliable usage statistics to justify funding project funding. [0] http://www.nitrc.org [1] http://neuro.debian.net The task aims to present Debian from two perspectives: 1. neuroscience researchers and 2. software developers in neuroscience research. Michael Hanke Yaroslav O. Halchenko Conference poster about Debian in neuroscience NeuroDebian repository Neuroimaging software portal Debian Med: Imaging task Debian Science: Cognitive Neuroscience task 16:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Science lecture This event will compile short presentations of new developments in basic scientific libraries/packages, or major changes in them. Please contact mbanck@debian.org if you want to take part in this event. This slot has three mini-talks about: MPI packaging (Adam C. Powell, IV) Linear Algebra Libraries packaging (Sylvestre Ledru) Citation/Reference infrastructure (Yaroslav Halchenko) Adam C. Powell, IV Sylvestre Ledru Yaroslav O. Halchenko Linear Algebra presentation - Sylvestre Ledru 17:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Science podium en Scientific communities are a big part of Debian's ecosystem and one of the original driving forces of Debian and Free Software in general. This round table will bring together the leaders of the respective communities (physics, biology, chemistry, biochemistry, maths, engineering, ...). One long-standing issue is the fragmentation between the pkg-scicomp and debian-science Alioth projects. Other agenda items will be discussed prior to Debconf (and this abstract be updated). Contact mbanck@debian.org if you want to participate as panel member in this event (everybody can participate in the audience). David Bremner Hanna Ollila Adam C. Powell, IV Michael Banck Sylvestre Ledru 17:30 03:30 Other Location Evening and Social other Some people among DebConf attendees like running. This year, having DebConf in a big city opens new opportunities to those of us who like to have a break for their fingers and thus move their legs instead. On Thursday August 5th 7pm, a local group of runners (the Van Cortlandt Track Club) is organizgin one of its X-C Summer Series 5 kilometers cross-country races. The race location is in Bronx, in Van Cortlandt Park. More information can be found on the [Van Cortlandt Track Club website]. Some of us will join there and participate to this race. Everybody who enjoys running can join in: there's nothing extra high level in this race which apparently gathers all kind of runners already. So, don't be shy: even very occasionnal runners can make it and share some good time with local runners and fellow DebConf attendees. The race registration fee is quite low (USD 5.-) and no pre-registration is needed, though having a good idea of who is participating would be good. PLEASE COME WITH DC10 T-SHIRTS! The race start map is mentioned on [Van Cortlandt Track Club website]. It is very easy to access from Columbia by going through subway line 1 up to the end (Van Cortlandt Park 242th st). The subway station closest to DebConf venue is "116th St Columbia University" on this very same line #1. So going to the race is just going through line #1 to the North up to the end of the line. When reaching 242th st station, exit the station to the right (eastwards), on the parkside of the street and walk north until you see the runners who gather close to a statue of a tortoise and a rabbit. We'll group travel to the race location. Meet at 17:30 in front of Carman building. You can come with your running clothes on, a small bag or backpack with other clothes, or the opposite. There will be a place to leave your stuff at the race start (avoid leaving valuables in bags, though). Christian will be carrying his running belt for those of you folks who would like to have some important stuff kept safely. Christian Perrier Van Cortland Trac Club Summer Series 09:30 01:00 477 CSB Ad Hoc bof en What is Virtualization? Why Virtualize? Which virtualization technology should I use? Benefits of virtualization Pitfalls of virtualization These topics and more will be discussed in this session. Many computing resources are not used to their full potential and sit idle for much of the time. By using virtualization, you can increase the utilization of these computing resources. Michael Schultheiss 10:30 01:00 477 CSB bof en There are a couple of batch queuing systems in Debian or as prospective packages - Gridengine, Torque and others. However, it seems the number of people willing to maintain them is quite small among all of them. This BoF will try to get the present maintainers/prospective maintainers of batch queuing in one room and discuss the way forward - e.g. should we pick one queuing system and concentrate efforts for it? Does it make sense to standardize on some policies among them? Michael Banck 19:30 01:00 477 CSB Ad Hoc other Daniel Baumann 09:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en Adam D. Barratt Felipe Augusto van de Wiel Mehdi Dogguy Philipp Kern 10:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium ... and its application to the plethora of Debian package managers lecture en All distributions use some kind of meta-data describing relationships between packages such as Dependencies, Conflicts, Virtual Packages, etc. Existing package managers are often specific to a packaging format, or even use implicit assumptions on the meaning of package relations in the context of a distribution. This talk addresses the issue of how we can overcome this seclusion by resolving inter-package relations in a way that is independent from a specific distribution. We will present CUDF (Common Upgradeability Description Format) which permits to encode upgrade scenarios coming from different packaging systems, including in particular .deb-based and .rpm-based distributions. The format comes with a clear semantics which makes it possible to share resolution tools among distributions, and to adapt general-purpose solvers to the needs of FLOSS distributions. We also show how, in the context of the Mancoosi project, we are using the CUDF format to improve the solving abilities of state-of-the-art package managers in distributions such as Debian, Mandriva, and Caixa Magica. Stefano Zacchiroli 11:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium other Aigars Mahinovs 14:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en An exploration into what we are not doing well enough to make Debian the best of the best, and how we could go about making things better. In the past Debian was held as one of the best GNU/Linux distributions. Currently, even though there are people still happy with our results, more and more are getting frustrated by the many bugs and the lack of innovation. Is it possible to make Debian rule once again? This talk aims to show the most important problems that we are facing and try to find a way that might help us become once again the greatest GNU/Linux distribution. Margarita Manterola 15:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium Introduction and Invitation lecture en Adnan Hodzic 16:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium New developments in the ongoing struggle against bugs lecture en Debbugs is the software that underlies bugs.debian.org; currently has over 580,000 bugs filed in it, over 480,000 of which have been fixed. Currently in use by thousands of Debian developers and maintainers and unknown numbers of Debian users daily, it is continuously undergoing upgrades to better service the needs of Developers. * Overview of how the BTS works - process, service - web frontends - soap, etc. * New features - user values - action-required sorting (maintainer and submitter views) + priority sorting (uservalue) - merging of merged bug reports and threaded view - control in messages to submit@ and nnn@ - usertag/uservalue/usercategory duplication/replay - rss feeds for packages and bugs - remote attachments - new spool storage format - better statistics * Old features that may be unfamiliar - fun with bts select - full text searching with HE - local-debbugs * A bald plea for more assistance Don Armstrong Debbugs 17:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium Annual meeting of the Debian Perl Group bof en The pkg-perl team will again take the opportunity to meet in person for discussing current topics and planning future work. Items for discussion and work are collected at http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianPerlGroup/OpenTasks gregor herrmann Agenda 09:30 01:00 414 Schapiro Following up on the inspiration of Eben Moglen's talk Ad Hoc bof en Inspired by Eben Moglen's vision of a small, cheap and simple computer that serves freedom in the home, we are building a Debian-based platform for distributed applications. There are a number of projects working to realize a future of distributed services; we aim to bring them all together in a convenient package. Freedom Box is about gathering the software on inexpensive hardware to give people their freedom back through aggregation and transition of cloud services to friend to friend services. Freedom Box is about: * privacy * control * ease of use * dehierarchicalization Hans-Christoph Steiner FreedomBox page on Debian Wiki http:// 10:30 01:00 414 Schapiro "I'm looking for work." "I need a worker." "Great, let's talk!" other en Many highly qualified people who come to DebConf are between jobs, looking to switch jobs or home countries, or are freelancers seeking additional contracts. This is true every year, but even more so in 2010 due to the global recession. Many others work at companies that could use the professional services of DebConf attendees. This event is intended to bring the two groups together so that job or contract opportunities can be discussed face-to-face. Another potential topic of discussion is how to search for work in various unfamiliar cities or countries. Jimmy Kaplowitz 14:00 01:00 414 Schapiro Why Debian Should Care And What Debian Can Do Ad Hoc bof en Kurt von Finck 15:00 01:00 414 Schapiro tutorial en I would start with a description of our BTS and the different ways to query it: HTML and SOAP. I'd go on explaining a bit about python-debianbts (the important datastructures and methods). Then I'd show how to query the BTS within Python using python-debianbts, starting with trivial examples like get all the bugs of package XXX, to more complex queries like get all the bugs of severity grave and serious with the tag patch which is not closed. Bastian Venthur 09:30 01:00 Interschool Lab Herding Cats for Aiur Media and Art lecture en Video recordings and live internet streams of a growing number of Gnu/Linux and Free Software conferences around the world are being produced by teams of volunteers using largely donated resources and Free Software running on Linux. This talk discusses the hardware and software used for a variety of the productions in which DebConf videoteam members have participated. The software covered includes dvswitch and tools from xiph.org. Challenges and experiences with regard to quality sound, lighting, volunteer organization and workflow management will also be touched upon. Eric Dantan Rzewnicki 10:30 01:00 Interschool Lab A Behind the Scenes Tour Media and Art workshop en The tools we have are pretty cool. Describing them and their use in a one-way presentation is good and useful. But, the complexity of the system is better understood through getting one's hands on it Eric Dantan Rzewnicki 14:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Getting MythTV and similar to work for the casual user Media and Art workshop en I hope that we can have a discussion of how installation of MythTV (and related systems such as freevo) can be even better on Debian. Possibly it would be nice to investigate whether shared infrastructure is appropriate such as permitting "following" other people's recording selections, permitting social interactions in the middle of viewing, etc. Also we are in dire need of some easy way to integrate music collections properly with the multiple music managers... Kristoffer H. Rose 15:00 01:00 Interschool Lab why do 3rd party multimedia archives suck Media and Art bof en Currently, many multimedia related packages are still unpackaged, or packaged but not in debian. Our users therefore have to choose from a number of 3rd party distributors or compile software from source which leads to a poor user experience. This BoF discusses the needs, requirements and interest of 3rd-party archives that contain multimedia related packages. The goal is to identify the current biggest multimedia related problems in debian and tries to form suggestions on how to improve the situation. Reinhard Tartler 16:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Media and Art lecture en Adrian Knoth Reinhard Tartler 17:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Constantly Usable Testing exploration Ad Hoc bof en This BoF will be used to explore the feasibility of the Constantly Usable Testing concept. Encouraged to attend: Representatives from Release Team, FTP Team, Security Team, d-i and CD teams, and Publicity Team. And anyone with an interest in forming a CUT Team. Joey Hess Constantly Usable Testing manifesto 10:30 01:00 477 CSB Ad Hoc bof en General discussion of using source package formats in Debian other than 1.0 and 3.0 (quilt), including such things as 3.0 (git). Came out of an IRC discussion Tuesday night. Let's talk about other source package formats while we're all in the same city and when more people can be around, and figure out where we want to go with getting richer metadata about packages and package history into the archive. Russ Allbery 14:00 01:00 477 CSB Ad Hoc bof en Matthias Klose 15:00 01:00 477 CSB Overview and Q&A Ad Hoc bof en Erinn Clark 19:30 01:00 477 CSB Managing your part of the Web of Trust Ad Hoc bof en AdHoc discussion on digital identity security practices, smartcards, and advanced usage. AdHoc discussion on digital identity security practices, smartcards, and advanced usage. Michael Shuler 20:30 01:00 477 CSB performance We will do the Classical Keysigning ritual at this event. Aníbal Monsalve Salazar DC10 Keysigning 09:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium Discussion of distributed bug tracking including the bts Ad Hoc bof en Discussion of distributed bug tracking systems and current progress Don Armstrong 10:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium what works and what does not work with newbies bof en I will share my experiences within the Qt/KDE team and hopefully this will lead to a discussion with other members of others teams about what worked with them and what did not work while trying to attract new members. Ana Beatriz Guerrero López 11:30 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en Simple Defects (SD) is a command-line distributed bugtracker. If you've heard of Bugs Everywhere or Ditz, you have the general idea. Bugs Everywhere and Ditz might be nice for tracking bugs for your own new project, but they're not very useful for working with Debian. What may surprise you is that SD is! SD has a special feature that other distributed bug trackers lack: the ability to synchronize bugs back and forth with bug trackers that are external to itself. It does this through pluggable adaptors that work with SD's "foreign replica" interface. This allows you to grab bugs matching some criteria from a foreign source, work on them locally (even offline) with all the power of SD, and then send the updates back to the centralized bugtracker. This talk will present my work on an SD adaptor to interface with our beloved Debbugs, and how it can make you, Debian contributors, more productive when dealing with bugs. Christine Spang SD homepage http:// 14:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium Challenges packaging Koha for Debian lecture en Debian is a huge project, with tens of thousands software packages, a thousand people, and hundreds of communication forums. Koha is large, old, somewhat crufty, free software system for running libraries (the kinds with books and stuff). Koha upstream wants it packaged for Debian, and eventually included in Debian. Because of the sizes of both projects, and the established cultures and policies and habits, things are not always straightforward. What are the challenges Koha faces? What can Koha do to make integration into Debian better? What could Debian do? What lessons can be learned to help other upstreams? At work, I am packaging the Koha system as a Debian package, with the ultimate goal to upload it to Debian. This talk will chronicle the obstacles I have had to overcome, both upstream and in Debian, and discuss things Debian and upstream projects in general could do better. This is sort of a "What I do after I retired from Debian" kind of talk. Withheld Text and slides of talk 15:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium Clouds have them, how about you? lightning Lightning Talks are 11 five-minute talks in a 60-minute time-slot! Maybe you've never given a talk before, and you'd like to start small. For a Lightning Talk, you don't need slides, but if you make some you dont need many because your talk will only be 5 minutes! It will be over quickly, so don't get nervous, and don't try not to cram an entire talk in. Maybe you just want to raise an interesting question, recruit people to your project, brag about something you did, or show off some software; maybe you want to tell a story about that time you were camping in the backyard of a meth lab and a goat was being chased by ball lightening! There will be limited slots, so sign up early. Micah Anderson 16:00 01:00 Davis Auditorium lecture en The closing plenary will be the final wrap-up from Debconf. It will be the companion book-end to the opening plenary at the beginning. It will be brief, and will include things like number of contributors (BSP/RCBC prizes; talk report-backs; bosnia presentation, thanks and...see you next time!) The closing plenary would be the final wrap-up from Debconf. It will be the companion book-end to the opening plenary at the beginning. It will be the general good-bye, providing some closure, final words, and report-backs. Ideally this closing plenary would be scheduled as the very last thing, and would not be in competition with other things. It would likely be brief, and include things such as the following: * Exciting RCBC winners! * reportbacks from tracks - interesting ideas that came up, summaries of sessions * reportbacks from BoFs/talks * bosnia presentation * thanks to those who participated/volunteered/help * farewell, thanks and encouraging words Micah Anderson Stefano Zacchiroli Mehdi Dogguy gregor herrmann Adnan Hodzic 14:00 01:00 414 Schapiro Ad Hoc bof en OpenStreetMap (osm.org) is a free data project mapping the world wiki style. This bof is to discuss it for both users and those curious about it. Blars Blarson OpenStreetMap web site 09:30 01:00 Interschool Lab Raising Debian's profile in the wider world bof en Jeremiah C. Foster 10:30 01:00 Interschool Lab Fixing Authentication on the (Debian) 'Net with OpenPGP workshop en Monkeysphere is a project to extend the OpenPGP Web of Trust into as many domains as possible, effectively supplanting hierarchical certification infrastructure like X.509, and restoring control over authentication and identification to the communications peers themselves and their own legitimately trusted introducers. We will discuss how Debian can take advantage of Monkeysphere and related ideas, and how packagers can make sure their packages can make use of it. Debian relies on the OpenPGP Web of Trust as a decentralized mechanism for public key distribution for many critical tasks, including developer identification, NM and DM advocacy, GR proposals and seconds, voting, and package uploads. Despite this well-established distributed key management infrastructure, the Debian project uses centrally-managed (or un-managed) keys in other situations, including the web and ssh, where OpenPGP has not traditionally been available. Monkeysphere is a project to extend the OpenPGP Web of Trust into as many domains as possible, effectively supplanting hierarchical certification infrastructure like X.509, and restoring control over authentication and identification to the communications peers themselves and their own legitimately trusted introducers. We have functional tools for authenticating peers over the World Wide Web and SSH, with plans for more protocols. This workshop will cover how the Monkeysphere could enable the use of OpenPGP in other parts of Debian infrastructure, and how Debian developers can ensure that their packages are capable of taking advantage of the Web of Trust we all rely on. Greg Lyle Daniel Kahn Gillmor Monkeysphere 11:30 01:00 Interschool Lab - Friendly talk among porters interested in this architecture. Ad Hoc bof en Debian ARM porters meeting for Open discussion on improvements Debian porters could do to Debian/ARM architecture. This talk was merged with Steve's BoF request for working on the arm/armel architecture. Recently many events are coming up on ARM world. Debian GNU/Linux should be aware of these changes and Debian/ARM should be one of the distros of choice for future devices. There are lots improvements we could do to Debian/ARM to have better support for this Debian architecture. Steve McIntyre Debian/ARM support for variants 14:00 01:00 Interschool Lab How to get better policies and a better performance... podium Philipp Kern 15:00 01:00 Interschool Lab Why is DebConf a fork & shouldn't we merge? Ad Hoc bof en Discuss why (and how far) DebConf and Debian are two seperate entities. Discuss future. Holger Levsen Stefano Zacchiroli