Debian Conference 2014

Speaker: Enrico Zini
An introductory session to help those new to DebConf to understand this crazy, wonderful experience

Speaker: Don Armstrong
Brief overview of the current state of the BTS, new features, and new developments in the ongoing onslaught of bugs.

Speaker: Moray Allan
Thinking about helping as a volunteer during DebConf? Come along and find out more.

Speaker: Colin Watson
GRUB has moved on a great deal from its beginnings, when most of us just used it over LILO because you didn't have to remember to reinstall your boot loader when you installed a new kernel. Nowadays, thanks in part to the work of several Debian developers, it's a very powerful boot loader ported to many architectures that's actually fun to hack on. I'll be giving a whistle-stop tour of its history and design, and laying out some of the things where the Debian GRUB team could do with help.

Speaker: Martin Zobel-Helas
What has DSA done for you and what you can do for DSA.

Speaker: Anne Christine Spang
Debian made me who I am. If I hadn't started using Debian in high school, I wouldn't have become a hacker, I wouldn't have gone to MIT, I probably wouldn't have started a company. (At least not the one I started.) This is my story. Come and hear how this crazy worldwide organization changed my life. Perhaps it'll be a reminder that this is all worthwhile.

Speaker: Nicolas Dandrimont
Fedmsg, the federated messaging infrastructure, was built by the Fedora Infra team to streamline the communication between its services. During the Google Summer of Code in 2013, Simon Chopin worked under my tutelage to bring fedmsg to Debian. For a year, fedmsg has sent messages regarding the BTS, package uploads, and mentors.debian.net. This session will present fedmsg, and start a conversation on where we should go from here.

Speaker: Didier Raboud
During this free-form talk, we'll take a look at the current status of the Debian Printing stack as well as the upcoming challenges.

Speaker: Wookey
The use of stable in our infrastructure and understandably conservative rules for backports, stable updates and infra changes make it very difficult to even test something like Build Profiles (or Mulitarch builds) (which need changes in build tools and core infra), never mind get them into widespread use, without waiting for a whole stable release cycle (these are just recent examples - it's a general problem). So this also means that it takes 2-4 years to make a change, which hampers progress. This session is a discussion on whether we can do anything to be a bit more nimble than this?

Speaker: John Sullivan
Debian and the Free Software Foundation, along with its GNU Project, share many goals and ideals. They are two of the most mature and dedicated organizations working in the free software movement. Debian is not on the FSF's list of endorsed GNU/Linux distributions. Why is this? Should something be done about it, and if so, what? Much attention has been focused on the question of full endorsement. But there are other opportunities for the FSF and Debian to work together, whether full endorsement becomes a reality or not. Let's review the history of this cooperation, and talk about some future possibilities. FSF executive director (and Debian Developer) John Sullivan will give a presentation about the current state of things as the FSF sees it, and will leave plenty of time for discussion as well.

Speaker: Didier Raboud
Let's discuss what we want to do with src:lsb, lsb-base and friends.