Debian Conference 2014

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

Speaker: Steve McIntyre
General discussion on how things are going in the team and future plans

Speaker: gregor herrmann
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

Speaker: Kirsten Watson
Stitch 'n Geek

Speaker: Margarita Manterola
An opportunity for DC15 team to discuss ideas, tasks and who does what

Speaker: Barry Warsaw
Discuss and plan team conversion from Subversion to git.

Speaker: Brian Gupta
For members of the two teams to meet, and discuss plans for upcoming year. (Meeting of two teams is combined as there is overlap in team memberships.) Topics like roles of Debian's Trusted Organizations, and how best to manage Debian assets (including Trademarks) will be covered. If anyone is interested in the work of either team, team members will be available for Q&A.

Speaker: Jimmy Kaplowitz
Eric Johnson and I from Google are here to work on improving several aspects of Debian on Google's cloud: * Proper Debian packaging of Google's tools and their dependencies * Getting you involved in building the Debian images we ship to customers * Introducing you to our platform and answering questions you might have Come join us and collaborate! We also have a talk on Friday, which will look back and forward at how this effort is going.

Speaker: Tom Marble
Many elements of security we rely on such as generating of encryption keys and synthesizing one time session keys depend on random number generation. Any predictability of these numbers introduces potential weakness in secure systems. We often use Pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) because they are quick and convenient, yet they are deterministic algorithms for approximating a sequence of random numbers. By contrast a true random number generator (TRNG) is implemented in hardware based on a physical process that creates unpredictable noise. Often entropy from TRNGs is used to seed PRNGs to provide a balance of speed and unpredictability. In this talk I will discuss the USB TRNG project of AltusMetrum to create a fully open source hardware TRNG. Why make yet another TRNG when several are commercially available? Because most existing TRNGs are expensive, out-of-stock or based on closed designs. The USB TRNG can be connected to the Entropy Key Daemon (ekeyd) which can provide entropy directly to the kernel pool or serving via the EGD protocol. How can we evaluate the quality of the USB TRNG? Results of statistical analysis will provided along with detailed design documents in order to encourage critical community review.

Speaker: Ryan Lortie
Casual session for those who are interested in learning (about) Esperanto. (from Wikipedia) Esperanto (/ɛspəˈrɑːntoʊ/ or /-ræntoʊ/; [espeˈranto] is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Between 100,000 and 2,000,000 people worldwide fluently or actively speak Esperanto, including perhaps 1,000 native speakers who learned Esperanto from birth. Esperanto has a notable presence in 112 countries. Its usage is highest in Europe, East Asia, and South America We'll discuss: * what it is * why it was created * some basics about the structure of the language * online resources to help with learning it * Esperanto culture and community

Speaker: Jérémy Bobbio
How can we enable multiple parties to verify that a binary package has been produced untampered from a given source in a distribution like Debian? While trying to get reproducible builds for Debian packages, several problems were identified. For some, like paths encoded in debug files, we are still missing good solutions. Let's review them and find great ideas!

Speaker: Kees Cook
Discuss all things AppArmor in relation to using and packaging it in Debian.

Speaker: Michael Banck
Discuss the possibility for companies to continously contribute to Debian/DebConf via a yearly participatory fee, and what this means for DebConf fundraising and sponsoring

Speaker: Colin Watson
Work out what we need to do next to move forward UEFI Secure Boot support in Debian.

Speaker: Peter De Schrijver
In this presentation we will start from basic CMOS power consumption factors. We will use that as the basis to explain the various possibilities to balance power versus performance. We will then continue explaining how these techniques are implemented both in the SoC hardware and in the the operating system and application software. Android, maemo, OMAP and Tegra will be used to illustrate the techniques. We will start by explaining which factors influence power consumption in CMOS chips. We will then explain a number of commonly used techniques to control the power versus performance balance such as clock and powergating, clock and supply voltage scaling and heterogenous multiprocessing. We will continue explaining how these techniques are implemented in linux using various frameworks such as cpuidle, cpufreq, common clock framework, runtime PM, generic powerdomains, device QoS constraints, system suspend. We will then discuss how application code affects the device power consumption and discuss how Android and Maemo handle this. We will also discuss various debugging mechanisms and tools such as powertop, ftrace and other information in linux sysfs and debugfs. We will also explain hardware techniques we have used to gain insight in the system operation beyond the view of software. I gave this talk at fosdem already, but if there's interest from people who haven't seen it, I can give it again.

Speaker: Dimitri Ledkov
ABI-compliance-checker (acc) is a tool that can be used to catch unintentional abi breakage, as well as to assert ABI stability of a release and validate 3rd party binaries to be compatible with a given release. A debhelper plugin dh_acc is also available, but the adoption has been very slow. A short presentation on what dh_acc is and how one can leverage it will be presented. Presentation will be followed by discussion on how to lower adoption barrier and/or provide abi compliance on a more holistic approach (e.g. do we want an archive-wide service for Debian similar to http://upstream-tracker.org/ ?) Type: BoF, presentation, discussion Tracks: QA, Validation & CI, Packaging and tools

Speakers: Tassia Camoes, Moray Allan, Martín Ferrari
DebConf organisation working group

Speaker: Antonio Terceiro
Anual face-to-face meeting of the Debian Ruby team. Discussion of status, plans for the next release, and everything else. Ruby users are more than welcome to provide feedback to the team.

Speaker: Breno Leitao
This is going to be a presentation/discussiong abound adding the new ppc64el architecture in the Debian operating System. This discussion is going track the ppc64el progress and the missing parts. This is a draft of the agenda that I would like to follow: The Power8 little endian architecture (together with PowerKVM) The OpenPower Foundation PPC64 Little Endian Toolchain and new ABI Cross-compilation phase rootfs Buildd

Speaker: Thomas Goirand
In this talk, I'm planning to first give an update on what has been going on in OpenStack over the past year. Then, as packaging OpenStack means packaging a LOT of Python dependencies, I would like to share the packaging experience related to it: tricks that I've been doing, issues that I've faced and that I had to solve, etc.

Speaker: Francois Marier
Today's web applications often have a lot of external dependencies. Start off with a basic framework, sprinkle a couple of handy modules and finish with a generous serving of JavaScript front-end libraries. What you end up is a gigantic mess of code from different sources which follow very different release schedules and policies. Language-specific package managers can automate much of the dependency resolution and package installation, but you're on your own in terms of integration and quality assurance. Also, the minute you start distributing someone else's code with your project, you become responsible for the security of that third-party code. We moved away from statically-linked C/C++ programs a long time ago and now (mostly) live in a nicely-packaged shared library world. Can we leverage the power of Debian (i.e. the great work of the package maintainers and security team) to similarly reduce the burden of those who end up having to maintain our webapps? This talk will examine the decision that the Libravatar project made to outsource much of its maintenance burden to Debian by using system packages for almost everything.

Speaker: Agustin Henze
How we got a toolchain for Jessie! This talk is an update of the status of Embedded ARM toolchain in Debian since last Debconf in Switzerland, when Keith Packard talked about the support and work needed on Cortex-M0 and M3 chips. Today we can say that Jessie will be released with a complete and an amazing ARM toolchain for Embedded Systems, providing support for all cortex-A*/R*/M* processors. When you acquire a beautiful embedded board, you realize that at some point you will be needing to download tons of proprietary and distributed binary-only software, or build a lot of projects from scratch just to try blinking a LED. Now, you have the alternative of using the ARM Bare Metal Toolchain provided by Debian altogether the favourite flavoured IDE of your choice. On the same page, there are some important areas of improvements we need to work on, one of them being improving documentation, helping to reduce a steepy learning curve.

Speaker: Gunnar Wolf
Canada, Norway, Brazil, Finland, Mexico, Scotland, Argentina, Spain, USA, Bosnia, Nicaragua, Switzerland, USA, Germany... Where do you want to go next?

Speaker: - Intrigeri
We'll give a summary of where the Tails project is at these days, the challenges its facing, and how its relationship with Debian is evolving. Then, we'll discuss the various ways there are to help Tails from within Debian. Anyone curious is welcome :)

Speaker: Joey Hess
Free Software gets built by both volunteers and wealthy corporations. Not everything is about money, as we know, but people must make a living somehow. Most developers can trace their income back to proprietary sources. How can we build a more robust community-centered Free Software economy? Discuss various issues and ideas, hosted by Aaron Wolf of Snowdrift.coop

Speakers: René Engelhard, Martin Krafft, Margarita Manterola, Maximiliano Curia, Michael Banck
In 2015, DebConf takes place in Heidelberg, Germany. We'll offer a glimpse of the venue and our plans.

Speaker: Clint Adams
An overview of hOpenPGP and openpgp-asciiarmor, an OpenPGP implementation in Haskell; hopenpgp-tools, tools based on the hOpenPGP library; and their relevance to Debian.

Speaker: Joey Hess
Using Nix's functional package management as inspiration, let's look at Debian from a functional programming perspective. Including: The rise (and limits) of declarative configuration in Debian (triggers, control files, tendencies in debian/rules), schroot and docker, reproducible builds.

Speaker: Felipe van de Wiel
This is open to everybody, you don't need to be on DC14 Bursaries team or DebConf organization, you can attend to know what we do and give suggestions on the process. First part will have details and stats about DebConf14 Bursaries work on Travel, Food and Accommodation Sponsorship. Second part will present some ideas and topics for discussions and collect feedback and ideas on what to do and how to move forward.