Debian Conference 2014

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

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.

Speakers: Ana Guerrero López, René Mayorga
The Purpose of the MIA(Missing In Action) team is to track the inactive developers/maintainers with a main concern for the quality of their packages. In the past years the MIA process and tools have not changed so much, the purpose of this discussion is to improve our process, get more feedback of what we are doing good, what we are doing wrong and how can we improve; Before the discussion starts we will give a brief introduction on how does the MIA team works right now, which tools we have at hand and how do we handle the MIA process.

Speaker: Stefano Zacchiroli
Debsources is an infratructure and a web application to publish on the web the entire source code of Debian, allowing to search and browse through it. The main Debsources instance, currently running at http://sources.debian.net , spans Debian history from Debian early releases of the 90s to sid and experimental. In this talk I will present Debsources and sources.d.n, highlighting plans for the future and how people could hack on Debsources for fun and/or profit.

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? With free software, anyone can inspect the source code for malicious flaws. But most distributions provide binary packages to their users. We would like them to be able to verify that no flaws are introduced during the build process. The idea of “deterministic” or “reproducible” builds is to enable anyone to reproduce a byte-for-byte identical binary packages from a given source. Last year at DebConf13, a last minute BoF kicked off the effort. The last large scale experiment on 5151 source packages yield 62% of them producing matching binaries after a couple changes to the toolchain. A pretty encouraging result! The presentation will explain why we need reproducible builds, what has been done over the past yeast, the problems that have been identified so far and possible solutions. A subsequent BoF will allow interested parties to discuss solutions to some hard problems that were found during this first year of research.

Speaker: Eric Dorland
For various reasons, obsolete packages can accumulate in Debian. They may be old versions kept around for compatibility. They may be things long obsoleted by a newer piece of software. Eventually, they're all cruft cluttering up our beautiful archive. I'll briefly walk through the work I did to remove old versions of automake from the archive, including dramatized accounts of bug filings, NMUs, tools used, and maintainers cajoled. Then I'll lead a discussion of how we can make this easier, around these areas: * Tools that are missing that could make this easier. * How to encourage maintainers to do the right thing. * Best ways to proceed with mass bug filings & NMUs. * What to do about the long tail of broken packages and obstinate maintainers. Hopefully we can share techniques and come up with ideas to make this easier in the future.

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: Paul Wise
Debian's Upstream Guide has grown organically since it was created. In this BoF we hope to improve the guide and make it more comprehensive and comprehendable. We will copy the wiki text into gobby, review the text, make changes and add new recommendations and push the changes back to the wiki. https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide