Debian Conference 2014

Speaker: Matthew Vernon
The adoption of maven is creating new kinds of dependency hell for Debian. The "download dependencies at compile time" approach is antithetical to the idea of distribution-provided libraries, and encourages authors to be slap-dash about dependency management, and API stability. If people are going to package java apps for Debian, then we need a better way to build java library packages, perhaps by enhancing maven-debian-helper. This BoF aims to propose solutions to this problem.

Speaker: Ian Jackson
I want to cross-build half of the NetBSD kernel for Xen, build qemu against it, and put the result in an amd64 .deb. Help me do this in the least annoying way. Event structure: I'll spend the first quarter or so of the time sketching out what I'm trying to do and why. Then we can move onto the difficult question of how. I have a few slides, here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ijackson/2014/debconf-builds-bof/slides.pdf --- Notes from the session are here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ijackson/2014/debconf-builds-bof/gobby.txt

Speaker: Enrico Zini
Upstreams are doing their best packaging their tarballs, and then we redo most of their work when we debianise them. I personally find this situation wasteful and boring. I like how debhelper7 allows to write debian/rules files that describe only when something diverges from the norm, and I think that debianising a package should be the same. I want to debianise a package by just saying "I'm fine with everything upstream says, and put this in Section: foobar". I want to fix upstream's packaging by sending them patches instead of redoing it in debian/. I want most policy or toolchain updates to be handled with just a binNMU. I don't want to manually do any of the work that can possibly be done by a computer. debdry is a prototype tool that tries to address that by running autodebianisation tools, which exist and work reasonably well for at least perl, python, haskell, ruby and node.js, and then applying semantically significant, manually maintained tweaks, if any is needed. The bulk of my debian work should be adding Debian-specific metadata, testing, interacting with upstream, dealing with the BTS. It should not involve writing files that say that the README needs to be installed with the package documentation. Let's make it happen.

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: Michael Vogt
A overview of APTs recent past, present and future(s).

Speaker: Piotr Ożarowski
* will pybuild replace dh_python and why not? * how to customize build/install/test targets? * tips and tricks useful while packaging Python libraries and applications

Speaker: Neil McGovern
SteamOS is one of the latest Debian derivatives and is set to be hugely popular. This talk will explore some of the decisions and implementation details behind the creation of (what will hopefully be!) the biggest linux gaming platform ever. Presented by Neil McGovern (DD, Collabora) and John Vert (Valve)

Speaker: Ian Jackson
dgit lets you clone, commit, and push to the Debian archive. Other Developers don't even need to know you're using git, but if they use dgit you share history with them. The talk will cover the basic design choices, include a demo, and go on to the current status and future plans. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ijackson/2014/debconf-dgit-talk/slides.pdf and .../talk.txt