Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

Speakers:
Important announcements and a raffle.

Speaker: Bdale Garbee
Invited talk by Bdale Garbee

Speaker: Bdale Garbee
Invited talk by Bdale Garbee

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. Last year at DC14, FSF executive director (and Debian Developer) John Sullivan presented a list of joint initiatives that the FSF and Debian could work on together to advance the cause of free software, even without Debian being officially recommended by the FSF. As a group, we also talked about some of the reasons that Debian is not on the FSF's list of endorsed GNU/Linux distributions. I will give an update on the status of these joint initiatives, especially about progress on the h-node.org database of hardware that is compatible with Debian main and the FSF's endorsed distributions (a cooperative initiative that was announced shortly after DC14), and about the import of package info from Debian main into the FSF's Free Software Directory. I'll talk about the thorny problem of navigating between, on one side, recommending nonfree software to users, and on the other side, giving them a distribution that won't work on the laptop they currently use -- and what we could do together in order to get out of this jam. Finally, I'll present some new ideas for us working together and continuing to strengthen our relationship, and hope that you do the same.

Speaker: Matthias Klumpp
AppStream is a metadata-enhancement project for both Linux distributions and upstream projects which develop for Linux. It allows upstreams to provide distributors with a machine-readable description of an application or generic software package, links to screenshots and websites and several other useful metadata. It also allows projects to assign a unique identifier to their software, which allows other software to find it in the distribution's package repositories. AppStream also is the basis for new exciting projects, like automatic UEFI firmware updates. The first half of the talk will go into detail about why we need AppStream, and the work which was done to integrate it with Debian. The second half of the talk will give an overview on the current plans to change the way software is distributed on Linux. Traditionally upstream software is packaged by a downstream Linux distributor and then released as a Linux distribution. Currently, work is going on on solutions to allow projects to distribute their software directly to the end user, as well as for sandboxing the 3rd-party software and isolating it from the rest of the system. I will give a brief introduction on the Limba and XdgApp approaches to the software-distribution issue, and what we at Debian should prepare for in future.

Speaker: Wouter Verhelst
Debian used to have a reputation of having a rather harsh community, where flamewars were the normal way of handling conflict. Over the past decade or so, however, things have gradually improved to the point where this is no longer the case. In recent years, we've had two general resolutions in this area: the diversity statement in 2012, and the code of conduct in 2014. Together, they are the Debian community's instruments in ensuring that our project remains a welcoming environment. Are these instruments working? Do we need more of these? Or are we perhaps overreaching in our effort to keep discussion civil, to a point where these instruments are counterproductive? Let's talk about that.

Speaker: Héctor Orón Martínez
Informal Auditor Team meet-up

Speaker: Werner Koch
Invited talk by Werner Koch

Speaker: Werner Koch
Invited talk by Werner Koch

Speaker: Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos
Currently each and every shipped application in distributions enforces its own policy on the allowed cryptographic algorithms/protocols. While for some this is a desirable property, for most unmanaged applications like wget, curl, and similar, it prevents enforcing a consistent security level. The purpose of this talk is to describe the approach we've taken in Fedora to counter the issue, and enforce a system-wide policies, discuss the current outcome, lessons learned, and invite Debian maintainers to participate.

Speaker: Daniel Kahn Gillmor
I've written up my "preferred packaging" techniques at https://wiki.debian.org/DanielKahnGillmor/preferred_packaging -- I'd like to briefly present them in person, with a projector to show how I work with the tools and how i investigate a package's revision history this way.

Speaker: Paul Gevers
In this BoF I like to take some time to explain what dbconfig-common can do for packages that require a working database. dbconfig-common has recently seen a lot of long standing bugs fixed, so I think it is time that more packagers are aware of it's possibilities. I would like to take the opportunity to solicit for further enhancements and help.

Speakers:
Coffee & Snacks

Speaker: Allison Randal
As a community, Debian is driven by many passions, but none so deep and lasting as the philosophy of Free Software. Born in an era of increasing social freedom but increasing political and corporate conservatism, Free Software didn't begin as a rebellion against an entrenched proprietary majority, but more as a jolt of surprise that earlier attitudes of open collaboration were disappearing. Academic experimentation gave way to the "Big Business" of software, and to economic motivations to lock down legal ownership. Until the 1970's, the United States considered software as a "utilitarian good" and granted it no copyright protection. Free Software and proprietary software grew more-or-less at the same time, in response to new ideas of software as a creative work, due the same treatment as other forms of property. Free Software has always been firmly planted in the ideals of freedom, liberty, equality, and a society of individuals working toward a common good. These concepts are steeped in a heritage stretching back centuries, including Socrates, Plato, Scotus, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Hill Green, and numerous others. This talk explores the philosophical roots of Free Software, for a deeper understanding of the movement today.

Speaker: Daniel Kahn Gillmor
Big changes are afoot in the world of OpenPGP and GnuPG as well. The Debian GnuPG packaging team will present some of the changes we have in store, what they might mean for other parts of the infrastructure, and how our operating system can make use of the new features.

Speaker: Richard Hartmann
How do you use Git for code, personal files, and Debian?

Speaker: Daniel Kahn Gillmor
patch queues! upstream VCS tags! pristine tar! tracking security updates! contributing back to upstream! Do you use git-buildpackage (gbp) in your debian packaging? Do you have special tricks that you find sanity-preserving, time-saving, or otherwise handy? Do you want to learn more about this workflow? come to this skillshare/discussion to share and learn.

Speaker: Niibe Yutaka
In this talk, I will discuss Monty Hall problem by its computer simulation and will show how Random Bit Generator is important, and more entropy is needed. In Debconf 14, I listend the talk by Tom Marble, which was titled "Security not by chance: the AltusMetrum hardware true random number generator". It was very impressive for me. (I had a TRNG implementation of mine, but I didn't recognize its importance.) Since then, I have been considering some promotion for more entropy, and l wrote the article (see the first URL). The story doesn't directly discuss TRNG itself, but it explains that bias should be killed and it discuss an effective side channel attack, and it emphasizes more entropy is required.

Speaker: Nolan Leake
Cumulus Linux is a Debian derivative distribution that runs on Network Switches. This talk will introduce the distribution and its use cases, as well as discuss our relationship with Debian and other upstream projects.

Speaker: Clint Adams
Since the hOpenPGP talk at DC14, a few things have changed. This will briefly summarize what's new with hOpenPGP and hopenpgp-tools.

Speaker: Markus Frosch
We try to explain some of the problems Nagios has had for years, what the differences to Icinga are, and how Icinga 2 can ease up monitoring in small, as well as really big environments. Most sysadmins have a love-hate relationship with Nagios based monitoring solutions. Backed by a sizable community, users have learned to live with it’s shortcomings in scaling, configuration, and modern integration options. Taking advantage of the tremendous number of supported hard- and software, Icinga leaves all legacy limitations behind. It delivers an easily scalable solution, with clustering, load balancing, automated replication, and even business process monitoring out-of-the-box. Based on a new configuration format with advanced language features - like conditional processing and complex type support - monitoring agile environments works like a breeze. Existing modules for Puppet, Chef and Ansible ramp up the rollout time and ensure a continuous and up to date monitoring environment. The talk will demonstrate how popular tools such as Graphite, Logstash, or Graylog integrate better and easier than ever before. In addition to that we’ll introduce the new Icinga Web 2 interface and give a brief introduction into the technical architecture. Icinga is shipped with Debian for years now, and we brought Icinga 2 into Debian just after its first stable release, which is know included in Jessie. I will show you the safe and most recent update channels for your environment.

Speaker: Neil McGovern
The annual State of the Union address

Speaker: Nattie Mayer-Hutchings
Show off your project! NB: It will be mandatory to set up your laptop before the session, in order to assure a smooth transition between speakers.

Speaker: Guido Günther
git-buildpackage{,-rpm} are used inside and outside of Debian for creating Debian and RPM packages out of Git repositories. What workflows do you use? Where can gbp be improved for that? What's missing? Where should it integrate better into other tools? What about DEP-14?

Speakers:
Debian, Finance, Crypto Currency + Bitcoin