Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

Speakers:
Important announcements and a raffle.

Speaker: Jon 'maddog' Hall
This talk will discuss two contests with two issues. First contest: Inveneo, LeMaker and ARM have sponsored a contest to develop a solar-powered, highly available, scalable, passively cooled "Micro Data Center" for developing countries. The first part of the contest was to develop a design for the hardware that would use up to 15 ARM-based Single Board Computers (SBCs) and up to ten SSDs with a 16-port Gbit data switch that could be powered by a Solar Panel or other 12 volt supply. Over fifty entries were submitted to a contest ending June 10th, with the results being announced July 20th. Some number of the winning Micro Data Center designs will be built by a company called ProCase. Then a second part of the contest will be to create and configure the software to run these data centers in a secure, highly available, easily updated fashion. The speaker would like the Debian community, spear-headed by Debian developers at Debconf, to create such a package of software. Second Contest: Linaro, a non-profit organization trying to help companies put GNU/Linux on their ARM processors and SoCs, has noticed about 1400 programs in GNU/Linux that still have assembly language in them. This assembly language has often been there a long time, and may (in the days of multi-core, multi-pipelined, multi-level cache) cause the programs to run slower and less efficiently, not faster. Examples of these performance and efficiency issues will be briefly given in the talks. Linaro has designed a contest to port these 1400 programs to ARM-64, and at the same time test to see if the programs efficiency can be improved by recoding the assembly language sections. These contests will be discussed in the talk, perhaps with workshops set up to help address them at Debconf.

Speaker: Jon 'maddog' Hall
This talk will discuss two contests with two issues. First contest: Inveneo, LeMaker and ARM have sponsored a contest to develop a solar-powered, highly available, scalable, passively cooled "Micro Data Center" for developing countries. The first part of the contest was to develop a design for the hardware that would use up to 15 ARM-based Single Board Computers (SBCs) and up to ten SSDs with a 16-port Gbit data switch that could be powered by a Solar Panel or other 12 volt supply. Over fifty entries were submitted to a contest ending June 10th, with the results being announced July 20th. Some number of the winning Micro Data Center designs will be built by a company called ProCase. Then a second part of the contest will be to create and configure the software to run these data centers in a secure, highly available, easily updated fashion. The speaker would like the Debian community, spear-headed by Debian developers at Debconf, to create such a package of software. Second Contest: Linaro, a non-profit organization trying to help companies put GNU/Linux on their ARM processors and SoCs, has noticed about 1400 programs in GNU/Linux that still have assembly language in them. This assembly language has often been there a long time, and may (in the days of multi-core, multi-pipelined, multi-level cache) cause the programs to run slower and less efficiently, not faster. Examples of these performance and efficiency issues will be briefly given in the talks. Linaro has designed a contest to port these 1400 programs to ARM-64, and at the same time test to see if the programs efficiency can be improved by recoding the assembly language sections. These contests will be discussed in the talk, perhaps with workshops set up to help address them at Debconf.

Speaker: Richard Hartmann
Debian is being offered as part of a service more and more often. Hosted servers, Debian installations on Android, pre-installed laptops, cloud images, and containers are just some examples. We need a common set of guidelines to determine when something can be called "official Debian", "Debian", and "based on Debian"

Speaker: Ben Hutchings
initramfs-tools in Debian is on life support. None of the current maintainers has a lot of time for it. Aside from the fsck/mount changes that came far too late into the jessie release cycle, maintenance is mostly reactive. Although the Ubuntu maintainers are doing some work on it, their branch has diverged quite a way and they haven't sent any changes to Debian for a long time. initramfs-tools depends on udev, which will probably become dependent on D-Bus by the time of stretch release. The system bus would probably have to be set up by systemd running as init. I think that this would require rewriting much of initramfs-tools. dracut has been adopted by several other distributions and has an active upstream, but it doesn't yet work as well in Debian. In particular, many of the Debian packages that hook into initramfs-tools don't hook into dracut (and it has weaker support for such hooks). It does already support the use of systemd as init in the initramfs. I believe we have to make a decision soon as to which of these to use by default in stretch, and then begin work on the necessary changes.

Speakers:
Sec-team meeting

Speaker: Andreas B. Mundt
The talk shows how to install Debian on a set of machines (a computer lab, a school, or your neighborhood!) more or less automatically. We start with a so called "InstallBox", a machine that provides a package cache and PXE boot installer images (di-netboot-assistant, squid). The installation may be customized using preseeding techniques. We start with minor modifications and end up deploying a DebianLAN network.

Speaker: Ricardo Mones
The unbelievable story of a team committed to make you to work less so Debian can be better.

Speaker: Andreas Tille
I'd like to give a packaging workshop with the goal to do some "live packaging" on some software which is not yet included in Debian but wanted by some attendee of the workshop. So if you want to join this workshop please be prepared by bringing your own Laptop as well as a target software to package.

Speaker: Anthony Towns
Databases are great at remembering things, but most of the time we only let them know what the current state of the world is. Temporal tables are the database equivalent of using version control -- allowing you not only to see how things are now, but also to be able to see how things used to be, and who changed them and why. brithint is a python tool that uses temporal tables to manage britney's hints database, so that it's possible to track when hints were introduced or removed, who they were introduced by -- and even better, it's possible to review that data to see where the release team gets bottlenecked.

Speaker: Samuel Thibault
This will give a brief update on the progress of the GNU/Hurd port in the past few years.

Speaker: Sune Vuorela
QtQuick is the current best maintained and actively developed way of making graphical applications in a nice and mostly declarative way. This talk will give you a introduction to the concepts and basic workings of QtQuick.

Speaker: Michael Prokop
How would it be to just commit your packaging changes to the version control system and get automated Q/A tests plus Debian packages for different releases without any further manual work required? This is what we're doing for a company who relies 100% on Debian packages. The OpenStack project jenkins-job-builder allows us to manage more than 800 Jenkins jobs through a few YAML configuration files without touching the Jenkins web interface. jenkins-debian-glue takes care of Debian package builds, building on cowbuilder, lintian, piuparts and autopkgtest. Code review using Gerrit as well as configuration management (Puppet + Ansible) helps us control the workflow and infrastructure. All the involved software is open source and in this talk I'll provide an overview how such a system can look like, how you might benefit for your own project and which challenges you might face.

Speaker: Richard Hartmann
The Debian Trademark Team invites all interested parties to join and discuss with us.

Speaker: Steve McIntyre
We've been shying away from including non-free firmware packages in Debian for a long time for the obvious DFSG/SC reasons. But arguably we're also not solving the problems a lot of our users face. Official installation and live media is often not useful to many people today because of this: imagine installing a laptop with only wireless connectivity, and the wireless needs non-free firmware to function. More and more people seem to be using the "unofficial" installation and live media now. Others are having to add "non-free" to their sources.list after installation. What could / should we do about this? A number of people have suggested adding a new (sub)component to the archive ("non-free-firmware", "non-free/firmware" or similar), such that we could treat this slightly differently to the rest of the stuff in non-free. This will hopefully help people by allowing users to choose only this limited set of non-free stuff for their system, but nothing more. Should we consider adding this new section to our installation media? I don't think there are any easy answers here - please join in the discussion...

Speakers:
Blackroll Physio BoF

Speakers:
Crowdfunding for Free Software BoF

Speaker: Lars Wirzenius
I would like a default Debian desktop or server install to provide a good backup solution by default. This would mean that all the software is installed, and that it requires minimal configuration to start making backups. Further, backups should be as automatica as possible (no or minimal user interaction required), restores are simple, and that the backup system requires no or minimal administration once configured. This talk outlines my thoughts about this.

Speaker: Ben Hutchings
The Linux kernel is under rapid development. Stable releases are made around 5 times per year, each including many new features and support for new hardware. This talk will summarise the features that have been added and enabled in the last year. There have been many changes to Linux between 3.16 and 4.1. Some of these will require new or updated userland applications to take advantage of them. I will attempt to summarise the most interesting changes and the state of integration in Debian.

Speakers: Steve McIntyre, Wookey
Discussion of the state of the ARM ports, and planning for the future.

Speaker: Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Problem is nothing new (e.g. see https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/05/msg00970.html) -- some fields of endeavor require making some data available withing the conveniences of Debian distribution. Multiple approaches were suggested, utilized to different degrees, and we do bare with few relatively large packages (>=1GB) in the archive. In this BoF we would like to discuss possible approaches on how to deal with "data packages" hopefully to arrive at a scalable and sustainable solution.

Speakers:
Coffee & Snacks

Speakers:
DebConf Fundraising BoF

Speakers: Martin Zobel-Helas, Bastian Blank, Joshua Poulson
Debian on Microsoft Azure Q&A

Speaker: Enrico Zini
Hands-on session on writing code to improve Debian Contributors. We will start by creating our own data source to submit data to the site, and continue with a look at the server-side data model, and how to deploy a local development version of the site.

Speaker: Cyril Brulebois
This talk will include a wrap-up of important changes that happened during the Jessie release cycle, and also present what's happening during the Stretch one.

Speaker: Antonio Terceiro
A tutorial on how to implement functional testing in your packages using the DEP-8 standard (a.k.a autopkgtest) in a way that the Debian CI will automatically run it for you. I will explain the foundations of the DEP-8 spec, how to run tests on your own development box, commons tips and tricks for writing tests (e.g. how to run the upstream test suite), and present several examples from packages in the archive.

Speaker: David Bremner
One of (at least my) primary motivations for working on Notmuch [1] is reducing my dependence on cloud services, and supporting the secure sending and receiving of signed and encrypted mail. Like any real world piece of software, notmuch is far from perfect, and several areas related to privacy and security could clearly be improved. During this BoF we'd like to plan out some topics to work on in followup hacking sessions. Anyone is welcome, even if they don't feel like hacking on notmuch. Potential topics of discussion and hacking include: - S/MIME signatures and encryption - Improving the security of the Emacs MML mime composer - Searching of GPG encrypted mail - Auditing and fixing "webbug" style problems in front ends - Making notmuch build reproducibly [1]: http://notmuchmail.org

Speaker: Daniel Pocock
What are the problems people have encountered (both technical and organizational) in deploying Free RTC? This session aims to document some of the problems holding us back in this area and look at how this field is evolving to address people's concerns. We can look at some examples of problems people have encountered and also look at troubleshooting techniques and strategies for improving the chances of success.

Speaker: Maximiliano Curia
pkg-kde team meetup

Speaker: Helmut Grohne
Bootstrapping an architecture refers to building the initial set of binary packages to populate the archive. The early phase discussed in this talk uses cross building to obtain essential packages. The following questions will be addressed: Why should we care about architecture bootstrap? What aspects are manual, but don't have to be? What are build profiles and why do we need them? Which packages need to support cross compilation? How to translate Build-Depends for a cross build?

Speaker: Joshua Powers
A year after visiting DebConf14 the HP's hLinux team would like to present on a few of the efforts, lessons learned, and direction of hLinux. We also want to solicit feedback. Presented by Joshua Powers (HP).

Speaker: Joachim Breitner
As every year, those who care about Haskell in Debian meet and discuss. In contrast to last year, there will be no (or only very little) presentation before, so that we have more time to discuss. Possible topics are: * Report from the DebCamp: What, if anything, did we produce there? * How can we automate the packaging and upgrading more, using cabal-debian. * What is our relation to Stackage and Stackage LTS? how can we best build on their work? * Can we better define the scope of what we want to have packaged in Debian and, especially, what not? * Do and can we want to provide up-to-date packages in backports? * Is there a better VCS-workflow for us, and what would it be? * Generally: How can we distribute the work on more shoulders?

Speaker: Andi Barth
Porter meeting for mips*-architectures

Speakers:
Alternative users of the BitCoin Block Chain

Speaker: Cédric Boutillier
Go over a few Ruby packages, discussing ruby-specific issues and how to solve them.

Speaker: Enrico Zini
I will ramble freely about Debian and everything else I care about. I will cover topics including, but not limited to, anarchism, relationships, sex, violence, society stereotypes and expectations, and it will really all be about Debian. I expect that this talk will be both unsuitable and insightful for pretty much any kind of audience I can think of.

Speakers:
There are things to be done and volunteers are needed. Coordination will take place at the Under Heidelberg hacklab.

Speaker: Nicolas Dandrimont
The traditional DebConf Cheese and Wine party! Bring cheese, wine or any other goods you think are representative from your country/region/town/borough/house/garden. No limit as long as it is: • tasty • preferrably smelly • able to survive a few days before being used.