Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

Speakers: Michael Banck, Margarita Manterola, Martin Krafft
The classic kickstarting session of every DebConf.

Speaker: Margarita Manterola
This talk is an introduction to the Go language. It will go over what Go is and what it's not. A little bit of its history, the basics of the language and a few live demos. It will also cover the state of Go in the free software world in general and Debian in particular.

Speaker: Lars Wirzenius
Obnam is an easy, secure backup program. It de-duplicates data, and encrypts it locally before transferring the backup data to a remote server over sftp. It supports a FUSE filesystem for restoring data using normal file management tool This talk shows how Obnam is used in various cases, and covers both basic and advanced use.

Speaker: Bradley M. Kuhn
Debian is among the oldest GNU/Linux distributions still active today. A community-led project with democratically elected leadership, Debian remains a shining example of a project that serves developers and users rather than for profit interests and wealthy trade associations that so commonly control and manipulate Open Source projects today. Debian culture embodies the ethos of software freedom and the tradition of enthusiasts and hobbyists (rather than businesses) directing the future of Free Software projects. As an independent observer and Debian user, in this keynote, I will examine the reasons why these principles have served Debian well, considered early decisions that Debian made that have assured a commitment to principle, explore how Debian can continue to help everyone, introduce future collaborations that might succeed in helping Debian in its goals, and discuss the unique role Debian can play in advancing software freedom.

Speaker: Christophe Siraut
Distro tracker presents us with an insightful view on Debian packages. In this talk we will introduce its design, discover how easy it is to contribute, and discuss changes and improvements.

Speaker: Nattie Mayer-Hutchings
They're talks. They go like lightning.

Speaker: Steven Chamberlain
An overview of how GNU/kFreeBSD works, and what it can do. We present a rationale for porting work within Debian, and think about the future. There will be a live demo of a jessie-kfreebsd system.

Speaker: Robert Edmonds
The Domain Name System (DNS) protocol is widely used by Internet-connected hosts, including Debian systems. It is most commonly associated with the "hostname to address" lookup service needed by many Internet protocols, but it has an extensible design and is capable of distributing many types of information. The DNS has a highly componentized architecture and no individual package in Debian is responsible for implementing DNS support as a whole. This talk will introduce the DNS architecture and explain how individual packages in the Debian archive together implement this architecture. Other topics covered will include: - The DNS data model. - The broad history of the protocol, and likely future developments. - How the DNS is commonly deployed on the Internet. - How Debian's DNS support compares to other operating systems like Fedora and FreeBSD. - Privacy, security, and governance considerations.

Speakers: intrigeri, Andres Gomez
Tails is a Debian GNU/Linux based live system that aims to preserve user privacy and anonymity. This talk gives an overview on the technical details behind Tails, how privacy, anonymity and security are enforced on top of Debian. We will explain the challenges that Tails faces. This talk also presents the current Tails project roadmap and future goals, and the evolution of the relation with Debian, from a technical point of view.

Speakers:
Important announcements and a raffle.

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Neil McGovern
The annual State of the Union address

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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:
Important announcements and a raffle.

Speaker: Ian Jackson
dgit is a tool which allows you to dgit clone any package in Debian, and get a git tree. You can work on the package in git, and when you are ready do dgit build and dgit push to upload. Other dgit users see your git history. dgit is particularly useful for NMUers and downstreams.

Speaker: Axel Beckert
dh-dist-zilla is a debhelper plugin which allows you to build Debian packages of your own Dist::Zilla based CPAN distributions (i.e. Perl modules) without having to first generate all the files by debhelper. dh-dist-zilla calls "dzil build" and friends for you in a transparent way, so that you can build you Debian package from the very same VCS checkout (which usually doesn't contain any generated files like Makefile.PL or Build.PL) from which you would also build the CPAN distribution of your Perl module.

Speaker: Cédric Boutillier
The Debian Publicity team's motto is "Make Debian famous" and this means to try to spread the word about Debian to a wider audience but also spread the word inside the Debian community about the cool things that happen. This talk will show an overview of the different services that the Publicity Team handles, and how can people get involved.

Speaker: Andy Simpkins
Over the last couple of decades the world of product development with embedded systems has changed considerably. Changing to Open Source (for hardware as well as software) is not easy. The world resists change, this is a brief history of where I have succeeded, where I have failed and the lessons learned. This is a not a technical talk, more a collection of observations.

Speaker: Thomas Goirand
Lots of new things happend since last year in the OpenStack world. One very nice thing that we are currently working on is doing the packaging using upstream infrastructure using Gerrit, in a new collaboration with Ubuntu people. This talk will present you this, and the new projects and features in OpenStack which are now available in Debian.

Speakers: Stefano Zacchiroli, Matthieu Caneill
Debsources provides Web access to all of Debian source code. Debsources allows to browse, search, and render Debian source code, as well as compute code metrics and statistics that encompass all available source packages. This talk will emphasize new features being developed, mainly by two GSoC students and a former Outreachy intern. On the one hand, Debsources is being extended to scale better, by switching the Debsources updater to an asynchronous architecture. This change allows to distribute indexing tasks over multiple workers, potentially running on multiple independent machines. It also allows to easily re-index previously indexed data in batch (e.g., upon changes to the available indexing plugins, or when injecting new releases from scratch), a use case that is challenging to support properly with the current synchronous architecture. On the other hand, requests to extend Debsources with new features and to support new use cases, not always related to source code publishing, are on the raise. We want to address them by turning Debsources into a base software platform capable of running multiple Web applications on top of the same underlying database. The Debsources code base is being refactored to make this possible. As concrete use cases to test this change we are developing 2 new Web applications on top of Debsources: 1) a "copyright.debian.net" web app, allowing to browse, search, render, and export debian/copyright files; 2) a "patch tracker" web app to publish details about the source code differences that Debian packages carry with respect to upstream releases of the same software.

Speaker: Peter Eckersley
Invited talk about Let's Encrypt

Speakers:
Important announcements and a raffle.

Speakers: Holger Levsen, Lunar
With free software, anyone can inspect the source code for malicious flaws. But Debian provide binary packages to its users. The idea of “deterministic” or “reproducible” builds is to empower anyone to verify that no flaws have been introduced during the build process by reproducing byte-for-byte identical binary packages from a given source. This talk will explain the current status of the Debian Reproducible Builds project, how this is relevant for the complete free software eco system and how you can contribute.

Speaker: Martín Ferrari
This talk will introduce a new tool for the discerning sysadmin: Prometheus. It will start with an overview of the challenges of packaging a Go application in Debian: the small number of packaged libraries, the very particular model of dependency management and compilation, etc. It will be followed with an overview of the system and a taste of what you can do with it. If time permits, I might even do a small demo. Most sysadmins face a similar problem: the state of FOSS monitoring tools is still stuck in the 90s. Nagios, Munin and friends get the job done, and you might think this is enough. But once you have a taste of what you can do with a tool like Prometheus, you will never want to come back! Prometheus is a very different system. Instead of checking good/bad states of services, or just nicely graphing values, it collects information. A lot of information! At its core, it is just a time-series database and data collector. What makes it powerful is the advanced calculations you can make on the fly with the collected data, from which you can derive nice graphs, fire alerts, or just store for future analysis.

Speaker: Asheesh Laroia
This talk introduces Sandstorm, a free software package manager for web applications with a focus on usability and security. The talk dives deep into how Sandstorm works and why. You'll see how Sandstorm is similar to and different from Debian, and you'll learn: * Why Sandstorm exists, and why I think it fits the web better than packaging the same apps in Debian directly * How people turn open source web apps into Sandstorm packages * How (and why) every Sandstorm app package is a Debian derivative * Why Debian should use this for Debian Developer-oriented infrastructure * Examples of web apps that Sandstorm is, and isn't, good for * How our community structure is different from Debian's -- with many lessons I've personally learned through my work on Debian * How Sandstorm adds security and access control to any web app You'll leave with a sense of the purpose of Sandstorm, an understanding of why we made it, and a desire to run it yourself.

Speakers: Martin Pitt, Michael Biebl
We look back at what challenges we faced with the SysVinit → systemd transition during the jessie release cycle and how we managed to survive it in the end. We will also introduce some planned and potential changes for stretch and how you can get involved.

Speaker: Nattie Mayer-Hutchings
They're talks. They go like lightning.

Speakers:
Important announcements and a raffle.

Speaker: Niels Thykier
The Release Team will be reflecting on the Jessie and the Stretch release cycle.

Speaker: Asheesh Laroia
Volunteer economics is the notion that even though contributors frequently work without financial cost to a project, there are social, personal, and technical costs that affect their ability to do that work. These costs relate heavily to the question of which projects can sustain themselves on volunteer energy. We’ll dive into three stories: * The demise of cdn.debian.net: How http.debian.net outcompeted it, through a technical structure that enabled it to grow with fewer people having to collaborate. * Why no one uses “apt-get” to install web applications: Although many server, command line, and desktop software packages are available in Debian, very few of today’s open source web applications are. This section provides a brief overview of Debian’s attempts to make web applications packageable, and an examination of where the efforts have & haven’t succeeded, and considers how volunteer incentives to maintain desktop software don’t apply cleanly to web applications. * The rise of reproducible builds in Debian: What binary-reproducible builds mean, and within 18 months, how a community member was able to create the volunteer energy required to make 80% of all packages truly verifiable. We’ll conclude by re-visiting some common, cliche questions people ask of free software — “where are all the designers?” “where are all the documentation writers?” — and consider if these stories provide any answers. The talk assumes no particular background with Debian or maintaining Linux systems. Some of the topics have technical content, but we will provide the necessary background as part of the talk. (For what it's worth: This is also a talk I gave at Open Source Bridge 2015, compressed somewhat since I expect more familiarity with the topics at Debconf.)

Speaker: Jonathan Carter
An introduction to AIMS, the AIMS Desktop derivative (which is currently an Ubuntu derivative) and using Linux in the 3rd world. AIMS Desktop is currently used in university centres in South Africa, Ghana, Camaroon and Tanzania as well as individuals around the world.

Speaker: Niels Thykier
This talk will touch on the following subjects: * What makes the problem(s) "hard" * What in turn makes the problem(s) highly tractable in practise. * Various tricks to reduce the problem even further.

Speaker: Guillem Jover
A view on the past, present and future of dpkg. Its defining traits, and how those affect its usage and evolution.

Speaker: Neil McGovern
PPAs have been on the horizon for a long time, but have been stalled. Let's talk about how we can unblock this and get them implemented!

Speaker: Stefano Rivera
Overview of DebConf16, in Cape Town

Speakers: Martín Ferrari, Tássia Camões Araújo, Giacomo Catenazzi
Interested in having DebConf17 in your city? Come and show us your early plans!

Speakers:
Screening of the award winning documentary Citizenfour movie.

Speakers:
Important announcements and a raffle.

Speaker: Jacob Appelbaum
Closing keynote by Jacob Appelbaum

Speaker: Samuel Thibault
The graal of accessibility is that it should be ready to be enabled everywhere, all the time. Some of the Debian desktops are very accessible, but most of them are not. In this talk, I will present how the accessibility stack is packaged in Debian, how it works, and what desktop maintainers need to do to make sure that their desktop is accessible.

Speaker: Antonio Terceiro
In this talk I will present a project I have been working on to allow end users to easily install and basically configure server-side applications with the need for technical knowledge such as database and web server administration.

Speaker: Nattie Mayer-Hutchings
They're talks. They go like lightning.

Speakers: Michael Banck, Margarita Manterola, Martin Krafft
Good bye to Heidelberg... See you in Cape Town!