Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

Speakers:
Why Children need an open source community and what they contribute

Speaker: Héctor Orón Martínez
Informal Auditor Team meet-up

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.

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...

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.

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: Andi Barth
Porter meeting for mips*-architectures

Speakers:
PHP (+ pecl) packaging

Speakers: Ian Campbell, Ian Jackson
The Xen upstream developers would like to to open up a session to users of Xen within the Debian community as well as the packagers of Xen and packages which depend upon or integrate with Xen. We are interested in use case and pain points for end users as well as discovering what upstream could do to make things easier in order to improve the Xen experience in Debian.

Speakers:
shroot sbuild BoF

Speaker: Michael Meskes
Debian while seeing more deployment in corporate IT still gets neglected by a lot of companies for various reasons. This BoF is to discuss whether or not we care, and if we do, how to improve our standing and the impact cloud computing has on this topic.

Speaker: Andreas Tille
While not beeing an active member of the Debian Games Blend I'd like to reserve a slot for all those games enthusiasts in Debian to meet in one place and discuss common issues. I'd like to present some teammetrics stats and give some short introduction into the Blends GSoC project to rewrite Blends tasks pages to ask for comments about potential enhancements which could help the Debian Games team. I'd be more than happy if somebody of pkg-games would serve as additional speaker and bring in more ideas for this meeting.

Speakers: Enrico Zini, Martin Zobel-Helas
Status on the setup of sso.debian.org DACS, OAUTH2

Speakers: Joerg Jaspert, Holger Levsen, Richard Hartmann
BoF about video.debian.net and the archive structure behind it.

Speaker: Louis-Philippe Véronneau
Discussion and preparation of the bid presentation

Speaker: Paul Wise
Debian is the basis for a number of other software distributions. This BoF provides a space for representatives from derivatives and Debian to share experiences, find out what is is being worked on and discuss problems, solutions and tools. We will begin with a quick round of introductions and then begin open discussion.

Speaker: Paul Wise
check-all-the-things is a verbose tool for developers to run many tools that can check various things (lintian, duck etc). In this BoF I'll quickly introduce the tool, its history and ask for suggestions on what other check tools could be run. If we get time we will also ask participants to help write check commands for new tools.

Speaker: Paul Wise
Got brain overload due to DebConf!? Dump your ideas here. Crazy ideas, hard ideas, easy ideas, impossible ideas, forgotten ideas, we want them all. Bring your creativity! There is no such thing as a bad idea and no idea is too crazy to say out loud.

Speakers:
Javascript / Ruby

Speaker: Andreas Tille
People interested in software for biology and medical care should meet in one room and we should talk about the current status of Debian Med and future developments. This is the usual Debian Med meeting at DebConf.

Speaker: Michael Prokop
jenkins-debian-glue allows you to build Debian & Ubuntu packages directly from the Jenkins Continuous Integration system. It's used by several open source projects (FreeRDP, Grml, Kamailio, LLVM, PostgreSQL, Scilab, Wikimedia) and can be set up within a few minutes. It retrieves package sources from a version control repository, adjusts debian/changelog (handle version number + mention changes that took place) and builds according source and binary packages out of it. Its lintian, autopkgtest (DEP8) and piuparts integration provides Q/A reports about the resulting source and binary Debian packages. In this BoF session we will provide an opportunity to meet developers and contributors of the jenkins-debian-glue project, discuss issues for improvements, discuss upcoming new features and get your questions answered.

Speaker: Andreas Tille
This is the usual Debian Science meeting at DebConf. If you are a scientist and have some interest in scientific packages please show up and try to contribute ideas how Debian Science could enhance. Items to discuss in this meeting - Debian Science team policy - Status of citation usage - Maintaining Blends tasks (Sponsering of Blends) - More specific Blends (dedicated to Mathematics, Physics, Electronics, etc.) - Screenshots - Snapshots of specific versions This is just a continuation from previous DebConfs considering recent development