Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

Speaker: Andi Barth
This talk describes how the core debian package infrastructure parts work together, that is ftp archive, buildds, release scripts (including but not limited to "how did it evolve")

Speaker: Olly Betts
Debian uses Xapian-powered search extensively, both in the software we package and in our own infrastructure. I'd like to share some thoughts on these different searches, where they work well, where they don't, and how we can improve them.

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: Christoph Berg
The debian-ha group was pretty much MIA during the jessie release cycle, so the release missed pacemaker, rendering existing HA setups un-upgradeable. In the meantime, a new group has formed. This BoF discusses the current state of the HA stack and the next steps to take.

Speaker: Olly Betts
Xapian is used to provide fast search in several parts of the Debian infrastructure (lists.d.o, packages.d.o, search.d.o, wiki.d.o, debtags.d.n) and is also used by dozens of packages in the archive, from aptitude to zeitgeist-core. It's installed on 95% of machines reporting to popcon. This BoF is an opportunity for the maintainers and developers of these packages and services to get together and discuss all things Xapian.

Speaker: Enrico Zini
Front Desk members, Debian Account Managers, Application Managers, current or prospective New Member applicants are invited to ask questions, tell stories and exchange tips about everything related to handing out Debian Developer hats.

Speakers: Bdale Garbee, Didier Raboud, Andi Barth, Steve Langasek, Keith Packard
An opportunity to meet the members of the Debian Technical Committee who are in attendance at Debconf, hear the status of open issues, and discuss pending and future issues with the committee.

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.

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: 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: 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?

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Carsten Schönert
The talk will give an compressed overview on the current state of Icedove and related packages, the work of the maintainers on Icedove in the last years, current problems and issues, also a short overview about the future planes for Icedove in Debian.

Speaker: Wookey
Discussion of the state of Multiarch, Crossbuilding, Bootstrapping, and Cross-toolchains in Debian. There has been good progress in these areas recently, but numerous issues remain, such as Multiarch dpkg/apt/aptitude inconsistencies, cross-dependencies, and how Cross-toolchains in the archive should look. Not everyone is interested in all of this so the session will be spit into chunks: 11:00 Multiarch 13:00 Crossbuilding and bootstraping 15:00 Cross-toolchain packaging Agenda: Multiarch things: * Multiarch (not!) in Policy * dpkg/apt/aptitude inconsistencies * cross-dependencies * bootstrapping-related issues * embedded interpreter problem Agreement on the correct interpretations of some things is needed: 1) if a package foo with arch:A depends on bar:any where bar is m-a:no and arch:A, is that dependency satisfied? 2) Do we accept https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/InterpreterProposal? If not what should we do instead? 3) Should we declare 666772 (apt cross-build-dep handling should be liberal with Arch: all packages) wontfix officially (and document corollary) ? Crossbuilding: General roadmap - what still needs doing? Feedback from users on what we have so far is very welcome. * Cross-dependencies * Multiarching more packages * toolchain support packages * Cmake crossing - state? * Using build profiles * sbuild issues * Documentation Bootstrapping Followup from Helmut's talk on Monday. Cross-Toolchains gcc-5 uses -cross standalone packages gcc-4.9 uses wdotap multiarch packages * Everyone happy with standalone packages? * Should cross-toolchains be multibbed? * What set of toolchains should be pre-built in the archive? * What about toolchains not provided as binaries? Cross-gcc source-generator OK? * What ancilliary packages are needed? Full details in gobby document on gobby.debian.org in the path debconf15/bof/Multiarch-Crossbuilding-Bootstrap-Toolchains

Speaker: Michael Banck
Both Debian squeeze and the PostgreSQL version it ships with (8.4) were discontinued in Summer 2014. To support squeeze-lts, credativ GmbH has maintained a LTS branch of PostgreSQL 8.4, backpatching applicable changes from the next-younger branch (9.0). So far, three releases have been made on the same day or shortly after the official point releases by the PostgreSQL community. Those releases were then uploaded to squeeze-lts. This short talk will present the PostgreSQL-LTS effort, which policies were set and what problems we had during the project.

Speaker: Piotr Ożarowski
any Python related topics

Speaker: Riku Voipio
The standard method for installing Debian is using debian-installer. However, there is considerable demand for ready Debian images for a large range of purposes. People want computers pre-installed with debian, live CD's for demos, cloud images for virtual machines, sd-card images for embedded boards. There is also growing interest in non-bootable images for containers. Debian main archive carries almost a dozen different tools for creating images - and outside debian there are dozens of others. All tools tend to use debootstrap as their, base, and add a bunch of common things on top - typically set up partition, filesystem, bootloader, default user and credentials, and possibly a custom kernel. This talk explores the available methods and their use cases. I intend to look if there is room for consolidation in image creation tools, and how improve the quality and safety of prebuilt Debian images floating in the internet.

Speaker: Daniel Kahn Gillmor
Members of the GnuPG packaging team, upstream, and anyone else interested are welcome to come to discuss outstanding work, divvy up tasks, and get things done.

Speaker: David Kalnischkies
Package management is a solved problem. Everyone knows how it works, nothing ever changes and there are enormous teams maintaining the tools involved which many people use and complain about everyday. In short: Fun is to be had elsewhere - or is it? Confessions of an apt developer about the past, present and future of APT, the super cow powers in it and why you might want to care.

Speaker: Alexander Wirt
This talk wants to give an overview about the current state of affairs about lists.debian.org. Where are we? - some statistics - problems - features not everyone is familiar with Where do we want to go to? - DMARC - Spamhandling - We need help - New search frontend - Other planned Improvements

Speaker: Antonio Terceiro
The anual gathering of the Ruby team, to discuss all things Ruby in Debian.

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

Speaker: Steve SCHNEPP
With Munin, we are lucky to have very nice packager relationships, specially with Debian. It has several advantages, but also some hidden drawbacks. This is to list & help addressing them.

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

Speaker: Gregor Herrmann
The pkg-perl team will again take the opportunity to meet in person for discussing current topics and planning future work. Items for discussion and work are collected at http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianPerlGroup/OpenTasks

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: 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: 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: Lucas Nussbaum
Over the recent years, a number of packaging tools have been improved to include "automated packaging" features, to facilitate the packaging of software also distributed through CPAN, Pypi, rubygems, etc. The goal of this BOF is to discuss the existing tools, discover opportunities for improvements in each tool, and opportunities for collaboration between those tools.

Speakers: Paul Wise, Steve McIntyre
We will share knowledge about wiki work and do some work on the wiki, probably in these areas: * existing bug reports * known issues * moin bug reports/etc * wiki pages about the wiki * general wiki content Please join us if you would like to help out with the wiki or learn more about it. If there is enough interest we may hold more sessions.

Speaker: Andi Barth
Current state and updates about the buildd / wanna-build infrastructure / system (and discussion - this is a BoF)

Speakers: Helmut Grohne, Mattia Rizzolo, Holger Levsen
Defining what need's to be done to move jenkins.debian.net to DSA maintenance jenkins.debian.net exists since more than 2.5 years now and has been proven useful to many teams since them. To ensure its future it should be moved to a DSA maintained .debian.org machine with the Jenkins setup being under team maintence by a group of people. This session should ideally come up with a list whats needs to be done, and probably bugs filed to track them.