Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

Speaker: Raphaël Hertzog
Almost anybody will acknowledge that maintaining 18000 software packages secure over 5 years is a challenge and even more so in the context of Debian where most volunteers tend to skip the parts that are not fun. Still the story of the Debian LTS team shows that it is possible. This talk will explain how we got started and where we are today.

Speaker: Jan-Marek Glogowski
Technically started in 2005, Munich's LiMux project was officially and successfully finished in 2013; albeit with a long delay, compared to our initial project plan, as much more work croped up. Nevertheless the work on our Linux client(s) continues. New releases get rolled out, bugs get fixed and new features are implemented to improve the client, adapt it to the changing needs of the municipal IT, and support our users. This talk will put the spotlight on the current situation and does a quick glance on the history, the technical tools used to manage our 33 000 users and 18 000 clients and a little future outlook.

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: Nicolas Dandrimont
This year's GSoC students have worked on various projects all summer, and DebConf is a great opportunity for them to present a summary and let the community look at their work. The full program will be published in due time, but we expect around six short presentations.

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: 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.