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DebConf14 final report
The Final Report for DebConf14 is complete and the DebConf team proudly presents it to the world.
DebConf14, which was held in Portland, Oregon, USA, in August 2014, was a big success. Our final report captures the essence of this year’s conference in pictures and words:
- talks and how we selected them
- face-to-face meetings and their effect on building trust
- events such as the day trip or the infamous cheese and wine party
- the university venue
- a selection of attendee’s impressions
And of course there are numbers, budget, and statistics.
Read, enjoy, and share!
The DebConf team
Wrapping up DebConf14
The annual Debian developer meeting took place in Portland, Oregon, 23 to 31 August 2014. DebConf14 attendees participated in talks, discussions, workshops and programming sessions. Video teams captured a lot of the main talks and discussions for streaming for interactive attendees and for the Debian video archive.
Between the video, presentations, and handouts the coverage came from the attendees in blogs, posts, and project updates. We’ve gathered a few articles for your reading pleasure:
Gregor Herrmann and a few members of the Debian Perl group had an informal unofficial pkg-perl micro-sprint and were very productive.
Vincent Sanders shared an inspired gift in the form of a plaque given to Russ Allbery in thanks for his tireless work of keeping sanity in the Debian mailing lists. Pictures of the plaque and design scheme are linked in the post. Vincent also shared his experiences of the conference and hopes the organisers have recovered.
Noah Meyerhans’ adventuring to Debian by train, (Inter)netted some interesting IPv6 data for future road and railwarriors.
Hideki Yamane sent a gentle reminder for English speakers to speak more slowly.
Daniel Pocock posted of GSoC talks at DebConf14, highlights include the Java Project Dependency Builder and the WebRTC JSCommunicator.
Thomas Goirand gives us some insight into a working task list of accomplishments and projects he was able to complete at DebConf14, from the OpenStack discussion to tasksel talks, and completion of some things started last year at DebConf13.
Antonio Terceiro blogged about debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project, Ruby, Redmine, and Noosfero. His post also shares the atmosphere of being able to interact directly with peers once a year.
Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about a talk he did on debsources which now has its own HACKING file.
Juliana Louback penned: DebConf 2014 and How I Became a Debian Contributor.
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph’s in-depth summary of DebConf14 is a great read. She discussed Debian Validation & CI, debci and the Continuous Integration project, Automated Validation in Debian using LAVA, and Outsourcing webapp maintenance.
Lucas Nussbaum by way of a blog post releases the very first version of Debian Trivia modelled after the TCP/IP Drinking Game.
François Marier’s shares additional information and further discussion on Outsourcing your webapp maintenance to Debian.
Joachim Breitner gave a talk on Haskell and Debian, created a new tool for binNMUs for Haskell packages which runs via cron job. The output is available for Haskell and for OCaml, and he still had a small amount of time to go dancing.
Jaldhar Harshad Vyas was not able to attend DebConf this year, but he did tune in to the videos made available by the video team and gives an insightful viewpoint to what was being seen.
Jérémy Bobbio posted about Reproducible builds in Debian in his recap of DebConf14. One of the topics at hand involved defining a canonical path where packages must be built and a BOF discussion on reproducible builds from where the conversation moved to discussions in both Octave and Groff. New helpers dh_fixmtimes and dh_genbuildinfo were added to BTS. The .buildinfo format has been specified on the wiki and reviewed. Lots of work is being done in the project, interested parties can help with the TODO list or join the new IRC channel #debian-reproducible on irc.debian.org.
Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the d-i / debian-cd BoF at DC14, with some of the session video available online. Current jessie D-I needs some help with the testing on less common architectures and languages, and release scheduling could be improved. Future plans: Switching to a GUI by default for jessie, a default desktop and desktop choice, artwork, bug fixes and new architecture support. debian-cd: Things are working well. Improvement discussions are on selecting which images to make I.E. netinst, DVD, et al., debian-cd in progress with http download support, Regular live test builds, Other discussions and questions revolve around which ARM platforms to support, specially-designed images, multi-arch CDs, and cloud-init based images. There is also a call for help as the team needs help with testing, bug-handling, and translations.
Holger Levsen reports on feedback about the feedback from his LTS talk at DebConf14. LTS has been perceived well, fits a demand, and people are expecting it to continue; however, this is not without a few issues as Holger explains in greater detail the lacking gatekeeper mechanisms, and how contributions are needed from finance to uploads. In other news the security-tracker is now fixed to know about old stable. Time is short for that fix as once jessie is released the tracker will need to support stable, oldstable which will be wheezy, and oldoldstable.
Jonathan McDowell’s summary of DebConf14 includes a fair perspective of the host city and the benefits of planning of a good DebConf14 location. He also talks about the need for facetime in the Debian project as it correlates with and improves everyone’s ability to work together. DebConf14 also provided the chance to set up a hard time frame for removing older 1024 bit keys from Debian keyrings.
Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the “State of the ARM” BoF at DebConf14 with updates on the 3 current ports armel, armhf and arm64. armel which targets the ARM EABI soft-float ARMv4t processor may eventually be going away, while armhf which targets the ARM EABI hard-float ARMv7 is doing well as the cross-distro standard. Debian is has moved to a single armmp kernel flavour using Device Tree Blobs and should be able to run on a large range of ARMv7 hardware. The arm64 port recently entered the main archive and it is hoped to release with jessie with 2 official builds hosted at ARM. There is talk of laptop development with an arm64 CPU. Buildds and hardware are mentioned with acknowledgements for donated new machines, Banana Pi boards, and software by way of ARM’s DS-5 Development Studio - free for all Debian Developers. Help is needed! Join #debian-arm on irc.debian.org and/or the debian-arm mailing list. There is an upcoming Mini-DebConf in November 2014 hosted by ARM in Cambridge, UK.
Tianon Gravi posted about the atmosphere and contrast between an average conference and a DebConf.
Joseph Bisch posted about meeting his GSOC mentors, attending and contributing to a keysigning event and did some work on debmetrics which is powering metrics.debian.net. Debmetrics provides a uniform interface for adding, updating, and viewing various metrics concerning Debian.
Harlan Lieberman-Berg’s DebConf Retrospective shared the feel of DebConf, and detailed some of the work on debugging a build failure, work with the pkg-perl team on a few uploads, and work on a javascript slowdown issue on codeeditor.
Ana Guerrero López reflected on Ten years contributing to Debian.
Full video coverage for DebConf14 talks
We are happy to announce that live video streams will be available for talks and discussion meetings in DebConf14. Recordings will be posted soon after the events. You can also interact with other local and remote attendees by joining the IRC channels which are listed at the streams page.
For people who want to view the streams outside a webbrowser, the page for each room lists direct links to the streams.
More information on the streams and the various possibilities offered is available at DebConf Videostreams.
The schedule of talks is available at DebConf 14 Schedule.
Thanks to our amazing video volunteers for making it possible. If you like the video coverage, please add a thank you note to VideoTeam Thanks
Welcome to DebConf
Welcome to Portland, the City of Roses! You may find it helpful to grab a copy of the Campus Map. A few key locations:
- Main conference venue is (for registration, sessions, and daytime hacklabs) on the 3rd floor of the Smith Memorial Student Union building at SW Broadway & SW Harrison.
- Dorms are The Broadway (SW 6th and SW Jackson) and Ondine (SW 6th and SW College). Check in at The Broadway on the 2nd floor (Suite 210).
- Night hacklabs are on the second floors of both Broadway and Ondine residence halls.
- Sponsored meals are served in the Ondine cafe at SW 6th and SW College.
- Show your badge at Olé Latte Coffee (food cart) on SW 5th & SW Harrison, to get free drop coffee, espresso, and loose leaf tea, 10% off other drinks and food, and an additional $1 off coffee drinks for the first 200 people every day. Open Weekdays 9-12 and 3-4, and Sat-Sun 9-1:30.
- There will be yoga at on the 2nd floor of The Broadway residence at 7am on the 25th & 25th, and 28th & 29th. Sign up in advance on the wiki.
Talks review and selection process.
Today we finished the talk selection process. We are very grateful to everyone who decided to submit talks and events for DebConf14.
If you have submitted an event, please check your email :). If you have not received any confirmation regarding your talk status, please contact us on talks@debconf.org
During the selection process, we bore in mind the number of talk slots during the conference, as well as maintaining a balance among the different submitted topics. We are pleased to announce that we have received a total of 115 events, of which 80 have been approved (69%). Approval means your event will be scheduled during the conference and you will have video coverage.
The list of approved talks can be found on the following link: https://summit.debconf.org/debconf14/all/
If you got an email telling your talk have being approved, and your talk is not listed, don’t panic. Check the status on summit, and make sure to select a track, if you have some track suggestions please mail us and tell us about it.
This year, we expect to also have a sort of “unconference” schedule. This will take place during the designated “hacking time”. During that time the talks rooms will be empty, and ad hoc meetings can be scheduled on-site while we are in the Conference. The method for booking a room for your ad hoc meeting will be decided and announced later, but is expected to be flexible (i.e: open scheduling board / 1 day or less in advance booking), Please don’t abuse the system: bear in mind the space will be limited, and only book your event if you gather enough people to work on your idea.
Please make sure to read the email regarding your talk. :) and prepare yourself.
Time is ticking and we will be happy to meet you in Portland.
DebConf13 final report
The DebConf team is pleased to announce the release of the DebConf13 Final Report. It’s a 32-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes words from the Debian Project Leader, descriptions of talks, a section about the Debian Birthday Party, attendee impressions, budgeting and DebConf13 in numbers. If you attended Debconf13, the report may refresh some of your memories and bring you closer to the organization team work. If not, it will certainly encourage you to be part of future Debian events.
We thank the Matanel foundation, Google, the Republic and Canton of Neuchâtel, and all other DebConf13 sponsors for their support that made the event possible.
The DebConf team
DebConf13 is now over
Copyright © 2004 - 2013 Michal Čihař.
After two incredible weeks here in Vaumarcus, the awesome team of DebConf volunteers and organizers is getting his latest lunch from Le Camp after having spent the morning tyding the venue.
This DebConf made more than hundred scheduled hours of talks, BoFs and meetings possible and brought more than 300 attendees together from all around the world. Live video coverage for two talk rooms during six days, eight kilograms of powder sugar for the Debian Birthday cake icing and thousands of smiling faces made this DebConf the awesome week it’s been.
The view is really fantastic from here! Thanks for all the fish!
We look forward to meeting everyone in 2014 at the next DebConf in Portland!
The DebConf team
DebConf13 video recordings and hires streams
This is just a quick update about the video streams of DebConf13 which are available at the following URLs:
- Main talk room, chat on #debconf-talkroom1 on irc.debian.org
- Second talk room, #debconf-talkroom2
- hires streams, with special thanks to Sesse and pkern
- video recordings - already has files up to yesterday!
/me bows to this is pretty fantatic results - and, the view is also fantastic! Especially from down at the lake :-)
P.S.: I’ve you missed some technical details in the systemd talk from Lennart, these are probably in here.
DebConf13 video streams
This is just a quick note that the video streams of DebConf13 will be available at the following URLs:
- Main talk room, chat on #debconf-talkroom1 on irc.debian.org
- Second talk room, guess what - #debconf-talkroom2 it is.
DebConf13 preliminary schedule available
We are happy to announce that the schedule for the upcoming DebConf13 in Vaumarcus, Switzerland, is available! It is still possible for some changes to occur, as we always try to accept new proposals, even those submitted during the conference.
DebConf13 talks will mostly happen in two rooms simultaneously, except for a few plenaries which will be presented in the main room with no parallel event. A third room will be available for discussion groups and ad-hoc sessions. As usual, we’ve tried to cluster related activities in sequence, even though it was not always possible. Besides that there will be many tracks covering specific topics, which are:
- Debian for the cloud
- Building and porting
- Community outreach
- Real time communications
- Debian blends and derivatives
- Quality assurance
- Debian boot
- Debian in education
- Debian teams
There will also be two special tracks, since DebConf is not only about hacking, talks and discussions:
- Social activities, which includes a poetry night, the traditional cheese and wine party, our group photo, a day trip, the conference dinner etc.
- Debian 20th birthday, an event open to the general public to celebrate Debian’s 20th birthday (details to come soon!).
As in previous years, we provide various ways to access the schedule:
- Plain nice html export, available for everyone without needing a login.
- The same as above, for people registered in our “Pentabarf” conference management system: This one has one extra feature compared to the non-login version: You can rate an event and its speaker(s) after you attended it. Please take the opportunity to do so, your feedback is very important both for the speaker(s) and for the organizing team!
- An iCal file
- An xCal file
- An XML file
— the DebConf team
