Part 1 - Debconf 2014
This year I went to my first
Debconf, which took place in Portland, OR during the last week of August 2014. All in all I have to rate my experience as very enlightening and in the end quite fun.
First of all, it was a little daunting to go to a conference in 1 - A city I d never been to before; 2 - A conference with 300+ people, only 3 of which I knew and even then I only knew them virtually. Not to mention I was in the presence of some extremely brilliant and known contirbutors in the Debian community which was somewhat intimidating. Just to give you an idea,
Linus Torvalds showed up for a Q&A session last Friday morning! Jealous? Actually I missed that too. It was kind of a last minute thing, booked for coincidentally the exact time I d be flying out of Portland. I found out about it much too late. But luckily for me and maybe you, the session was filmed and can be seen
here. Isn t that a treat?
Point made, there are lots of really talented people there, both techies and non-techies. It s easy to feel you re out of league, at least I did. But I d highly encourage you to ignore such feelings if you re ever in the same situation. Debian has been built on for a long time now, but although a lot has been done, a lot still needs to be done. The Debian community is very welcoming of new contributors and users, regardless of the level of expertise. So far I haven t been snubbed by anyone. To the contrary, all my interactions with the Debian community members has been extremely positive.
So go ahead and attend the meetings and presentations, even if you think it s not your area of expertise. Debconf was organized (or at least this one was) as a series of talks, meet ups and ad hoc sessions, some of which occured simultaneously. The sessions were all about different components of the Debian universe, from presenting new features to overviews of accomplishments to discussing issues and how to fix them. A schedule with the location and description of each session was posted on the
Debconf wiki. Sometimes none of the sessions at a certain time was on a topic I knew very much about. But I d sit in anyways. There s no rule to attending the sessions, no minimum qualifications required. You ll likely learn something new and you just might find out there is something you can do to contribute. There are also hackathons that are quite the thing or so I heard. Or you could walk about and meet new people, do some networking.
I have to say networking was the highlight of the Debconf for me. Remember I said I knew about 3 people who were at the conference? Well, I had actually just corresponded with those people. I didn t really
know them. So on my first day I spent quite some time shyly peeking at people s name tags, trying to recognize someone I had met over email or IRC. But with 300 or so people at the conference, I was unsuccessful. So I finally gave up on that strategy and walked up to a random person, stuck out my hand and said, Hi. My name is Juliana. This is my first Debconf. What s your name and what do you do for Debian? This may not be according to protocol, but it worked for me. I got to meet lots of people that way, met some Debian contributos from my home country (Brazil), some from my current city (NYC), and yet others that had similar interests as I do who I might work with in the near future. For example, I love Machine Learning, I m currently beginning my graduate studies on that track. Several Debian contributors offered to introduce me to a well known Machine Learning researcher and Debian contributor who is in NYC. Others had tried out
JSCommunicator and had lots of suggestions for new features and fixes, or wanted to know more about the project and WebRTC in general. Also, not everyone there is a super experienced Debian contributor or user. There are a lot of newbies like me.
I got to do a quick 20-min presentation and demo of the work I had done on JSCommunicator during GSoC 2014. Oh my goodness that was nerve-wracking, but not half as painful as I expected. My mentor (
Daniel Pocock) wisely suggested that when confronted with a question I didn t know how to answer, to redirect the question to to the audience. Chances are, there is someone there that knows the answer. If not, it will at least spark a good discussion.
When meeting new people at Debian, a question almost everyone asked is How did you start working with/for Debian? . So I thought it would be a good topic to post about.
Part 2 - How I Became a Debian Contributor
Sometime in late October of 2013 (I think) I received an email from one of my professors at
UNIRIO forwarding a description of the
Outreach Program for Women. OPW is a program organized by the
GNOME which endeavors to get more women involved in FOSS. OPW is similar to
Google Summer of Code; you work remotely from home, guided by an assigned mentor. Debian was one of the 8 participating organizations that year. There was a list of project proposals which I perused, a few of them caught my eye and these projects were all Debian. I d already been a fan of FOSS before. I had used the Ubuntu and Debian OS, I d migrated to
GIMP from Photoshop and to
Open Office from Microsoft Office, for example. I d strongly advocated the use of some of my prefered open source apps and programs to my friends and family. But I hadn t ever contributed to a FOSS project.
There s no time like the present, so I reached out the the mentor responsible for one of the projects I was interested in,
Daniel Pocock. Daniel guided me through making a small contribution to a FOSS project, which serves as a token demonstration of my abilities and is part of the application process. I added a small feature to
JMXetric and suggested a fix for an
issue in the
xTuple project. Actually, I had forgotten about this. Recently I made another
contribution to xTuple, it s funny to see things come full circle. I also had to write a profile-ish description of my experience and how I intended on contributing during OPW on the Debian wiki, if you d like you can check it out
here.
I wouldn t follow my example to a T, because in the end I didn t make the OPW selection. Actually, I take that back. The fact I wasn t chosen for OPW that year doesn t mean I was incompetent or incapable of making a valuable contribution. OPW and GSoC do not have unlimited resources; they can t include everyone they d like to. They receive thousands of proposals from very talented engineers and not everyone can participate at a given moment. But even though I wasn t selected, like I said, I could still pitch in. It s good to keep in mind that people usually aren t paid to contribute to FOSS. It s usually volunteer based, which I think is one of the beauties of the FOSS community and in my opinion one of the causes of it s success and great quality. People contribute because they
want to, not because they
have to.
I will say I was a little disappointed at not being chosen. But after being reassured that this rejection wasn t due to any lack on my part, I decided to continue contributing to the Debian project I d applied to. I was begining the final semester of my undergraduate studies which included writing a thesis. To be able to focus on my thesis and graduate on time, I d stopped working temporarily and was studying full time. But I didn t want to lose practice and contributing to a FOSS project is a great way to stay in coding shape while doing something
useful. So continue contributing I did.
It paid off. I gained experience, added value to a FOSS project and I think my previous contributions added weight to the application I later made for GSoC 2014. I passed this time. To be honest, I really wasn t counting on it. Actually, I was certain I wouldn t pass for some reason - insecure much? But with GSoC I wasn t too anxious about it as I was with the OPW application because by then, I was already hooked . I d learned about all the
benefits of becoming a FOSS contributor and I wasn t stopping anytime soon. I had every intention of still working on my FOSS project with or without GSoC. GSoC 2014 ended a week ago (August 18th 2014). There s a list of things I still want to do with JSCommunicator and you can be sure I ll keep working on them.
P.S. This is not to say that programs like OPW and GSoC aren t amazing programs. Try it out if you can, it s really a great experience.
Before I start a short listing of (some of) the stuff I did during Debconf 14, I d like to say how much I enjoyed everyone there. You guys (all of you, really!) are just awesome, and it s always a real pleasure to see you all, each time.
Anyway, here s a bits of the stuff I did.
1/ packaging of Google Cloud Engine client tools.
Thanks to the presence of Eric and Jimmy, I was able to finish the work I started at Debconf 13 last year. All python modules are packaged and uploaded. Only the final client (the gcloud command line utility) isn t uploaded, even though it s already packaged. The reason is that this client downloads stuff from internet, so I need to get the full, bundled, version of it, to avoid this. Eric gave me the link, I just didn t have time to finish it yet. Though the (unfinished) package is already in the Git in Alioth.
2/ Tasksel talks
We discussed improvements in Tasksel both during the conference, and later (in front of beers ). I was able to add a custom task on a modified version of the Tasksel package for my own use. I volunteered myself for adding a more task option in Tasksel for Jessie+1 because I really would like to see this feature, and nobody raised hand, but honestly, I have no idea how to do it, and therefore, I m not sure I ll be able to do so. We ll see Anyway, before this happen, we must make sure that we know what kind of tasks we want in this more tasks screen, otherwise it d be useless work for nothing. Therefore, I have setup a wiki page. Please edit the page and drop your ideas there. I ve already added entries for desktops and Debian blends, but I m sure there s more that we could add.
3/ Custom Debian CD
I started experimentation on building my own Debian Wheezy CD image (well, DVD, since the resulting image is nearly 2GB). This was fun, but I am still having the issue that the installer fails to install Dash, so the CD is still unusable. I ll try to debug it. Oh I nearly forgot of course , the ISO image aims at including all OpenStack Icehouce packages backported to Wheezy, and the goal was to include the above custom Tasksel task, with an OpenStack proxy node task, and a OpenStack compute task. Let s hope I can figure out what the issue is, and finally release it.
4/ OpenStack talk
Nothing special to say, just watch the video. I hope my talk was interesting enough. Of course, after watching myself, I hate everything I see, and would like to correct so many mistakes, but that s the usual, I guess.
5/ Some RC fixing
Thanks to the nice work of our DPL rebuilding all the archive, I had to fix a couple of FTBFS issues on my own packages. 3 of them have been easy to fix (2 missing build-dependencies which I missed because my automated build environment has them by default, and a unit test failure), I still don t understand what s going on with Ceilometer. I also NMU-ed transmission (switching from 2.82 to 2.84, as upstream had the bugfix, and current maintainer was not responsive) which was the last blocker for the miniupnpc transition to Jessie. After the 5 days delay of the upload, it went in Sid, then migrated to Jessie, together with the miniupnpc library. I also fixed a trivial RC bug with python3-webob.
6/ Python team meeting
It was nice to see everyone, and hopefully, we ll soon implement what we discussed. I hope to start migrating some of my OpenStack dependencies to the team once we move to Git (though please don t expect this to happen before the Juno release, which keeps me very busy these days).
There s probably more stuff which I did during Debconf 14 (hacking or otherwise), but either it s not worth sharing, or I can t remember :)
Bluetooth network error.
I think it's a network-manager feature to be able to use bluetooth tethering.
I think it's a network-manager bug that when bluetooth tethering fails due to some error, and does not report that error.
Yesterday I finally figured out what was going wrong after staring at hcidump. It was obvious after I did. I've reset my tablet so bluetooth PIN was wrong. If only the GUI told me that.
Debian remains to be my favorite distribution, however there s one thing that s missing, that thing is called PPA.
There were numerous discussions on this topic inside of Debian, but AFAIK without any visible movement. Thus, I decided to publish a utility I ve been using for some time now.
PPA s
Since its introduction, PPA s are exclusively connected to Ubuntu and its derivatives (Mint, Elementary, etc ). But over time, a number of interesting projects appeared whose whole development is happening inside of PPA s. To name few, I m talking about TLP, Geary, Oracle Java Installer, Elementary OS and etc Some of these projects are in WNPP without much happening for a long time, i.e: 
A few days ago I watched a 
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I have two classes of servers:
With 
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Tryton
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Howdy y all
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Public Jenkins packages
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== Getting the basics
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