(I wrote this up for an internal work post, but I figure it s worth sharing more publicly too.) I spent last week at DebConf23, this years instance of the annual Debian conference, which was held in Kochi, India. As usual, DebConf provides a good reason to see a new part of the world; I ve been going since 2004 (Porto Alegre, Brazil), and while I ve missed a few (Mexico, Bosnia, and Switzerland) I ve still managed to make it to instances on 5 continents. This has absolutely nothing to do with work, so I went on my own time + dime, but I figured a brief write-up might prove of interest. I first installed Debian back in 1999 as a machine that was being co-located to operate as a web server / email host. I was attracted by the promise of easy online upgrades (or, at least, upgrades that could be performed without the need to be physically present at the machine, even if they naturally required a reboot at some point). It has mostly delivered on this over the years, and I ve never found a compelling reason to move away. I became a Debian Developer in 2000. As a massively distributed volunteer project DebConf provides an opportunity to find out what s happening in other areas of the project, catch up with team mates, and generally feel more involved and energised to work on Debian stuff. Also, by this point in time, a lot of Debian folk are good friends and it s always nice to catch up with them. On that point, I felt that this year the hallway track was not quite the same as usual. For a number of reasons (COVID, climate change, travel time, we re all getting older) I think fewer core teams are achieving critical mass at DebConf - I was the only member physically present from 2 teams I m involved in, and I d have appreciated the opportunity to sit down with both of them for some in-person discussions. It also means it s harder to use DebConf as a venue for advancing major changes; previously having all the decision makers in the same space for a week has meant it s possible to iron out the major discussion points, smoothing remote implementation after the conference. I m told the mini DebConfs are where it s at for these sorts of meetings now, so perhaps I ll try to attend at least one of those next year. Of course, I also went to a bunch of talks. I have differing levels of comment about each of them, but I ve written up some brief notes below about the ones I remember something about. The comment was made that we perhaps had a lower level of deep technical talks, which is perhaps true but I still think there were a number of high level technical talks that served to pique ones interest about the topic. Finally, this DebConf was the first I m aware of that was accompanied by tragedy; as part of the day trip Abraham Raji, a project member and member of the local team, was involved in a fatal accident.

Talks (videos not yet up for all, but should appear for most)

• Opening Ceremony
  Not much to say here; welcome to DebConf!
• Continuous Key-Signing Party introduction
  I ended up running this, as Gunnar couldn t make it. Debian makes heavy use of the OpenPGP web of trust (no mass ability to send out Yubikeys + perform appropriate levels of identity verification), so making sure we re appropriately cross-signed, and linked to local conference organisers, is a dull but important part of the conference. We use a modified keysigning approach where identity verification + fingerprint confirmation happens over the course of the conference, so this session was just to explain how that works and confirm we were all working from the same fingerprint list.
• State of Stateless - A Talk about Immutability and Reproducibility in Debian
  Stateless OSes seem to be gaining popularity, so I went along to this to see if there was anything of note. It was interesting, but nothing earth shattering - very high level.
• What s missing so that Debian is finally reproducible?
  Reproducible builds are something I ve been keeping an eye on for a long time, and I continue to be impressed by the work folks are putting into this - both for Debian, and other projects. From a security standpoint reproducible builds provide confidence against trojaned builds, and from a developer standpoint knowing you can build reproducibly helps with not having to keep a whole bunch of binary artefacts around.
• Hello from keyring-maint
  In the distant past the process of getting your OpenPGP key into the Debian keyring (which is used to authenticate uploads + votes, amongst other things) was a clunky process that was often stalled. This hasn t been the case for at least the past 10 years, but there s still a residual piece of project memory that thinks keyring is a blocker. So as a team we say hi and talk about the fact we do monthly updates and generally are fairly responsive these days.
• A declarative approach to Linux networking with Netplan
  Debian s /etc/network/interfaces is a fairly basic (if powerful) mechanism for configuring network interfaces. NetworkManager is a better bet for dynamic hosts (i.e. clients), and systemd-network seems to be a good choice for servers (I m gradually moving machines over to it). Netplan tries to provide a unified mechanism for configuring both with a single configuration language. A noble aim, but I don t see a lot of benefit for anything I use - my NetworkManager hosts are highly dynamic (so no need to push shared config) and systemd-network (or /etc/network/interfaces) works just fine on the other hosts. I m told Netplan has more use with more complicated setups, e.g. when OpenVSwitch is involved.
• Quick peek at ZFS, A too good to be true file system and volume manager.
  People who use ZFS rave about it. I m naturally suspicious of any file system that doesn t come as part of my mainline kernel. But, as a longtime cautious mdraid+lvm+ext4 user I appreciate that there have been advances in the file system space that maybe I should look at, and I ve been trying out btrfs on more machines over the past couple of years. I can t deny ZFS has a bunch of interesting features, but nothing I need/want that I can t get from an mdraid+lvm+btrfs stack (in particular data checksumming + reflinks for dedupe were strong reasons to move to btrfs over ext4).
• Bits from the DPL
  Exactly what it says on the tin; some bits from the DPL.
• Adulting
  Enrico is always worth hearing talk; Adulting was no exception. Main takeaway is that we need to avoid trying to run the project on martyrs and instead make sure we build a sustainable project. I ve been trying really hard to accept I just don t have time to take on additional responsibilities, no matter how interesting or relevant they might seem, so this resonated.
• My life in git, after subversion, after CVS.
  Putting all of your home directory in revision control. I ve never made this leap; I ve got some Ansible playbooks that push out my core pieces of configuration, which is held in git, but I don t actually check this out directly on hosts I have accounts on. Interesting, but not for me.
• EU Legislation BoF - Cyber Resilience Act, Product Liability Directive and CSAM Regulation
  The CRA seems to be a piece of ill informed legislation that I m going to have to find time to read properly. Discussion was a bit more alarmist than I personally feel is warranted, but it was a short session, had a bunch of folk in it, and even when I removed my mask it was hard to make myself understood.
• What s new in the Linux kernel (and what s missing in Debian)
  An update from Ben about new kernel features. I m paying less attention to such things these days, so nice to get a quick overview of it all.
• Intro to SecureDrop, a sort-of Linux distro
  Actually based on Ubuntu, but lots of overlap with Debian as a result, and highly customised anyway. Notable, to me, for using OpenPGP as some of the backend crypto support. I managed to talk to Kunal separately about some of the pain points around that, which was an interesting discussion - they re trying to move from GnuPG to Sequoia, primarily because of the much easier integration and lack of requirement for the more complicated GnuPG features that sometimes get in the way.
• The Docker(.io) ecosystem in Debian
  I hate Docker. I m sure it s fine if you accept it wants to take over the host machine entirely, but when I ve played around with it that s not been the case. This talk was more about the difficulty of trying to keep a fast moving upstream with lots of external dependencies properly up to date in a stable release. Vendoring the deps and trying to get a stable release exception seems like the least bad solution, but it s a problem that affects a growing number of projects.
• Chiselled containers
  This was kinda of interesting, but I think I missed the piece about why more granular packaging wasn t an option. The premise is you can take an existing .deb and chisel it into smaller components, which then helps separate out dependencies rather than pulling in as much as the original .deb would. This was touted as being useful, in particular, for building targeted containers. Definitely appealing over custom built userspaces for containers, but in an ideal world I think we d want the information in the main packaging and it becomes a lot of work.
• Debian Contributors shake-up
  Debian Contributors is a great site for massaging your ego around contributions to Debian; it s also a useful point of reference from a data protection viewpoint in terms of information the project holds about contributors - everything is already public, but the Contributors website provides folk with an easy way to find their own information (with various configurable options about whether that s made public or not). T ssia is working on improving the various data feeds into the site, but realistically this is the responsibility of every Debian service owner.
• New Member BOF
  I m part of the teams that help get new folk into Debian - primarily as a member of the New Member Front Desk, but also as a mostly inactive Application Manager. It s been a while since we did one of these sessions so the Front Desk/Debian Account Managers that were present did a panel session. Nothing earth shattering came out of it; like keyring-maint this is a team that has historically had problems, but is currently running smoothly.

Debian Celebrates 30 years! We celebrated our birthday this year and we had a great time with new friends, new members welcomed to the community, and the world. We have collected a few comments, videos, and discussions from around the Internet, and some images from some of the DebianDay2023 events. We hope that you enjoyed the day(s) as much as we did!

"Debian 30 years of collective intelligence" -Maqsuel Maqson Brazil

Pouso Alegre, Brazil

Macei , Brazil

Curitiba, Brazil

The cake is there. :) Honorary Debian Developers: Buzz, Jessie, and Woody welcome guests to this amazing party. Sao Carlos, state of Sao Paulo, Brazil Stickers, and Fliers, and Laptops, oh my! Belo Horizonte, Brazil Bras lia, Brazil Bras lia, Brazil Mexico 30 a os! A quick Selfie We do not encourage beverages on computing hardware, but this one is okay by us. Germany

30 years of love

The German Delegation is also looking for this dog who footed the bill for the party, then left mysteriously.

We took the party outside

We brought the party back inside at CCCamp Belgium

Cake and Diversity in Belgium El Salvador

Food and Fellowship in El Salvador South Africa

Debian is also very delicious!

All smiles waiting to eat the cake Reports Debian Day 30 years in Macei - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in S o Carlos - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Pouso Alegre - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Belo Horizonte - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Curitiba - Brazil Debian Day 30 years in Bras lia - Brazil Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil Articles & Blogs Happy Debian Day - going 30 years strong - Liam Dawe Debian Turns 30 Years Old, Happy Birthday! - Marius Nestor 30 Years of Stability, Security, and Freedom: Celebrating Debian s Birthday - Bobby Borisov Happy 30th Birthday, Debian! - Claudio Kuenzier Debian is 30 and Sgt Pepper Is at Least Ninetysomething - Christine Hall Debian turns 30! -Corbet Thirty years of Debian! - Lennart Hengstmengel Debian marks three decades as 'Universal Operating System' - Sam Varghese Debian Linux Celebrates 30 Years Milestone - Joshua James 30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros - Liam Proven Looking Back on 30 Years of Debian - Maya Posch Cheers to 30 Years of Debian: A Journey of Open Source Excellence - arindam Discussions and Social Media Debian Celebrates 30 Years - Source: News YCombinator Brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian ... Source: News YCombinator Comment: Congrats @debian !!! Happy Birthday! Thank you for becoming a cornerstone of the #opensource world. Here's to decades of collaboration, stability & #software #freedom -openSUSELinux via X (formerly Twitter) Comment: Today we #celebrate the 30th birthday of #Debian, one of the largest and most important cornerstones of the #opensourcecommunity. For this we would like to thank you very much and wish you the best for the next 30 years! Source: X (Formerly Twitter -TUXEDOComputers via X (formerly Twitter) Happy Debian Day! - Source: Reddit.com Video The History of Debian The Beginning - Source: Linux User Space Debian Celebrates 30 years -Source: Lobste.rs Video Debian At 30 and No More Distro Hopping! - LWDW388 - Source: LinuxGameCast Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Debian User Forums Debian Celebrates 30 years! - Source: Linux.org

by Thiago Pezzo, Debian contributor, pt_BR localization team This year's Debian Day was a pretty special one, we are celebrating 30 years! Giving the importance of this event, the Brazilian community planned a very special week. Instead of only local gatherings, we had a week of online talks streamed via Debian Brazil's youtube channel (soon the recordings will be uploaded to our team's peertube instance). Nonetheless the local celebrations happened around the country and one was organized in Pouso Alegre, MG, Brazil, at the Instituto Federal de Educa o, Ci ncia e Tecnologia do Sul de Minas Gerais (IFSULDEMINAS - Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of the South of Minas Gerais). The Institute, as many of its counterparts in Brazil, specializes in professional and technological curricula to high school and undergraduate levels. All public, free and quality education! The event happened on the afternoon of August 16th at the Pouso Alegre campus. Some 30 students from the High School Computer Technician class attended the presentation about the Debian Project and the Free Software movement in general. Everyone had a great time! And afterwards we had some spare time to chat. I would like to thank all people who helped us:

• Professors Michelle Nery and Ismael David Muro (IFSULDEMINAS Pouso Alegre)
• Virginia Cardoso and Melissa de Abreu (IFSULDEMINAS Rector's Office)
• Giovani Ferreira (a DD living in Minas Gerais state)
• Felipe Maia (from Debian S o Paulo - thanks for the posters!)
• Gustavo (a clever young student who made important comments about accessibility - thanks!)
• And a special thanks to all students who attended the presentation, hope to see you again!

Here goes our group photo:

I'm starting a new blog, and instead of going into the technical details on how it's made, or on how I migrated my content from the previous ones, I want focus on why I did it. It's been a while since I have written a blog post. I wanted to get back into it, but also wanted to finally self-host my blog/homepage because I have been let down before. And sadly, I was not let down by a for-profit, privacy invading corporation, but by a free software organization. The sad story of wiki.softwarelivre.org My first blog that was hosted in a blog engine written by me, which was hosted in a TWiki, and later Foswiki instance previously available at wiki.softwarelivre.org, hosted by ASL.org. I was the one who introduced the tool to the organization in the first place. I had come from a previous, very fruitful experience on the use of wikis for creation of educational material while in university, which ultimately led me to become a core TWiki, and then Foswiki developer. In 2004, I had just moved to Porto Alegre, got involved in ASL.org, and there was a demand for a tool like that. 2 years later, I left Porto Alegre, and some time after that the daily operations of ASL.org when it became clear that it was not really prepared for remote participation. I was still maintaing the wiki software and the OS for quite some years after, until I wasn't anymore. In 2016, the server that hosted it went haywire, and there were no backups. A lot of people and free software groups lost their content forever. My blog was the least important content in there. To mention just a few examples, here are some groups that lost their content in there:

• The Brazilian Foswiki user group hosted a bunch of getting started documentation in Portuguese, organized meetings, and coordinated through there.
• GNOME Brazil hosted its homepage there until the moment the server broke.
• The Inkscape Brazil user group had an amazing space there where they shared tutorials, a gallery of user-contributed drawings, and a lot more.

Some of this can still be reached via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but that is only useful for recovering content, not for it to be used by the public. The announced tragedy of softwarelivre.org My next blog after that was hosted at softwarelivre.org, a Noosfero instance also hosted by ASL.org. When it was introduced in 2010, this Noosfero instance became responsible for the main domain softwarelivre.org name. This was a bold move by ASL.org, and was a demonstration of trust in a local free software project, led by a local free software cooperative (Colivre). I was a lead developer in the Noosfero project for a long time, and I was also involved in maintaining that server as well. However, for several years there is little to no investment in maintaining that service. I already expect that it will probably blow up at some point as the wiki did, or that it may be just shut down on purpose. On the responsibility of organizations Today, a large part of wast mot people consider "the internet" is controlled by a handful of corporations. Most popular services on the internet might look like they are gratis (free as in beer), but running those services is definitely not without costs. So when you use services provided by for-profit companies and are not paying for them with money, you are paying with your privacy and attention. Society needs independent organizations to provide alternatives. The market can solve a part of the problem by providing ethical services and charging for them. This is legitimate, and as long as there is transparency about how peoples' data and communications are handled, there is nothing wrong with it. But that only solves part of the problem, as there will always be people who can't afford to pay, and people and communities who can afford to pay, but would rather rely on a nonprofit. That's where community-based services, provided by nonprofits, are also important. We should have more of them, not less. So it makes me worry to realize ASL.org left the community in the dark. Losing the wiki wasn't even the first event of its kind, as the listas.softwarelivre.org mailing list server, with years and years of community communications archived in it, broke with no backups in 2012. I do not intend to blame the ASL.org leadership personally, they are all well meaning and good people. But as an organization, it failed to recognize the importance of this role of service provider. I can even include myself in it: I was member of the ASL.org board some 15 years ago; I was involved in the deployment of both the wiki and Noosfero, the former as a volunteer and the later professionally. Yet, I did nothing to plan the maintenance of the infrastructure going forward. When well meaning organizations fail, people who are not willing to have their data and communications be exploited for profit are left to their own devices. I can afford a virtual private server, and have the technical knowledge to import my old content into a static website generator, so I did it. But what about all the people who can't, or don't? Of course, these organizations have to solve the challenge of being sustainable, and being able to pay professionals to maintain the services that the community relies on. We should be thankful to these organizations, and their leadership needs to recognize the importance of those services, and actively plan for them to be kept alive.

I'm starting a new blog, and instead of going into the technical details on how it's made, or on how I migrated my content from the previous ones, I want to focus on why I did it. It's been a while since I have written a blog post. I wanted to get back into it, but also wanted to finally self-host my blog/homepage because I have been let down before. And sadly, I was not let down by a for-profit, privacy invading corporation, but by a free software organization. The sad story of wiki.softwarelivre.org My first blog that was hosted in a blog engine written by me, which was hosted in a TWiki, and later Foswiki instance previously available at wiki.softwarelivre.org, hosted by ASL.org. I was the one who introduced the tool to the organization in the first place. I had come from a previous, very fruitful experience on the use of wikis for creation of educational material while in university, which ultimately led me to become a core TWiki, and then Foswiki developer. In 2004, I had just moved to Porto Alegre, got involved in ASL.org, and there was a demand for a tool like that. 2 years later, I left Porto Alegre, and some time after that the daily operations of ASL.org when it became clear that it was not really prepared for remote participation. I was still maintaing the wiki software and the OS for quite some years after, until I wasn't anymore. In 2016, the server that hosted it went haywire, and there were no backups. A lot of people and free software groups lost their content forever. My blog was the least important content in there. To mention just a few examples, here are some groups that lost their content in there:

• The Brazilian Foswiki user group hosted a bunch of getting started documentation in Portuguese, organized meetings, and coordinated through there.
• GNOME Brazil hosted its homepage there until the moment the server broke.
• The Inkscape Brazil user group had an amazing space there where they shared tutorials, a gallery of user-contributed drawings, and a lot more.

Some of this can still be reached via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but that is only useful for recovering content, not for it to be used by the public. The announced tragedy of softwarelivre.org My next blog after that was hosted at softwarelivre.org, a Noosfero instance also hosted by ASL.org. When it was introduced in 2010, this Noosfero instance became responsible for the main domain softwarelivre.org name. This was a bold move by ASL.org, and was a demonstration of trust in a local free software project, led by a local free software cooperative (Colivre). I was a lead developer in the Noosfero project for a long time, and I was also involved in maintaining that server as well. However, for several years there is little to no investment in maintaining that service. I already expect that it will probably blow up at some point as the wiki did, or that it may be just shut down on purpose. On the responsibility of organizations Today, a large part of wast mot people consider "the internet" is controlled by a handful of corporations. Most popular services on the internet might look like they are gratis (free as in beer), but running those services is definitely not without costs. So when you use services provided by for-profit companies and are not paying for them with money, you are paying with your privacy and attention. Society needs independent organizations to provide alternatives. The market can solve a part of the problem by providing ethical services and charging for them. This is legitimate, and as long as there is transparency about how peoples' data and communications are handled, there is nothing wrong with it. But that only solves part of the problem, as there will always be people who can't afford to pay, and people and communities who can afford to pay, but would rather rely on a nonprofit. That's where community-based services, provided by nonprofits, are also important. We should have more of them, not less. So it makes me worry to realize ASL.org left the community in the dark. Losing the wiki wasn't even the first event of its kind, as the listas.softwarelivre.org mailing list server, with years and years of community communications archived in it, broke with no backups in 2012. I do not intend to blame the ASL.org leadership personally, they are all well meaning and good people. But as an organization, it failed to recognize the importance of this role of service provider. I can even include myself in it: I was member of the ASL.org board some 15 years ago; I was involved in the deployment of both the wiki and Noosfero, the former as a volunteer and the later professionally. Yet, I did nothing to plan the maintenance of the infrastructure going forward. When well meaning organizations fail, people who are not willing to have their data and communications be exploited for profit are left to their own devices. I can afford a virtual private server, and have the technical knowledge to import my old content into a static website generator, so I did it. But what about all the people who can't, or don't? Of course, these organizations have to solve the challenge of being sustainable, and being able to pay professionals to maintain the services that the community relies on. We should be thankful to these organizations, and their leadership needs to recognize the importance of those services, and actively plan for them to be kept alive.

DebConf4 This tshirt is 16 years old and from DebConf4. Again, I should probably wash it at 60 celcius for once... DebConf4 was my 2nd DebConf and took place in Porto Alegre, Brasil. Like many DebConfs, it was a great opportunity to meet people: I remember sitting in the lobby of the venue and some guy asked me what I did in Debian and I told him about my little involvements and then asked him what he was doing, and he told me he wanted to become involved in Debian again, after getting distracted away. His name was Ian Murdock... DebConf4 also had a very cool history session in the hallway track (IIRC, but see below) with Bdale Garbee, Ian Jackson and Ian Murdock and with a young student named Biella Coleman busy writing notes. That same hallway also saw the kickoff meeting of the Debian Women project, though sadly today http://tinc.debian.net ("there's no cabal") only shows an apache placeholder page and not a picture of that meeting. DebCon4 was also the first time I got a bit involved in preparing DebConf, together with Jonas Smedegaard I've set up some computers there, using FAI. I had no idea that this was the start of me contributing to DebConfs for text ten years. And of course I also saw some talks, including one which I really liked, which then in turn made me notice there were no people doing video recordings, which then lead to something... I missed the group picture of this one. I guess it's important to me to mention it because I've met very wonderful people at this DebConf... (some mentioned in this post, some not. You know who you are!) Afterwards some people stayed in Porto Alegre for FISL, where we saw Lawrence Lessing present Creative Commons to the world for the first time. On the flight back I sat next to a very friendly guy from Poland and we talked almost the whole flight and then we never saw each other again, until 15 years later in Asia... Oh, and then, after DebConf4, I used IRC for the first time. And stayed in the #debconf4 IRC channel for quite some years Finally, DebConf4 and more importantly FISL, which was really big (5000 people?) and after that, the wizard of OS conference in Berlin (which had a very nice talk about Linux in different places in the world, illustrating the different states of 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'), made me quit my job at a company supporting Windows- and Linux-setups as I realized I'd better start freelancing with Linux-only jobs. So, once again, my life would have been different if I would not have attended these events! Note: yesterdays post about DebConf3 was thankfully corrected twice. This might well happen to this post too!

About me Hello, world! For those who are meeting me for the first time, I am a 31 year old History teacher from Porto Alegre, Brazil. Some people might know me from the Python community, because I have been leading PyLadies Porto Alegre and helping organize Django Girls workshops in my state since 2016. If you don't, that's okay. Either way, it's nice to have you here. Ever since I learned about Rails Girls Summer of Code, during the International Free Software Forum - FISL 16, I have been wanting to get into a tech internship program. Google Summer of Code made into my radar as well, but I didn't really feel like I knew enough to try and get into those programs... until I found Outreachy. From their site:

Outreachy is an organization that provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.

There were many good projects to choose from on this round, a lot of them with few requirements - and most with requirements that I believed I could fullfill, such as some knowledge of HTML, CSS, Python or Django. I ought to say that I am not an expert in any of those. And, since you're reading this, I'm going to be completely honest. Coding is hard. Coding is hard to learn, it takes a lot of studying and a lot of practice. Even though I have been messing around computers pretty much since I was a kid, because I was a girl lucky enough to have a father who owned a computer store, I hadn't began learning how to program until mid-2015 - and I am still learning. I think I became such an autodidact because I had to (and, of course, because I was given the conditions to be, such as having spare time to study when I wasn't at school). I had to get any and all information from my surroundings and turn into knowledge that I could use to achieve my goals. In a time when I could only get new computer games through a CD-ROM and the computer I was allowed to use didn't have a CD-ROM drive, I had to try and learn how to open a computer cabinet and connect/disconnect hardware properly, so I could use my brother's CD-ROM drive on the computer I was allowed to and install the games without anyone noticing. When, back in 1998, I couldn't connect to the internet because the computer I was allowed to use didn't have a modem, I had to learn about networks to figure out how to do it from my brother's computer on the LAN (local network). I would go to the community public library and read books and any tech magazines I could get my hands into (libraries didn't usually have computers to be used by the public back then). It was about 2002 when I learned how to create HTML sites by studying at the source code from pages I had saved to read offline in one of the very, very few times I was allowed to access the internet and browse the web. Of course, the site I created back then never saw the light of the day, because I didn't have really have internet access at home. So, how come it is that only now, 14 years later, I am trying to get into tech? Because when I finished high school in 2003, I was still a minor and my family didn't allow me to go to Vocational School and take an IT course. (Never mind that my own oldest brother had graduated in IT and working with for almost a decade.) I ended up going to study... teacher training in History as an undergrad course. A lot has happened since then. I took the exam to become a public school teacher and more than two years had passed without being called to work. I spent 3 years in odd-jobs that paid barely enough to pay rent (and, sometimes, not even that). Since the IT is the new thing and all jobs are in IT, finally, finally it seemed okay for me to take that Vocational School training in a public school - and so I did. I gotta say, I thought that while I studied, I would be able to get some sort of job or internship to help with my learning. After all, I had seen it easily happening with people I met before getting into the course. And by "people", of course, I mean white men. For me, it took a whole year of searching, trying and interviewing for me to get an internship related to the field - tech support in a school computer lab, running GNU/Linux. And, in that very same week, I was hired as a public school teacher. There is a lot more... actually, there is so much more to this story, but I think I have told enough for now. Enough to know where I came from and who I am, as of now. I hope you stick around. I am bound to write here every two weeks, so I guess I will see you then! o/

Finally a new update of many TeX related packages: all the texlive-* including the binary packages, and biber have been updated to the latest release. This upload was delayed by my travels around the world, as well as the necessity to package a new Perl module (libdatetime-calendar-julian-perl) as required by new Biber. Also, my new job leaves me only the weekends for packaging. Anyway, the packages are now uploaded and should appear soon on your friendly local server. There are several highlights: The binaries have been patched with several upstream fixes (tex4ht and XeTeX compatibility, as well as various Japanese TeX engine fixes), updated biber and biblatex, and as usual loads of new and updated packages. Last but not least I want to thank one particular author: His package was removed from TeX Live due to the addition of a rather unusual clause in the license. Instead of simply uploading new packages to Debian with the rather important removed, I contacted the author and asked for clarification. And to my great pleasure he immediately answered with an update of the package with fixed license. All of us user of these many packages should be grateful to the authors of the packages who invest loads of their free time into supporting our community. Thanks! Enough now, here as usual the list of new and updated packages with links to their respective CTAN pages. Enjoy. New packages addfont, apalike-german, autoaligne, baekmuk, beamerswitch, beamertheme-cuerna, beuron, biblatex-claves, biolett-bst, cooking-units, cstypo, emf, eulerpx, filecontentsdef, frederika2016, grant, latexgit, listofitems, overlays, phonenumbers, pst-arrow, quicktype, revquantum, richtext, semantic-markup, spalign, texproposal, tikz-page, unfonts-core, unfonts-extra, uspace. Updated packages achemso, acmart, acro, adobemapping, alegreya, allrunes, animate, arabluatex, archaeologie, asymptote, attachfile, babel-greek, bangorcsthesis, beebe, biblatex, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-apa, biblatex-bookinother, biblatex-chem, biblatex-fiwi, biblatex-gost, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-morenames, biblatex-nature, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, biblatex-phys, biblatex-realauthor, biblatex-science, biblatex-true-citepages-omit, bibleref, bidi, chemformula, circuitikz, cochineal, colorspace, comment, covington, cquthesis, ctex, drawmatrix, ejpecp, erewhon, etoc, exsheets, fancyhdr, fei, fithesis, footnotehyper, fvextra, geschichtsfrkl, gnuplottex, gost, gregoriotex, hausarbeit-jura, ijsra, ipaex, jfontmaps, jsclasses, jslectureplanner, latexdiff, leadsheets, libertinust1math, luatexja, markdown, mcf2graph, minutes, multirow, mynsfc, nameauth, newpx, newtxsf, notespages, optidef, pas-cours, platex, prftree, pst-bezier, pst-circ, pst-eucl, pst-optic, pstricks, pstricks-add, refenums, reledmac, rsc, shdoc, siunitx, stackengine, tabstackengine, tagpair, tetex, texlive-es, texlive-scripts, ticket, translation-biblatex-de, tudscr, turabian-formatting, updmap-map, uplatex, xebaposter, xecjk, xepersian, xpinyin. Enjoy.

One month has passed since the big multiarch update, and not one bug report concerning it did come in, that are good news. So here is a completely boring update with nothing more than the usual checkout from the TeX Live tlnet distribution as of yesterday. I cannot recall anything particular to mention here, so this time let me go with the list of updated and new packages only: Updated packages alegreya, algorithm2e, animate, archaeologie, articleingud, attachfile, bankstatement, beebe, biber, biblatex, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, bidi, br-lex, bytefield, catcodes, chemfig, chemformula, chemgreek, comprehensive, computational-complexity, ctable, datetime2, dowith, dvipdfmx, dvipdfmx-def, dynamicnumber, e-french, epspdf, etoc, fetamont, findhyph, fix2col, gitinfo2, gradstudentresume, indextools, kotex-oblivoir, kotex-utils, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex, latex2e-help-texinfo, lisp-on-tex, ltxfileinfo, luatexja, makedtx, mathastext, mathtools, mcf2graph, media9, medstarbeamer, morehype, nameauth, nicetext, ocgx2, perltex, preview, prftree, pst-eucl, pstricks, reledmac, resphilosophica, selnolig, substances, tcolorbox, tetex, teubner, tex4ht, texdoc, texinfo, texlive-scripts, toptesi, translations, turabian-formatting, uptex, xepersian, xetex, xetex-def, xint. New packages asciilist, babel-macedonian, bestpapers, bibtexperllibs, fixcmex, iffont, nucleardata, srcredact, texvc, xassoccnt. Enjoy.

A big update of all related packages (tex-common 6.04, texlive-bin 2015.20150524.37493-7, texlive-base/lang/extra package 2015.20151016-1) due to the move to support multi-arch. Of course, the regular updates of the TeX Live are included, too. With this change it should be possible to run a multi-arch system with only one TeX Live installed. Thanks to the excellent support and testing of the Multi-arch guys, in particular Thorsten Glaser, Helmut Grohne, Johannes Schauer, and Wookey, I learned a lot about multi-arch, and I hope that the current setup is safe. All the packages but the various lib* packages are tagged as Multi-Arch: foreign, while the lib packages are tagged Multi-Arch: same. Anyway, if you find a bug concerning multi-arch, that is that some of the programs exhibit architecture information, please let us know via a bug report. Updated packages acro, alegreya, amiri, assoccnt, attachfile, babel-french, babel-hungarian, barr, beebe, biblatex-philosophy, bidi, bnumexpr, caption, chemfig, chemformula, chemmacros, cjk-gs-integrate, csplain, dantelogo, dataref, dtxgen, dvipdfmx-def, dvips, eledmac, elements, fcolumn, fithesis, fontspec, genealogytree, gradstudentresume, gtl, jfontmaps, knuth-local, koma-script, kotex-oblivoir, kotex-plain, kotex-utf, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex, latexconfig, ledmac, ltxfileinfo, lualatex-math, luamplib, luatex, luatexbase, luatexja, luatexko, make4ht, mcf2graph, mflogo, modiagram, multiexpand, newtx, odsfile, old-arrows, paracol, pdfpages, pdftex, plain, pst-stru, pxchfon, randomwalk, reledmac, resumecls, rubik, selnolig, showhyphens, siunitx, suftesi, tetex, teubner, tex4ebook, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikzsymbols, tipfr, tools, tudscr, uassign, unicode-math, unravel, visualfaq, xepersian, xetex-def, xint. New packages archaeologie, ctablestack, dynamicnumber, exercises, fibeamer, h2020proposal, imfellenglish, lstbayes, tempora, xellipsis. Enjoy.

Usual regular update of the TeX Live packages. Now that Debian/unstable is back to full development speed thanks to the end of the bit gcc transition, probably this TeX Live update will be lost between the hundreds of others. Anyway a few interesting changes are still in there. Most importantly the fix for unicode-math that was broken for a short time, and for the Japanese users it seems that the LaTeX3 packages have gained support for upTeX. Good to hear. Of course, these are not the only updates and newcomers, see the list below. Updated packages abc, acro, alegreya, animate, arabxetex, babel-bosnian, babel-french, babel-greek, babel-latin, babel-welsh, beamer-FUBerlin, bidi, bigfoot, blochsphere, bxjscls, chemformula, chemmacros, chet, classicthesis, crossrefware, csplain, ctable, ctanify, datetime2, datetime2-basque, detlev-cm, disser, doclicense, drm, dtxgen, dtxtut, dvips, ecclesiastic, eledmac, embrac, etex-pkg, etoc, factura, fbb, fithesis, font-change, fontname, glossaries, gothic, greek-fontenc, IEEEtran, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexconfig, lettrine, luatexja, mathastext, mcf2graph, media9, metrix, mhequ, minted, moderntimeline, newtx, ocgx2, pagecolor, pdftex, pgf, pstricks, reledmac, resphilosophica, roboto, shdoc, siunitx, suftesi, tetex, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikz-bayesnet, translations, ucharcat, udesoftec, ulthese, unicode-math, ut-thesis, withargs, xint. New packages checklistings, cleanthesis, easyreview, fei, medstarbeamer, mfirstuc, nevelok, old-arrows, proofread, uassign, xebaposter. Enjoy.

In June I started keeping track of my Debian activities, and this is my July update. Elixir in Debian Elixir is a functional language built on top of the Erlang virtual machine. If features imutable data structures, interesting concurrency primitives, and everything else that Erlang does, but with a syntax inspired by Ruby what makes it much more aproachable in my opinion. Those interested in Elixir for Debian are encouraged to hang around in #debian-elixir on the OFTC IRC servers. There are still a lot of things to figure out, for example how packaging Elixir libraries and applications is going to work. MiniDebconf at FISL, and beyond I helped organize a MiniDebconf at this year s FISL, in Porto Alegre on the 10th of July. The whole program was targetted at getting more people to participate in Debian, so there were talks about translation, packaging, and a few other more specific topics. I myself gave two talks: one about Debian basics, What is Debian, and how it works , and second one on packaging the free software web , which I will also give at Debconf15 later this month. The recordings are available (all talks in Portuguese) at the Debian video archive thanks to Holger Levsen. We are also organizing a new MiniDebconf in October as part of the Latinoware schedule. Ruby We are in the middle of a transition to switch to Ruby 2.2 as default in Debian unstable, and we are almost there. The Ruby transition is now on hold while GCC 5 one is going on, but will be picked up as soon as were are done with GCC 5. ruby-defaults has been uploaded to experimental for those that want to try having Ruby 2.2 as default before that change hits unstable. I myself have been using Ruby 2.2 as default for several weeks without any problem so far, including using vagrant on a daily basis and doing all my development on sid with it. I started taking notes about Ruby interpreter transitions work to make sure that knowledge is registered. I have uploaded minor security updates of both ruby2.1 and ruby2.2 to unstable. They both reached testing earlier today. I have also fixed another bug in redmine, which I hope to get into stable as well as soon as possible. gem2deb has seen several improvements through versions 0.19, 0.20, 0.20.1 and 0.20.2. I have updated a few packages:

• ruby-rubymail
• ruby-ferret
• ruby-omniauth
• ruby-hashie
• ruby-rack-accept
• chef-zero
• nailgun-agent
• ruby-serialport
• ruby-gnome2
• ruby-mysql2
• ruby-dataobjects-postgres
• ruby-standalone
• thin
• ruby-stringex
• ruby-i18n

Two NEW packages, ruby-rack-contrib and ruby-grape-logging ,were ACCEPTED into the Debian archive. Kudos to the ftp-master team who are doing an awesome job reviewing new packages really fast. Debian Continuous Integration This month I have made good progress with the changes needed to make debci work as a distributed system with one master/scheduler node and as many worker nodes (running tests) as possible. While doing my tests, I have submitted a patch to lxc and updated autodep8 in unstable. At some point I plan to upload both autodep8 and autopkgtest to jessie-backports. Sponsoring I have sponsored a few packages:

• ruby-rack-mount, ruby-grape-entity, and ruby-grape for Hleb Valoshka.
• redir and tmate twice for Lucas Kanashiro.
• lxc to wheezy-backports for Christian Seiler.

Edit: Now translated to Chinese. Thanks zhang wei! There is really hardly a better way to open a series of interviewing with developers behind Free Libre Open Source Software project, then with incredible mind such as Joey Hess. To write his contributions to Free software ecosystem, especially in Debian, would be a book by itself. His impact exceeds even his projects - people literally follow his blog posts to see what he is doing and how is he living. A hacker from cabin. If you really need to have a picture of true hacker, then Joey is the one. As this isn't a book I will just mention few projects that he has been behind - git-annex, ikiwiki, etckeeper, debian installer, parts of dpkg, debhelper, devscripts, taskel. So without further waiting here it is. me: Who are you? joeyh: I'm Joey -- https://joeyh.name/ me: How did you start programming? joeyh: Atari 130XE which came with BASIC and a boring word processor and not much else. No other friends had one, so the only way to get software was to type in demo programs from manual and then begin to change and write my own. So, the easy way to learn. Also some Logo in school. me: How would you now advise others to start programming? joeyh: Difficult question, it seems much harder to get an intimate understanding of things than when I started, and much harder to be motivated to program when there's so much stuff easily available. Maybe simple bare-metal systems like Arduino coupled with real-world interaction are the answer. I've recently been mentoring my nephew who is learning python and Python the Hard Way has gotten him far impressively fast. me: Setup of your development machine? joeyh: Lenovo laptop de-spywared with Debian unstable, xmonad, xfce, vim. me: Your thoughts on Purism (the open hardware laptop initiative that got recently funded on CrowdSupply)? joeyh: I don't know much about that one, but it seems that consumer level hardware has gotten so low quality, and so closed and untrustworthy that it makes sense to either build alternatives that are open, or pick out, as a community, the stuff we can adapt to our needs and concentrate on it. Several projects are trying, I hope they succeed. me: How do you see future of Debian development? joeyh: Well, I've mostly stopped worrying about it. If you look back at my presentations at the past 2 or 3 DebConfs, you'll find my best thoughts on the matter. me: You retired as Debian developer - do you intend sometime soon to come back and/or do you plan to join some other communities? joeyh: It would be glorious to come back, wouldn't it? But I don't think I will. Can't step in the same river twice, and all. Instead, Debian will probably have to put up with me as an annoying upstream author who doesn't ship tarballs, but does ship debian/ directories, and as a bug reporter who enjoys reporting amusing bugs like -0 NaN. I seem to have more time to spend in other online communities since I left Debian, but in a more diffuse way. Maybe that's just what it's like, to be involved in Free Software but not in the embrace of a big project like Debian. me: Some memorable moments from Debian conferences? joeyh: There are so many! Picnicing on berries and tamales at the Portland farmer's market right outside the venue; rainbows and bonfire in Switzerland after crazy busy days; impromptu pipe organ repair in a weird night venue in Edinburgh; walking through Porto Alegre at night with Ian Murdock and how humble he was about what he'd started; hacking all night in Spain; failing to sleep through midnight sun and incessent partying Finland; hanging out in the hotel lobby in Atlanta where we designed Build-Depends. me: Are you a gamer? Valve Steam games are offered for free to Debian Developers - do you use steam and play Valve games? joeyh: I've played through Half Life and Portal, but nethack has claimed more of my time. I mostly enjoy short, indie games, or games that tell us something new about the medium of games, A recent favorite was A Dark Room. But really, I have more pure fun playing real world Tabletop games with friends, like Carcassanne Discovery and Hive. In March, I am going to try to write a roguelike game in one week, in Haskell, for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge and I'll be blogging about my progress daily. me: You are nowdays a Haskell hacker (git-annex) - what would you like to say about this language and how does it compare to Python, C, JavaScript, Ruby and Perl? joeyh: Not just git-annex; all my current projects are written in Haskell. I think it's amazing how much we expect programmers to keep in their heads while writing code. Is that buffer going to overflow? Is changing the value of that global variable going to break some other part of the code? Is that input sanitized yet? Did that interface change? Haskell solves some of these outright, but more, it makes you start noticing this kind of pervasive issue, and it provides ways to completely eliminate a class of problems from your code. For example http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/making_propellor_safer_with_GADTs_and_type_families/. The class of bugs I avoided there had never affected my code even once, but it was still worth preventing that whole class of bugs, so I don't have to worry about them ever again. me: Would you suggest Haskell as first language to learn especially for those that have an itch for mathematics? joeyh: I think that can work well. Or it can go other the way -- I had an affinity to mathematics when I was young, but it got knocked out of me in the way that happens to many people, and languages like perl and C don't do much to make you want to learn more about higher-order math. I've been picking up a bit more here and there via Haskell. me: How do you compare your productivity in Haskell compared to your Perl days? joeyh: It's very different; I'm a very different programmer now. I probably would bang out quick hacks more quickly when I was writing Perl. But, they tended to stay quick hacks. Now, I might take a little longer to get there, but the code seems a lot more solid, while also being more malleable to turn into larger or different programs. I'm also a lot more drawn toward writing software libraries. me: Can you describe your philosophy of life (you live in cabin, in forest, using a lot of solar power - many people are intrigued (including myself) what drives you towards that kind of life and how does it impact your overall quality of life and happiness. Looking the todays modern predator capitalistic society, in which you could easily earn more then $10.000 a month, you seem to be an anarchist and very humble human)? joeyh: I want to build worthwhile things that might last. Which is super hard in the world of software, both because it's hard to think far ahead at all, and because most jobs don't emphasize that kind of real value. I've been lucky and bootstrapped up to a point where I've been able to work full time on free software for years, and I'm willing to forgo a lot to continue that. Living in the woods without modern conveniences is great, because it's quiet and you can think as much as you like; the internet is just as close as it is anywhere else (maybe a bit slower); and when you've spent too much time quietly thinking you'll need to go chop wood, or haul water, or jump in the river to cool off, depending on the season. (Humble? Like most programmers, I am internally a flaming tower of ego...)
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FISL (pronounced FIZZ lay by the locals) is a large Free and Open Source software gathering in Porto Alegre, Brazil. While the primary audience of that conference is the Latin America "libre software" community, a number of overseas speakers also participate in that conference. This is my contribution to them: a short guide for international guests visiting the F rum Internacional do Software Livre.

Planning Before you fly out, make sure you look up the visa requirements for your country of citizenship. Many western countries will require a visa and you will need to visit the local Brazillian embassy ahead of time to get one. Next, have a look at the list of recommended immunizations. As with most destinations, it is recommended that your routine immunizations be up to date, but there are also other specialized ones such as Yellow Fever that are recommended by the Brazillian government. You should therefore visit a travel clinic a few weeks ahead of time. Other than that, I suggest reading up on the country and keeping an eye on the various travel advisories.

Arrival You will be flying at the Porto Alegre airport. If you need to exchange overseas money for Brazilian Reals, you can do that there. You'll probably also want to pick up a power adapter at the airport if you intend to charge your laptop while you're in the country Brazil has both 127V and 220V outlets using Type N sockets. Privacy note: using the free airport wifi will require giving your Passport details as part of the registration process.

Language If you don't speak Portuguese, expect a few challenges since most of the people you'll meet (including taxi drivers, many airport workers, some hotel staff) won't speak English. I highly recommend getting a phrase book before you leave and printing paper maps of where you are planning to go (to show to taxi drivers when you get lost). Native Spanish speakers seem to get by speaking Spanish to Portuguese speakers and understanding enough Portuguese to hold a conversation. I wouldn't count on it unless your Spanish is quite good though. Also, the official conference blog posts get eventually translated to English, but there is a delay, so you may want to subscribe to the Portuguese feed and use Google Translate to keep up with FISL news before you get there.

The conference FISL is a large conference and it has a very "decentralized" feel to it. From the outside, it looks like it's organized by an army of volunteers where everyone is taking care of some portion of it without a whole lot of top-down direction. It seems to work quite well! What this means for you as a foreign speaker however is that you're unlikely to be provided with a lot of information or help finding your way around the conference (i.e. no "speaker liaison"). There is a separate registration desk for speakers but that's about all of the attention you'll receive before you deliver your talk. So make sure you know where to go and show up in your assigned room early to speak with the person introducing you. If your talk is in English, it will be live-transated by an interpreter. It's therefore a good idea to speak a bit more slowly and to pause a bit more. Other than that, the organizers make an effort to schedule an English talk in each timeslot so non-Portuguese speakers should still be able to get a lot out of the conference. FISL was a lot of fun for me and I hope that some of these tips will help you enjoy the biggest FLOSS gathering in the southern hemisphere!

2000, Bordeaux, France. 2001, Bordeaux, France. 2002, Ottawa, Canada. 2003, Oslo, Norway. 2004, Porto Alegre, Brazil. 2005, Helsinki, Finland. 2006, Oaxtepec, Mexico. 2007, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. 2008, Mar del Plata, Argentina. 2009, C ceres, Spain. 2010, New York, United States. 2011, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. 2012, Managua, Nicaragua. 2013, Vaumarcus, Switzerland. We have gone to all different latitudes (although not yet longitudes!). We have had very hot and very cold weather. Great cities and small villages have hosted us. What will be the next addition to this great list? As we approach DebConf12 (10 days to DebCamp and counting, yay!), we should keep the future in mind. So, as every year in recent history, we will once again have a DebConf session presenting possible venues for the next year. Organizing DebConf in your city means a lot of hard work. It also means one of the greatest personal experiences you can imagine. And it is a great way to contribute to Debian. The decision process for every DebConf venue starts two years before, with presentations during DebConf(n-2). That means, if you consider presenting a bid for DebConf14, now is the moment to act! Do you have to be present at Managua to propose your bid? No. You can proxy via somebody I d suggest to do it via somebody who knows the location you are suggesting, but basically, choose a friend that you trust that trusts you. Of course, you can participate in the presentation session via IRC. Do you have to be a Debian Developer to propose a bid? No. For DebConf9, none of the C ceres guys was a DD; for DebConf10, some of the people most involved from the local New Yorkers were not DDs. For DC11, none of our hosts in Bosnia are DDs. And for DC12, the dear and overworked Nicaraguan crew is also made from people interested in getting closer to the Debian project, but not DDs. Do you have to decide now? No. This is just a call for a first presentation, but the decision regarding DC14 will be taken probably around March 2013. However, giving a nice presentation at DebConf helps a lot, gives you visibility, and will get the ball rolling. Is there a geographical bias? Slight. So far, and since the second DebConf, we have kept the tradition not to repeat continents on two successive DebConfs. This is not a hard condition, however! While there is some probability that DebConf14 will be somewhere in America (the continent, of course), it depends on the proposals more than on any pseudo-rule. What do you need to start thinking about? Go visit our prospective location checklist. You can also look at what other teams have historically presented. And of course, go to the DebConf14 wiki planning page Register there, even if you are just in the early phases of finding data.

When I think about Margarita, I always remember her as a friendly and welcoming person. Like most of the Debian Women members by the way. But she likes to spread some love and organized a Debian Appreciation Day for example. I think I met her in real life for the first time at Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico). She deeply cares about Debian in general. She has proven it multiple times with her DPL candidacy and by giving talks like Making Debian rule again. One last thing, Debconf11 is just over and you will see that Debconf4 has had a big influence on Marga. My advice is simple: next time there s a Debconf on your continent, make sure to take a few days off and come to meet us! It really gives another picture of the Debian community. Now let s proceed with the interview. Raphael: Who are you? Margarita: I m Margarita Manterola, a Software Developer from Argentina. I work developing software in Python in a Debian-friendly company during the day, and teach programming at a local university during the evenings. I m married to Maximiliano Curia who is also a Debian Developer, most of our Free Software work has been done together. I only maintain a handful of packages in Debian, I m more interested in fixing bugs than in packaging new software. I ve also been a part of the organizing team of many of the previous Debian Conferences. One of the biggest commitments and the biggest success of my participation in Debian was being part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Margarita: I started using Debian around 2000. Soon after we had learned the grips of general GNU/Linux usage, Maxy and I started giving an introductory course at our local university, and became quite involved with the local LUG. At some point in 2002/2003 I became a Debian Bug Reporter : most of my friends would report bugs to me, and I would then write them in the proper form to the BTS. I would also be very attentive about reporting any bugs that I might encounter myself trying to create good bug reports. The turning point in my participation in Debian was DebConf4 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Being so close to Argentina meant that we felt specially invited to be there, and Maxy and I decided to go to DebConf for our honeymoon. We didn t really know much about DebConf dynamics, but we were really eager to learn more about Debian and become more involved. What happened was that meeting with DDs from all over the world transformed our lives, we became part of the Debian family and wanted to be more and more involved. Soon after that we both started maintaining packages and not long after that, applied to become Developers. The Debian Women project also meant a lot to me. I felt encouraged all along the way, encouraged to learn, to ask questions and to lose the fear of making mistakes. I became a Debian Developer on November 2005. Since then, Debian has always been one of the most important things I do in my life. Raphael There was a Debian Women BoF during debconf. What are the plans for Debian Women in the upcoming months? Margarita: I was not there in person, but thanks to the awesome work of the video team, and of Christian Perrier s typing efforts when something failed, I was able to experience much of what was discussed. One of the many points that came up during the BOF is that many people Want to help but don t know where to start or how to go about it. It s a challenge for the Debian Women project to find a way to allow these people to become involved in Debian through Mini projects or something like that. Another of the subjects that was brought up was the Debian Women mentoring project, which has been going on for quite a while now, but lacks enough publicity. So, we need to reach more people about it, and maybe also improve it with some templates, similar to the New Maintainer templates, so that mentees that don t know where to start have some sort of general path to follow. Raphael: You created very useful diagrams documenting how package maintainer scripts are invoked by dpkg. How did you do it and was that a useful experience? Margarita: I did those diagrams to be able to answer one of the questions in the NM templates, regarding the order of the maintainer script execution. Answering the question in text was basically copying and pasting the part of the Debian Policy that explained it, which wasn t really too clear for me, so I decided to go and make a diagram of it, so that I could really understand it. I did it by the best of all debugging techniques: adding prints to each of the maintainer scripts, and testing them in all the different orders that I could think of. It was a useful experience at the time, because I learned a lot of how maintainers scripts work. I didn t expect the diagrams to become so famous, though, I only did them to answer one NM question, that I assumed most other people had already answered before Raphael: You participated in a DPL election. This is a big commitment to make. What were your motivations? Margarita: As I said, I was part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Which was quite a success, a lot of people enjoyed it and praised the good work that had been done by the local team. During said DebConf8, I had a dream (it was almost a nightmare, actually): I woke up and just like that, I was the DPL. I spoke to some people about this dream and to my complete surprise many said that I should actually do it. After giving that possibility a year and a half of thoughts, during the 2010 campaign I was talked into participating myself as a candidate, and it was a very interesting experience. However, I m very glad that Zack got elected and not me, I think he makes a much better DPL that I would have made. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Margarita: I think the main problem that we have is our communication, both inside the project and outside the project. Most of us are very technical people, our skills lay in the technical part of Debian (preparing packages, fixing bugs, writing software, administering systems) not in the social part. And thus, we lack a general empathy that is quite needed when interacting with people from all over the world. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Margarita: Not particularly. I do want it to be a great release with good quality, stable software. I would also like to keep making Debian more and more universal with each release, making it more user friendly, more accessible, and more robust than any other previous release. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Margarita: I admire a lot of people in Debian. There s a lot of people that contribute a lot of time to Debian, amounts of time that I can t begin to understand how they can afford. I admire Stefano Zacchiroli, our current project leader. And Steve McIntyre, the project leader before him. Also Bdale Garbee, who s also been a DPL in the past. Making this list I realize that Debian has been blessed by quite a number of great leaders in the past. I admire Holger Levsen, for his contributions to the DebConf video team, that have made it possible year after year for the whole project to participate in DebConf remotely. I admire Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth (etch is still my favourite release). I admire Christian Perrier for his work on internationalization. I admire Joerg Jaspert for the incredible amounts of time that he puts into Debian. And actually, I could go on admiring people all night long. I admire so many people that this interview could become a very boring list of names. I guess it s better to leave it at saying that Debian is lucky to have quite a lot of excellent hackers around.

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Thank you to Marga for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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The day before yesterday I learned that a fellow Debian Developer was visiting Porto Alegre Federal University to do some work on Parallel Computing: Vincent Danjean. People from local user group organized a last minute get-together at Cavanhas (that served as last meeting of the year) and we had the most pleasant time. Guaraldo registered the moment with his cellphone camera: Vincent is flying back to France today or tomorrow. Hope he had a great time in Porto Alegre and have a safe trip back home.

The day before yesterday I learned that a fellow Debian Developer was visiting Porto Alegre Federal University to do some work on Parallel Computing: Vincent Danjean. People from local user group organized a last minute get-together at Cavanhas (that served as last meeting of the year) and we had the most pleasant time. Guaraldo registered the moment with his cellphone camera: Vincent is flying back to France today or tomorrow. Hope he had a great time in Porto Alegre and have a safe trip back home.

One of the largest FLOSS events in the world, FISL (International Free Software Forum in english) subscriptions are already being accepted. They also already called for papers! They re calling this year s a special edition since they expect to reach 10-thousand attendees (last year exceeded 7-thousand)... this is pretty big if you ask me. As usual, it will take place at Porto Alegre, and is scheduled from June 24th to 27th. I think we can expect the usual activities (Programming Arena, Interesting Workshops, FLOSS shows, Great Speakers, Brazilian Government), but I think the special edition is not just due to the number of attendees. What surprises are being cooked by the Organization Committee is just something we ll have to wait and see :-) See you there!

I am still laughing of IdolHands comparison between Obama and McCain. Watching how people can make tech-fun out of absolutely anything is amazing Maybe I can put a similar comparison of Porto Alegre mayor election in the pt-BR section