/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne
Much of the work was spent on handling interaction with time time64 transition
and sending patches for mitigating fallout. The set of packages relevant to
debootstrap is mostly converted and the patches for glibc and base-files
have been refined due to feedback from the upload to Ubuntu noble. Beyond this,
he sent patches for all remaining packages that cannot move their files with
dh-sequence-movetousr and packages using dpkg-divert in ways that dumat
would not recognize.
Upcoming improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n
Last month, Santiago Ruano Rinc n started the work on integrating sbuild into
the Salsa CI pipeline. Initially, Santiago used sbuild with the unshare
chroot mode. However, after discussion with josch, jochensp and helmut (thanks
to them!), it turns out that the unshare mode is not the most suitable for the
pipeline, since the level of isolation it provides is not needed, and some test
suites would fail (eg: krb5). Additionally, one of the requirements of the
build job is the use of ccache, since it is needed by some C/C++ large projects
to reduce the compilation time. In the preliminary work with unshare last
month, it was not possible to make ccache to work.
Finally, Santiago changed the chroot mode, and now has a couple of POC (cf:
1
and 2)
that rely on the schroot and sudo, respectively. And the good news is that
ccache is successfully used by sbuild with schroot!
The image here comes from an example of building grep. At the end of the
build, ccache -s shows the statistics of the cache that it used, and so a
little more than half of the calls of that job were cacheable. The most
important pieces are in place to finish the integration of sbuild into the
pipeline.
Other than that, Santiago also reviewed the very useful
merge request !346,
made by IOhannes zm lnig to autodetect the release from debian/changelog. As
agreed with IOhannes, Santiago is preparing a merge request to include the
release autodetection use case in the very own Salsa CI s CI.
Packaging simplemonitor, by Carles Pina i Estany
Carles started using simplemonitor in
2017, opened a
WNPP bug in 2022
and started packaging simplemonitor dependencies in October 2023. After
packaging five direct and indirect dependencies, Carles finally uploaded
simplemonitor to unstable in February.
During the packaging of simplemonitor, Carles reported
a few issues
to upstream. Some of these were to make the simplemonitor package build and run
tests reproducibly. A reproducibility issue was reprotest overriding the
timezone, which broke simplemonitor s tests. There have been discussions on
resolving this upstream in simplemonitor and
in reprotest,
too.
Carles also started upgrading or improving some of simplemonitor s dependencies.
Miscellaneous contributions
Stefano Rivera spent some time doing admin on debian.social infrastructure.
Including dealing with a spike of abuse on the Jitsi server.
Stefano started to prepare a new release of dh-python, including cleaning out
a lot of old Python 2.x related code. Thanks to Niels Thykier (outside
Freexian) for spear-heading this work.
DebConf 24 planning is beginning. Stefano discussed venues and finances with
the local team and remotely supported a site-visit by Nattie (outside
Freexian).
Also in the DebConf 24 context, Santiago took part in discussions and
preparations related to the Content Team.
A JIT bug was
reported against pypy3 in Debian Bookworm. Stefano bisected the upstream
history to find the patch (it was already resolved upstream) and released an
update to pypy3 in bookworm.
Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.
Colin dug into a cluster of celery build failures and tracked the hardest bit
down to a Python 3.12 regression, now
fixed in unstable. celery should be back in testing once the 64-bit time_t
migration is out of the way.
Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of cpdb-libs. Unfortunately
upstream changed the naming of their release tags, so updating the watch file
was a bit demanding. Anyway this version 2.0 is a huge step towards
introduction of the new Common Print Dialog Backends.
Helmut send patches for 48 cross build failures.
Helmut changed debvm to use mkfs.ext4 instead of genext2fs.
Helmut sent a
debci MR
for improving collector robustness.
In preparation for DebConf 25, Santiago worked on the Brest Bid.
Updated the linux-5.10 package in buster and issued
DLA-3512-1
for it.
Together with Aurelien Jarno, I investigated boot failures of
Linux 5.10 and later versions on Debian's MIPS buildds, but I
didn't find the root cause or any solution.
Reviewed and tested the kernel mitigations for the SRSO
(CVE-2023-20569)
issue in AMD CPUs, and added a critical missing patch to the
backports.
Updated the linux (4.19) and linux-5.10 packages in buster, and
the linux (5.10) package in bullseye, to include mitigations for
GDS
(CVE-2022-40982)
on Intel processors and (5.10 only) SRSO on AMD. I issued
DLA-3524-1
and
DLA-3525-1
for buster.
Updated
jinja-vanish to be compatible with Jinja 3.0. I also wired up
its test suite to autopkgtests and added a Salsa CI configuration
to catch any future regressions more quickly.
Introduction
DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :)
For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about freedom in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting.
My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.
Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.
Hotel overview
The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)
Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal
Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.
View from the hotel window.
Meals
On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :)
Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the spicy food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled Kerala rice . I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).
This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal
The excellent Swag Bag
The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.
Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi
A gift for Nattie
During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)
Being a mentor
There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.
My talk
My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn t get the time so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame.
My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.
My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio
Visiting a saree shop
After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.
Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.
Cheese and Wine Party
On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend s room), but not in public places.
Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.
Party at my room
Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating.
I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.
This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.
Sadhya Thali
On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.
Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal
Day trip
On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it.
Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat.
The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.
Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani
A good friend lost
When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip.
Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June.
We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.
A selfie in memory of Abraham.
We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them.
The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation.
On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website.
Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled.
As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.
Visiting Abraham s house
On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap.
In two hours, we reached Abraham s house. I couldn t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.
A Japanese gift
I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.
Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)
This is the Japanese gift I received.
Group photo
On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.
Click to enlarge
Volunteer work and talks attended
I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.
Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal
Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.
I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.
The night of the 17th of September
Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.
Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA
I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.
Departure day
The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good.
Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.
From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.
I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.
Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda
Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.
Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.
Big thanks to the organizers
DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event.
None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them.
The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.
Note about myself
I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me.
PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.
Dealing with the void during MiniDebConf Online #1
Between 28 and 31 May this year, we set out to create our first ever online MiniDebConf for Debian. Many people have been meaning to do something similar for a long time, but it just didn t work out yet. With many of us being in lock down due to COVID-19, and with the strong possibility looming that DebConf20 might have had to become an online event, we rushed towards organising the first ever Online MiniDebConf and put together some form of usable video stack for it.
I could go into all kinds of details on the above, but this post is about a bug that lead to a pretty nifty feature for DebConf20. The tool that we use to capture Jitsi calls is called Jibri (Jitsi Broadcasting Infrustructure). It had a bug (well, bug for us, but it s an upstream feature) where Jibri would hang up after 30s of complete silence, because it would assume that the call has ended and that the worker can be freed up again. This would result in the stream being ended at the end of every talk, so before the next talk, someone would have to remember to press play again in their media player or on the video player on the stream page. Hrmph.
Easy solution on the morning that the conference starts? I was testing a Debian Live image the night before in a KVM and thought that I might as well just start a Jitsi call from there and keep a steady stream of silence so that Jibri doesn t hang up.
It worked! But the black screen and silence on stream was a bit eery. Because this event was so experimental in nature, and because we were on such an incredibly tight timeline, we opted not to seek sponsors for this event, so there was no sponsors loop that we d usually stream during a DebConf event. Then I thought Ah! I could just show the schedule! .
The stream looked bright and colourful (and was even useful!) and Jitsi/Jibri didn t die. I thought my work was done. As usual, little did I know how untrue that was.
The silence was slightly disturbing after the talks, and people asked for some music. Playing music on my VM and capturing the desktop audio in to Jitsi was just a few pulseaudio settings away, so I spent two minutes finding some freely licensed tracks that sounded ok enough to just start playing on the stream. I came across mini-albums by Captive Portal and Cinema Noir, During the course of the MiniDebConf Online I even started enjoying those. Someone also pointed out that it would be really nice to have a UTC clock on the stream. I couldn t find a nice clock in a hurry so I just added a tmux clock in the meantime while we deal with the real-time torrent of issues that usually happens when organising events like this.
Speaking of issues, during our very first talk of the last day, our speaker had a power cut during the talk and abruptly dropped off. Oops! So, since I had a screenshare open from the VM to the stream, I thought I d just pop in a quick message in a text editor to let people know that we re aware of it and trying to figure out what s going on.
In the end, MiniDebConf Online worked out all right. Besides the power cut for our one speaker, and another who had a laptop that was way too under-powered to deal with video, everything worked out very well. Even the issues we had weren t show-stoppers and we managed to work around them.
DebConf20 Moves Online
For DebConf, we usually show a sponsors loop in between sessions. It s great that we give our sponsors visibility here, but in reality people see the sponsors loop and think Talk over! and then they look away. It s also completely silent and doesn t provide any additional useful information. I was wondering how I could take our lessons from MDCO#1 and integrate our new tricks with the sponsors loop. That is, add the schedule, time, some space to type announcements on the screen and also add some loopable music to it.
I used OBS before in making my videos, and like the flexibility it provides when working with scenes and sources. A scene is what you would think of as a screen or a document with its own collection of sources or elements. For example, a scene might contain sources such as a logo, clock, video, image, etc. A scene can also contain another scene. This is useful if you want to contain a banner or play some background music that is shared between scenes.
The above screenshots illustrate some basics of scenes and sources. First with just the DC20 banner, and then that used embedded in another scene.
For MDCO#1, I copied and pasted the schedule into a LibreOffice Impress slide that was displayed on the stream. Having to do this for all 7 days of DebConf, plus dealing with scheduling changes would be daunting. So, I started to look in to generating some schedule slides programmatically. Stefano then pointed me to the Happening Now page on the DebConf website, where the current schedule block is displayed. So all I would need to do in OBS was to display a web page. Nice!
Unfortunately the OBS in Debian doesn t have the ability to display web pages out of the box (we need to figure out CEF in Debian), but fortunately someone provides a pre-compiled version of the plugin called Linux Browser that works just fine. This allowed me to easily add the schedule page in its own scene.
Being able to display a web page solved another problem. I wasn t fond of having to type / manage the announcements in OBS. It would either be a bit prone to user error, and if you want to edit the text while the loop is running, you d have to disrupt the loop, go to the foreground scene, and edit the text before resuming the loop. That s a bit icky. Then I thought that we could probably just get that from a web page instead. We could host some nice html snippet in a repository in salsa, and then anyone could easily commit an MR to update the announcement.
But then I went a step further, use an etherpad! Then anyone in the orga team can quickly update the announcement and it would be instantly changed on the stream. Nice! So that small section of announcement text on the screen is actually a whole web browser with an added OBS filter to crop away all the pieces we don t want. Overkill? Sure, but it gave us a decent enough solution that worked in time for the start of DebConf. Also, being able to type directly on to the loop screen works out great especially in an emergency. Oh, and uhm the clock is also a website rendered in its own web browser :-P
So, I had the ability to make scenes, add elements and add all the minimal elements I wanted in there. Great! But now I had to figure out how to switch scenes automatically. It s probably worth mentioning that I only found some time to really dig into this right before DebConf started, so with all of this I was scrambling to find things that would work without too many bugs while also still being practical.
Now I needed the ability to switch between the scenes automatically / programmatically. I had never done this in OBS before. I know it has some API because there are Android apps that you can use to control OBS with from your phone. I discovered that it had an automatic scene switcher, but it s very basic. It can only switch based on active window, which can be useful in some cases, but since we won t have any windows open other than OBS, this tool was basically pointless.
After some quick searches, I found a plugin called Advanced Scene Switcher. This plugin can do a lot more, but has some weird UI choices, and is really meant for gamers and other types of professional streamers to help them automate their work flow and doesn t seem at all meant to be used for a continuous loop, but, it worked, and I could make it do something that will work for us during the DebConf.
I had a chicken and egg problem because I had to figure out a programming flow, but didn t really have any content to work with, or an idea of all the content that we would eventually have. I ve been toying with the idea in my mind and had some idea that we could add fun facts, postcards (an image with some text), time now in different timezones, Debian news (maybe procured by the press team), cards that contain the longer announcements that was sent to debconf-announce, perhaps a shout out or two and some photos from previous DebConfs like the group photos. I knew that I wouldn t be able to build anything substantial by the time DebConf starts, but adding content to OBS in between talks is relatively easy, so we could keep on building on it during DebConf.
Nattie provided the first shout out, and I made 2 video loops with the DC18/19 pictures and also two Did you know cards. So the flow I ended up with was: Sponsors -> Happening Now -> Random video (which would be any of those clips) -> Back to sponsors. This ended up working pretty well for quite a while. With the first batch of videos the sponsor loop would come up on average about every 2 minutes, but as much shorter clips like shout outs started to come in faster and faster, it made sense to play a few 2-3 shout-outs before going back to sponsors.
So here is a very brief guide on how I set up the sequencing in Advanced Scene Switcher.
If no condition was met, a video would play from the Random tab.
Then in the Random tab, I added the scenes that were part of the random mix. Annoyingly, you have to specify how long it should play for. If you don t, the no condition thingy is triggered and another video is selected. The time is also the length of the video minus one second, because
You can t just say that a random video should return back to a certain scene, you have to specify that in the sequence tab for each video. Why after 1 second? Because, at least in my early tests, and I didn t circle back to this, it seems like 0s can randomly either mean instantly, or never. Yes, this ended up being a bit confusing and tedious, and considering the late hours I worked on this, I m surprised that I didn t manage to screw it up completely at any point.
I also suspected that threads would eventually happen. That is, when people create video replies to other videos. We had 3 threads in total. There was a backups thread, beverage thread and an impersonation thread. The arrow in the screenshot above points to the backups thread. I know it doesn t look that complicated, but it was initially somewhat confusing to set up and make sense out of it.
For the next event, the Advanced Scene Switcher might just get some more taming, or even be replaced entirely. There are ways to drive OBS by API, and even the Advanced Scene Switcher tool can be driven externally to some degree, but I think we definitely want to replace it by the next full DebConf. We had the problem that when a talk ended, we would return to the loop in the middle of a clip, which felt very unnatural and sometimes even confusing. So Stefano helped me with a helper script that could read the socket from Vocto, which I used to write either Loop or Standby to a file, and then the scene switcher would watch that file and keep the sponsors loop ready for start while the talks play. Why not just switch to sponsors when the talk ends? Well, the little bit of delay in switching would mean that you would see a tiny bit of loop every time before switching to sponsors. This is also why we didn t have any loop for the ad-hoc track (that would have probably needed another OBS instance, we ll look more into solutions for this for the future).
Then for all the clips. There were over 50 of them. All of them edited by hand in kdenlive. I removed any hard clicks, tried to improve audibility, remove some sections at the beginning and the end that seemed extra and added some music that would reduce in volume when someone speaks. In the beginning, I had lots of fun with choosing music for the clips. Towards the end, I had to rush them through and just chose the same tune whether it made sense or not. For comparison of what a difference the music can make, compare the original and adapted version for Valhalla s clip above, or this original and adapted video from urbec. This part was a lot more fun than dealing with the video sequencer, but I also want to automate it a bit. When I can fully drive OBS from Python I ll likely instead want to show those cards and control music volume from Python (what could possibly go wrong ).
The loopy name happened when I requested an @debconf.org alias for this. I was initially just thinking about loop@debconf.org but since I wanted to make it clear that the purpose of this loop is also to have some fun, I opted for loopy instead:
I was really surprised by how people took to loopy. I hoped it would be good and that it would have somewhat positive feedback, but the positive feedback was just immense. The idea was that people typically saw it in between talks. But a few people told me they kept it playing after the last talk of the day to watch it in the background. Some asked for the music because they want to keep listening to it while working (and even for jogging!?). Some people also asked for recordings of the loop because they want to keep it for after DebConf. The shoutouts idea proved to be very popular. Overall, I m very glad that people enjoyed it and I think it s safe to say that loopy will be back for the next event.
Also throughout this experiment Loopy Loop turned into yet another DebConf mascot. We gain one about every DebConf, some by accident and some on purpose. This one was not quite on purpose. I meant to make an image for it for salsa, and started with an infinite loop symbol. That s a loop, but by just adding two more solid circles to it, it looks like googly eyes, now it s a proper loopy loop!
I like the progress we ve made on this, but there s still a long way to go, and the ideas keep heaping up. The next event is quite soon (MDCO#2 at the end of November, and it seems that 3 other MiniDebConf events may also be planned), but over the next few events there will likely be significantly better graphics/artwork, better sequencing, better flow and more layout options. I hope to gain some additional members in the team to deal with incoming requests during DebConf. It was quite hectic this time! The new OBS also has a scripting host that supports Python, so I should be able to do some nice things even within OBS without having to drive it externally (like, display a clock without starting a web browser).
The Loopy Loop Music
The two mini albums that mostly played during the first few days were just a copy and paste from the MDCO#1 music, which was:
I have much more things to say about DebConf20, but I ll keep that for another post, and hopefully we can get all the other video stuff in a post from the video team, because I think there s been some real good work done for this DebConf. Also thanks to Infomaniak who was not only a platinum sponsor for this DebConf, but they also provided us with plenty of computing power to run all the video stuff on. Thanks again!
DebConf20 starts in about 5 weeks, and as always, the DebConf
Videoteam is working hard to make sure it'll be a success. As such, we held a
sprint from July 9th to 13th to work on our new infrastructure.
A remote sprint certainly ain't as fun as an in-person one, but we nonetheless
managed to enjoy ourselves. Many thanks to those who participated, namely:
Carl Karsten (CarlFK)
Ivo De Decker (ivodd)
Kyle Robbertze (paddatrapper)
Louis-Philippe V ronneau (pollo)
Nattie Mayer-Hutchings (nattie)
Nicolas Dandrimont (olasd)
Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed)
Wouter Verhelst (wouter)
We also wish to extend our thanks to Thomas Goirand and Infomaniak for
providing us with virtual machines to experiment on and host the video
infrastructure for DebConf20.
Advice for presenters
For DebConf20, we strongly encourage presenters to record their talks in
advance and send us the resulting video. We understand this is more work,
but we think it'll make for a more agreeable conference for everyone. Video
conferencing is still pretty wonky and there is nothing worse than a talk
ruined by a flaky internet connection or hardware failures.
As such, if you are giving a talk at DebConf this year, we are asking you to
read and follow our guide on how to record your presentation.
Fear not: we are not getting rid of the Q&A period at the end of talks.
Attendees will ask their questions either on IRC or on a collaborative pad
and the Talkmeister will relay them to the speaker once the pre-recorded
video has finished playing.
New infrastructure, who dis?
Organising a virtual DebConf implies migrating from our battle-tested
on-premise workflow to a completely new remote one.
One of the major changes this means for us is the addition of Jitsi Meet to our
infrastructure. We normally have 3 different video sources in a room: two
cameras and a slides grabber. With the new online workflow, directors will be
able to play pre-recorded videos as a source, will get a feed from a Jitsi room
and will see the audience questions as a third source.
This might seem simple at first, but is in fact a very major change to our
workflow and required a lot of work to implement.
== On-premise == == Online ==
Camera 1 Jitsi
v ---> Frontend v ---> Frontend
Slides -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend Questions -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend
^ ---> Frontend ^ ---> Frontend
Camera 2 Pre-recorded video
In our tests, playing back pre-recorded videos to voctomix worked well, but was
sometimes unreliable due to inconsistent encoding settings. Presenters will
thus upload their pre-recorded talks to SReview so we can make sure there
aren't any obvious errors. Videos will then be re-encoded to ensure a
consistent encoding and to normalise audio levels.
This process will also let us stitch the Q&As at the end of the pre-recorded
videos more easily prior to publication.
Reducing the stream latency
One of the pitfalls of the streaming infrastructure we have been using since
2016 is high video latency. In a worst case scenario, remote attendees could
get up to 45 seconds of latency, making participation in events like BoFs
arduous.
In preparation for DebConf20, we added a new way to stream our talks: RTMP.
Attendees will thus have the option of using either an HLS stream with higher
latency or an RTMP stream with lower latency.
Here is a comparative table that can help you decide between the two protocols:
HLS
RTMP
Pros
Can be watched from a browser
Auto-selects a stream encoding
Single URL to remember
Lower latency (~5s)
Cons
Higher latency (up to 45s)
Requires a dedicated video player (VLC, mpv)
Specific URLs for each encoding setting
Live mixing from home with VoctoWeb
Since DebConf16, we have been using voctomix, a live video mixer developed
by the CCC VOC. voctomix is conveniently divided in two: voctocore is the
backend server while voctogui is a GTK+ UI frontend directors can use to
live-mix.
Although voctogui can connect to a remote server, it was primarily designed to
run either on the same machine as voctocore or on the same LAN. Trying to use
voctogui from a machine at home to connect to a voctocore running in a
datacenter proved unreliable, especially for high-latency and low bandwidth
connections.
Inspired by the setup FOSDEM uses, we instead decided to go with a web frontend
for voctocore. We initially used FOSDEM's code as a proof of
concept, but quickly reimplemented it in Python, a language we are more
familiar with as a team.
Compared to the FOSDEM PHP implementation, voctoweb implements A / B source
selection (akin to voctogui) as well as audio control, two very useful
features. In the following screen captures, you can see the old PHP UI on the
left and the new shiny Python one on the right.
Voctoweb is still under development and is likely to change quite a bit
until DebConf20. Still, the current version seems to works well enough to be
used in production if you ever need to.
Python GeoIP redirector
We run multiple geographically-distributed streaming frontend servers to
minimize the load on our streaming backend and to reduce overall latency.
Although users can connect to the frontends directly, we typically point them
to live.debconf.org and redirect connections to the nearest server.
Sadly, 6 months ago MaxMind decided to change the licence on their
GeoLite2 database and left us scrambling. To fix this annoying issue, Stefano
Rivera wrote a Python program that uses the new database and reworked our
ansible frontend server role. Since the new database cannot be
redistributed freely, you'll have to get a (free) license key from MaxMind if
you to use this role.
Ansible & CI improvements
Infrastructure as code is a living process and needs constant care to fix bugs,
follow changes in DSL and to implement new features. All that to say a large
part of the sprint was spent making our ansible roles and continuous
integration setup more reliable, less buggy and more featureful.
All in all, we merged 26 separate ansible-related merge request during the
sprint! As always, if you are good with ansible and wish to help, we accept
merge requests on our ansible repository :)
Erf, I'm tired and it is late so this report will be short and won't include
dank memes or funny cat pictures. Come back tomorrow for that.
tumbleweed
Stefano worked all day long on the metadata project and on YouTube uploads. I
think the DebConf7 videos have just finished being uploaded, check them out!
RattusRattus
Apart from the wonderful lasagna he baked for us, Andy continued working on the
scraping scheme, helping tumbleweed.
nattie
Nattie has been with us for a few days now, but today she did some great QA work
on our metadata scraping of the video archive.
ivodd
More tests, more bugs! Ivo worked quite a bit on the Opsis board today and it
seems everything is ready for the mini-conf. \0/
olasd
Nicolas built the streaming network today and wrote some Ansible roles to manage
TLS cert creation through Let's Encrypt. He also talked with DSA some more about
our long term requirements.
wouter
I forgot to mention it yesterday because he could not come to Cambridge, but
Wouter has been sprinting remotely, working on the reviewing system. Everything
with regards to reviewing should be in place for the mini-conf.
He also generated the intro and outro slides for the videos for us.
KiBi and Julien
KiBi and Julien arrived late in the evening, but were nonetheless of great
assistance.
Neither are technically part of the videoteam, but their respective experience
with Debian-Installer and general DSA systems helped us a great deal.
pollo
I'm about 3/4 done documenting our ansible roles. Once I'm done, I'll try to
polish some obvious hacks I've seen while documenting.
Some of you (but though probably not many) will know that I've
suffered from depression at times. It has made it very difficult
for me to do my job, to keep my home in order, even to have real
conversations. Many important tasks seemed to require more energy
than I had, and every setback left me feeling hopeless.
I have sought treatment on several occasions, with very limited
results. Certainly I would get better eventually, but it was hard
to tell whether this had anything to do with the medication or
therapy I received. And even while I felt better, I still didn't
feel particularly happy or hopeful except when going to my favourite
social events like DebConf.
As I was recovering from the 'flu a weeks ago, I realised that I was
feeling enthusiastic and energetic for no particular reason.
Obviously I was recovering from physical illness, but that was
brief. I had also just started a new project at work, but it isn't
that exciting (at this stage) and I'm already aware of plenty of
problems with it. So nothing external seemed to have changed to
make me feel better, and yet my mood was so high that I worried that
my illness could have changed to bipolar disorder and that I was
entering a manic phase.
Feeling better mentally than I have in at least 6 months. Unfortunately my head's been buzzing with thoughts that kept me awake all night. Ben Hutchings (@benhutchingsuk) 29 February 2016
Thankfully, I'm not behaving manically. I have been doing a lot
more shopping than usual, but almost the first purchase was a
whiteboard to maintain the to-do list that I had been keeping rather
unreliably in my head, and mostly I've been buying things off that
list - that I've intended to get for months or years. It's
just been so long since I could feel generally positive and
optimistic about my life - outside of any special event - that I
didn't immediately recognise this state of mind as normality.
@benhutchingsuk Did I say 6 months? I think it's more like a decade. There's a pretty deep pile of stuff I'm finally dealing with... Ben Hutchings (@benhutchingsuk) 7 March 2016
It's now been two three weeks since my recovery, and I still feel so much
better:
I'm bothered far less by discomforts like feeling a little cold or
hungry. I used to become almost paralysed by this, while feeling
too short of energy to fix myself some food.
Pleasure is more intense. Food tastes and smells wonderful.
Music feels more immersive. Sex made me cry.
I can easily have normal conversations with people I know and
people I don't. I'm having important conversations I had been
putting off.
I'm also able to write personal things like this, that I've shied
away from for years.
When I see minor problems with the flat, I either fix them
straight away or put them on the whiteboard to be fixed soon.
I'm far more persistent. If I run into an obstacle I'll either
try a different approach or add an item to the whiteboard for
whatever tools or supplies I'm missing.
As I feel better in myself I also find myself less self-centred and
more able to focus on other people's needs, particularly my wife
Nattie. Frankly I've been an asshole pretty often while I was
depressed, so I apologise to those who've been the brunt of that.
I hope you'll find me more pleasant to deal with from now on.
There's lots more I could write, but I'll end this entry now
and maybe say more at a later date.
Last Monday, I began a new project
at Codethink - working on
kernel support for the next generation of an interactive system
fitted in some high-performance cars. I travelled up to Manchester
the night before, and on Monday I met Codethink's team (most of whom
I was familiar with).
My first chore was to set up VPN access to the development resources
(source control, wiki, etc.). I sandboxed the proprietary VPN
client in a VM with a systemd unit to run it at boot, so I can
control it by starting and stopping that VM. I then set to work on
unpacking and exploring the SoC vendor's evaluation module (EVM),
starting by looking at serial output - of which there was none.
Nothing on the LCD panel or network port either. A frustrating day.
On Tuesday, the architect from our immediate customer, already a
friend of mine, joined us in Manchester. As for the EVM, without
any obvious change in cabling it was now reliably spitting out the
expected u-boot and kernel boot messages, unfortunately ending with
errors from the touchscreen driver intermingled with messages from
various graphics drivers. I looked at the u-boot environment to see
how the kernel parameters were controlled and started tweaking them
with the aim of working around the errors. None of this worked. I
looked for more documentation on the EVM, but found none beyond the
quick start guide. Had I been given the wrong kernel or device
tree? They matched the available downloads though the device tree
looked very different from the upstream version. I started trying
to edit the vendor's device tree to remove the troublesome devices
before realising that the decompiled tree was full of absolute
cross-references that would be invalid after recompiling. So, a
second day of frustration. In the evening I started to feel a cold
coming on.
I slept poorly, and just dragged myself out of bed in time for 11:00
checkout. In the office, I remembered that u-boot had commands for
manipulating device trees in memory. I tried stepping through the
boot script and then removing device tree nodes for the touchscreen
and graphics hardware before booting the kernel. Success! I got a
login prompt where of course username:root,
password:[empty] worked. (It doesn't run sshd, but does
run telnetd.) Then it was time for a team lunch at the excellent
Samsi, though I hesitated
to go as I was feeling quite poorly.
Shortly after lunch I found myself falling asleep at my desk in
the middle of reading documentation. I had to take a nap on the sofa.
I got a little more work done that day, but I got progressively
feebler. The train journey home was thankfully uneventful. I
arrived home at midnight and soon went to sleep.
I spent most of Thursday in a high fever, dreaming of abstract
entities and their relationships that I struggled to name, but
in retrospect might correspond to various kinds of software
component. It was incredibly tedious. I had no appetite and
little ability to process the real world. Nattie tended to me
as she could. I called my mum to cancel her visit planned for
the next day.
On Friday my fever started to recede and I drank some soup. I was
able to look after myself to some extent, though I sorely missed
Nattie when she went out. I spent most of the day watching comedy
and music docs on the BBC iPlayer, something far too passive for me
to do normally.
On Saturday morning I felt well enough to tackle the meze platter
that Nattie brought back from her previous evening's outing. It
tasted pretty damn good. I felt better hour by hour, and in the
evening we both went out to a group dinner in a pub. Hot food
smelled and tasted even more amazing! I was able to start catching
up on email and some real work, preparing kernel stable updates. I
even migrated DNS service for decadent.org.uk late that night,
driven by anger at the incompetence of my previous provider that had
prevented my mails reaching bugs.debian.org.
Despite the awfulness of Thursday and the symptoms I still have
(tickly throat and runny nose), this bout of the 'flu has been a
positive experience for me, but I'll explain why that is in a
subsequent entry.
Debian and FLOSS community don't only occupy coding developers. They occupy people who write news, who talk about FLOSS, who help on booths and conferences, who create artistic forms of the community and so many others that contribute in countless ways. A lady, that is doing many of that is Francesca Ciceri, known in Debian as MadameZou. She is non-packaging Debian Developer, a fearless warrior for diversity and a zombie fan. Although it sounds intimidating, she is deep caring and great human being. So, what has MadaZou to tell us?
Who are you?
My name is Francesca and I'm totally flattered by your intro. The fearless warrior part may be a bit exaggerated, though.
What have you done and what are you currently working on in FLOSS world?
I've been a Debian contributor since late 2009. My journey in Debian has touched several non-coding areas: from translation to publicity, from videoteam to www. I've been one of the www.debian.org webmasters for a while, a press officer for the Project as well as an editor for DPN. I've dabbled a bit in font packaging, and nowadays I'm mostly working as a Front Desk member.
Setup of your main machine?
Wow, that's an intimate question! Lenovo Thinkpad, Debian testing.
Describe your current most memorable situation as FLOSS member?
Oh, there are a few. One awesome, tiring and very satisfying moment was during the release of Squeeze: I was member of the publicity and the www teams at the time, and we had to pull a 10 hours of team work to put everything in place. It was terrible and exciting at the same time. I shudder to think at the amount of work required from ftpmaster and release team during the release. Another awesome moment was my first Debconf: I was so overwhelmed by the sense of belonging in finally meeting all these people I've been worked remotely for so long, and embarassed by my poor English skills, and overall happy for just being there... If you are a Debian contributor I really encourage you to participate to Debian events, be they small and local or as big as DebConf: it really is like finally meeting family.
Some memorable moments from Debian conferences?
During DC11, the late nights with the "corridor cabal" in the hotel, chatting about everything. A group expedition to watch shooting stars in the middle of nowhere, during DC13. And a very memorable videoteam session: it was my first time directing and everything that could go wrong, went wrong (including the speaker deciding to take a walk outside the room, to demonstrate something, out of the cameras range). It was a disaster, but also fun: at the end of it, all the video crew was literally in stitches. But there are many awesome moments, almost too many to recall. Each conference is precious on that regard: for me the socializing part is extremely important, it's what cements relationships and help remote work go smoothly, and gives you motivation to volunteer in tasks that sometimes are not exactly fun.
You are known as Front Desk member for DebConf's - what work does it occupy and why do you enjoy doing it?
I'm not really a member of the team: just one of Nattie's minions!
You had been also part of DebConf Video team - care to share insights
into video team work and benefits it provides to Debian Project?
The video team work is extremely important: it makes possible for people not attending to follow the conference, providing both live streaming and recording of all talks. I may be biased, but I think that DebConf video coverage and the high quality of the final recordings are unrivaled among FLOSS conferences - especially since it's all volunteer work and most of us aren't professional in the field. During the conference we take shifts in filming the various talks - for each talk we need approximately 4 volunteers: two camera operators, a sound mixer and the director. After the recording, comes the boring part: reviewing, cutting and sometimes editing the videos. It's a long process and during the conference, you can sometimes spot the videoteam members doing it at night in the hacklab, exhausted after a full day of filming. And then, the videos are finally ready to be uploaded, for your viewing pleasure. During the last years this process has become faster thanks to the commitment of many volunteers, so that now you have to wait only few days, sometimes a week, after the end of the conference to be able to watch the videos. I personally love to contribute to the videoteam: you get to play with all that awesome gear and you actually make a difference for all the people who cannot attend in person.
You are also non-packaging Debian Developer - how does that feel like?
Feels awesome! The mere fact that the Debian Project decided - in 2009 via a GR - to recognize the many volunteers who contribute without doing packaging work is a great show of inclusiveness, in my opinion. In a big project like Debian just packaging software is not enough: the final result relies heavily on translators, sysadmins, webmasters, publicity people, event organizers and volunteers, graphic artists, etc. It's only fair that these contributions are deemed as valuable as the packaging, and to give an official status to those people. I was one of the firsts non-uploading DD, four years ago, and for a long time it was just really an handful of us. In the last year I've seen many others applying for the role and that makes me really happy: it means that finally the contributors have realized that they deserve to be an official part of Debian and to have "citizenship rights" in the project.
You were the leading energy on Debian's diversity statement - what gave
you the energy to drive into it?
It seemed the logical conclusion of the extremely important work that Debian Women had done in the past. When I first joined Debian, in 2009, as a contributor, I was really surprised to find a friendly community and to not be discriminated on account of my gender or my lack of coding skills. I may have been just lucky, landing in particularly friendly teams, but my impression is that the project has been slowly but unequivocally changed by the work of Debian Women, who raised first the need for inclusiveness and the awareness about the gender problem in Debian. I don't remember exactly how I stumbled upon the fact that Debian didn't have a Diversity Statement, but at first I was very surprised by it. I asked zack (Stefano Zacchiroli), who was DPL at the time, and he encouraged me to start a public discussion about it, sending out a draft - and helped me all the way along the process. It took some back and forth in the debian-project mailing list, but the only thing needed was actually just someone to start the process and try to poke the discussion when it stalled - the main blocker was actually about the wording of the statement. I learned a great deal from that experience, and I think it changed completely my approach in things like online discussions and general communication within the project. At the end of the day, what I took from that is a deep respect for who participated and the realization that constructive criticism does require certainly a lot of work for all parts involved, but can happen. As for the statement in itself: these things are as good as you keep them alive with best practices, but I think that are better stated explicitly rather than being left unsaid.
You are involved also with another Front Desk, the Debian's one which is involved with Debian's New Members process - what are tasks of that FD
and how rewarding is the work on it?
The Debian Front Desk is the team that runs the New Members process: we receive the applications, we assign the applicant a manager, and we verify the final report. In the last years the workflow has been simplified a lot by the re-design of the nm.debian.org website, but it's important to keep things running smoothly so that applicants don't have too lenghty processes or to wait too much before being assigned a manager. I've been doing it for a less more than a month, but it's really satisfying to usher people toward DDship! So this is how I feel everytime I send a report over to DAM for an applicant to be accepted as new Debian Developer:
How do you see future of Debian development?
Difficult to say. What I can say is that I'm pretty sure that, whatever the technical direction we'll take, Debian will remain focused on excellence and freedom.
What are your future plans in Debian, what would you like to work on?
Definetely bug wrangling: it's one of the thing I do best and I've not had a chance to do that extensively for Debian yet.
Why should developers and users join Debian community? What makes Debian a great and happy place?
We are awesome, that's why. We are strongly committed to our Social Contract and to users freedom, we are steadily improving our communication style and trying to be as inclusive as possible. Most of the people I know in Debian are perfectionists and outright brilliant in what they do. Joining Debian means working hard on something you believe, identifying with a whole project, meeting lots of wonderful people and learning new things. It ca be at times frustrating and exhausting, but it's totally worth it.
You have been involved in Mozilla as part of OPW - care to share
insights into Mozilla, what have you done and compare it to Debian?
That has been a very good experience: it meant have the chance to peek into another community, learn about their tools and workflow and contribute in different ways. I was an intern for the Firefox QA team and their work span from setting up specific test and automated checks on the three version of Firefox (Stable, Aurora, Nightly) to general bug triaging. My main job was bug wrangling and I loved the fact that I was a sort of intermediary between developers and users, someone who spoke both languages and could help them work together. As for the comparison, Mozilla is surely more diverse than Debian: both in contributors and users. I'm not only talking demographic, here, but also what tools and systems are used, what kind of skills people have, etc. That meant reach some compromises with myself over little things: like having to install a proprietary tool used for the team meetings (and getting crazy in order to make it work with Debian) or communicating more on IRC than on mailing lists. But those are pretty much the challenges you have to face whenever you go out of your comfort zone .
You are also volunteer of the Organization for Transformative Works -
what is it, what work do you do and care to share some interesting stuff?
OTW is a non profit organization to preserve fan history and cultures, created by fans. Its work range from legal advocacy and lobbying for fair use and copyright related issues, developing and maintaining AO3 -- a huge fanwork archive based on open-source software --, to the production of a peer-reviewed academic journal about fanworks. I'm an avid fanfiction reader and writer, and joining the OTW volunteers seemed a good way to give back to the community - in true Debian fashion . As a volunteer, I work for the Translation Committee: we are more than a hundred people - divided in several language teams - translating the OTW website, the interface of AO3 archive, newsletter, announcements and news posts. We have a orga-wide diversity statement, training for recruits, an ever growing set of procedures to smooth our workflow, monthly meetings and movie nights. It's an awesome group to work with. I'm deeply invested in this kind of work: both for the awesomeness of OTW people and for the big role that fandom and fanworks have in my life. What I find amazing is that the same concept we - as in the FLOSS ecosystem - apply to software can be applied to cultural production: taking a piece of art you love and expand, remix, explore it. Just for the fun of it. Protect and encourage the right to play in this cultural sandbox is IMO essential for our society. Most of the participants in the fandom come from marginalised group or minorities whose point of view is usually not part of the mainstream narratives. This makes the act of writing, remixing and re-interpreting a story not only a creative exercise but a revolutionary one. As Elizabeth Minkel says: "My preferred explanation is the idea that the vast majority of what we watch is from the male perspective authored, directed, and filmed by men, and mostly straight white men at that. Fan fiction gives women and other marginalised groups the chance to subvert that perspective, to fracture a story and recast it in her own way." In other words, "fandom is about putting debate and conversation back into an artistic process".
On a personal side - you do a lot of DIY, handmade works. What have you
done, what joy does it bring to you and share with us a picture of it?
I like to think that the hacker in me morphs in a maker whenever I can actually manipulate stuff. The urge to explore ways of doing things, of create and change is probably the same. I've been blessed with curiousity and craftiness and I love to learn new DIY techniques: I cannot describe it, really, but if I don't make something for a while I actually feel antsy. I need to create stuff. Nowadays, I'm mostly designing and sewing clothes - preferably reproductions of dresses from the 40s and the 50s - and I'm trying to make a living of that. It's a nice challenge: there's a lot of research involved, as I always try to be historically accurate in design, sewing tecniques and material, and many hours of careful attention to details. I'm right in the process of make photoshoots for most of my period stuff, so I'll share with you something different: a t-shirt refashion done with the DebConf11 t-shirt! (here's the tutorial)
Notice: There were several requests for me to more elaborate on my path to Debian and impact on life so here it is. It's going to be a bit long so anyone who isn't interested in my personal Debian journey should skip it. :)
In 2007. I enrolled into Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (at first at Department of Industrial Management and later transfered to Department of Mechatronics - this was possible because first 3 semesters are same for both departments). By the end of same year I was finishing my tasks (consisting primarily of calculations, some small graphical designs and write-ups) when famous virus, called by users "RECYCLER", sent my Windows XP machine into oblivion. Not only it took control over machine and just spawned so many processes that system would crash itself, it actually deleted all from hard-disk before it killed the system entirely. I raged - my month old work, full of precise calculations and a lot of design details, was just gone. I started cursing which was always continued with weeping: "Why isn't there an OS that can whithstand all of viruses, even if it looks like old DOS!". At that time, my roommate was my cousin who had used Kubuntu in past and currently was having SUSE dual-booted on his laptop. He called me over, started talking about this thing called Linux and how it's different but de facto has no viruses. Well, show me this Linux and my thought was, it's probably so ancient and not used that it probably looks like from pre Windows 3.1 era, but when SUSE booted up it had so much more beautiful UI look (it was KDE, and compared to XP it looked like the most professional OS ever).
So I was thrilled, installed openSUSE, found some rough edges (I knew immediately that my work with professional CAD systems will not be possible on Linux machines) but overall I was bought. After that he even talked to me about distros. Wait, WTF distros?! So, he showed me distrowatch.com. I was amazed. There is not only a better OS then Windows - there where dozens, hundreds of them. After some poking around I installed Debian KDE - and it felt great, working better then openSUSE but now I was as most newbies, on fire to try more distros. So I was going around with Fedora, Mandriva, CentOS, Ubuntu, Mint, PCLinuxOS and in beginning of 2008 I stumbled upon Debian docs which where talking about GNU and GNU Manifesto. To be clear, I was always as a high-school kid very much attached to idea of freedom but started loosing faith by faculty time (Internet was still not taking too much of time here, youth still spent most of the day outside). So the GNU Manifesto was really a big thing for me and Debian is a social bastion of freedom. Debian (now with GNOME2) was being installed on my machine.
As all that hackerdom in Debian was around I started trying to dig up some code. I never ever read a book on coding (until this day I still didn't start and finish one) so after a few days I decided to code tetris in C++ with thought that I will finish it in two days at most (the feeling that you are powerful and very bright person) - I ended it after one month in much pain. So instead I learned about keeping Debian system going on, and exploring some new packages. I got thrilled over radiotray, slimvolley (even held a tournament in my dorm room), started helping on #debian, was very active in conversation with others about Debian and even installed it on few laptops (I became de facto technical support for users of those laptops :D ).
Then came 2010 which with negative flow that came in second half of 2009, started to crush me badly. I was promised to go to Norway, getting my studies on robotics and professor lied (that same professor is still on faculty even after he was caught in big corruption scandal over buying robots - he bought 15 years old robots from UK, although he got money from Norway to buy new ones). My relationship came to hard end and had big emotional impact on me. I fell a year on faculty. My father stopped financing me and stopped talking to me. My depression came back. Alcohol took over me. I was drunk every day just not to feel anything. Then came the end of 2010, I somehow got to the information that DebConf will be in Banja Luka. WHAT?! DebConf in city where I live. I got into #debconf and in December 2010/January 2011 I became part of the famous "local local organizers". I was still getting hammered by alcohol but at least I was getting out of depression. IIRC I met Holger and Moray in May, had a great day (a drop of rakia that was too much for all of us) and by their way of behaving there was something strange. Beatiful but strange. Both were sending unique energy of liberty although I am not sure they were aware of it. Later, during DebConf I felt that energy from almost all Debian people, which I can't explain. I don't feel it today - not because it's not there, it's because I think I integrated so much into Debian community that it's now a natural feeling which people here, that are close to me are saying that they feel it when I talk about Debian.
DebConf time in Banja Luka was awesome - firstly I met Phil Hands and Andrew McMillan which were a crazy team, local local team was working hard (I even threw up during the work in Banski Dvor because of all heat and probably not much of sleep due to excitement), met also crazy Mexican Gunnar (aren't all Mexicans crazy?), played Mao (never again, thank you), was hanging around smart but crazy people (love all) from which I must notice Nattie (a bastion of positive energy), Christian Perrier (which had coordinated our Serbian translation effort), Steve Langasek (which asked me to find physiotherapist for his co-worker Mathias Klose, IIRC), Zach (not at all important guy at that time), Luca Capello (who gifted me a swirl on my birthday) and so many others that this would be a post for itself just naming them. During DebConf it was also a bit of hard time - my grandfather died on 6th July and I couldn't attend the funeral so I was still having that sadness in my heart, and Darjan Prtic, a local team member that came from Vienna, committed suicide on my birthday (23 July). But DebConf as conference was great, but more importantly the Debian community felt like a family and Meike Reichle told me that it was. The night it finished, me and Vedran Novakovic cried. A lot. Even days after, I was getting up in the morning having the feeling I need something to do for DebConf. After a long time I felt alive. By the end of year, I adopted package from Clint Adams and Moray became my sponsor. In last quarter of 2011 and beginning of 2012, I (as part of LUG) held talks about Linux, had Linux installation in Computer Center for the first time ever, and installed Debian on more machines.
Now fast forwarding with some details - I was also on DebConf13 in Switzerland, met some great new friends such as Tincho and Santiago (and many many more), Santiago was also my roommate in Portland on the previous DebConf. In Switzerland I had really great and awesome time. Year 2014 - I was also at DebConf14, maintain a bit more packages and have applied for DD, met some new friends among which I must put out Apollon Oikonomopoulos and Costas Drogos which friendship is already deep for such a short time and I already know that they are life-long friends. Also thanks to Steve Langasek, because without his help I wouldn't be in Portland with my family and he also gave me Arduino. :) 2015. - I am currently at my village residence, have a 5 years of working experince as developer due to Debian and still a lot to go, learn and do but my love towards Debian community is by magnitude bigger then when I thought I love it at most. I am also going through my personal evolution and people from Debian showed me to fight for what you care, so I plan to do so.
I can't write all and name all the people that I met, and believe me when I say that I remember most and all of you impacted my life for which I am eternally grateful. Debian, and it's community effect literally saved my life, spring new energy into me and changed me for better. Debian social impact is far bigger then technical, and when you know that Debian is a bastion of technical excellence - you can maybe picture the greatness of Debian. Some of greatest minds are in Debian but most important isn't the sheer amount of knowledge but the enormous empathy. I just hope I can in future show to more people what Debian is and to find all lost souls as me to give them the hope, to show them that we can make world a better place and that everyone is capable to live and do what they love.
P.S. I am still hoping and waiting to see Bdale writing a book about Debian's history to this day - in which I think many of us would admire the work done by project members, laugh about many situations and have fun reading a book about project that was having nothing to do but fail and yet it stands stronger then ever with roots deep into our minds.
Long story short, we put in a bid to host Debconf 16 in Cape Town, and we got it!
Back at Debconf 12 (Nicaragua), many people asked me when we re hosting a Debconf in South Africa. I just laughed and said Who knows, maybe some day . During the conference I talked to Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed) who said that many people asked him too. We came to the conclusion that we d both really really want to do it but just didn t have enough time at that stage. I wanted to get to a point where I could take 6 months off for it and suggested that we prepare a bid for 2019. Stefano thought that this was quite funny, I think at some point we managed to get that estimate down to 2017-2018.
That date crept back even more with great people like Allison Randal and Bernelle Verster joining our team, along with other locals Graham Inggs, Raoul Snyman, Adrianna Pi ska, Nigel Kukard, Simon Cross, Marc Welz, Neill Muller, Jan Groenewald, and our international mentors such as Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Martin Krafft and Hannes von Haugwitz. Now, we re having that Debconf next year. It s almost hard to believe, not sure how I ll sleep tonight, we ve waited so long for this and we ve got a mountain of work ahead of us, but we ve got a strong team and I think Debconf 2016 attendees are in for a treat!
Since I happened to live close to Montr al back in 2012, I supported the idea of a Debconf bid for Montr al first, and then for Cape Town afterwards. Little did I know then that the two cities would be the only two cities bidding against each other 3 years later. I think both cities are superb locations to host a Debconf, and I m supporting Montr al s bid for 2017.
Want to get involved? We have a mailing list and IRC channel: #debconf16-capetown on oftc. Thanks again for all the great support from everyone involved so far!
A rare shot of some members of the Trout Cabal doing their secret handshake,
while wearing red noses to bring the fun back to Debian (as per their shadow DPL platform).
During the meeting, the members of the cabal were able to update their manifesto as well as devise new brilliant ways to promote Debian around the world.
Many thanks to MiniDebconf UK 2014 organizers for hosting this important meeting.
Also, thanks Nattie for the pic :).
It's not about how it inits, it's all about how it ends. (Going out in style, you know?)
The deadline for sponsored registration for DebConf11 in Banja Luka, originally May 8th, has officially been extended to May 19th. The reasons for the extension are as follows:
Thanks to a significant increase in sponsorship from one of our main sponsors, we have been permitted and encouraged to welcome more people to the conference. The extension is a one-off occurrence in response to this new development, and to allow any potential attendees time to access more information before registering.
Registration is required for everybody who plans to attend any part of Debconf. Access to the conference venue, food and accommodation is controlled through the registration badge. The only exception to the registration requirement is for those who plan to only attend Debian Day.
It is possible to request sponsorship for food, accommodation, and travel. Those who have been involved or contributed to Debian or to other open source projects are eligible to apply for sponsorship, which will be decided on a case-by-case basis.
The professional and corporate categories are for those who are sent and sponsored by their companies. Professional registration covers the actual costs of conference attendance, while corporate registration is just over double that price, and is aimed at those who, besides paying the actual costs, also want to contribute money and help Debian.
the DebConf team
Ben Hutchings, photo by Andrew Mc Millan, license CC-BY-2.0
Ben Hutchings is a rather unassuming guy but hiding behind his hat, there s a real kernel hacker who backports new drivers for the kernel in Debian stable so that our flagship release supports very recent hardware.
Read on to learn more about Ben and the kernel team s projects for Debian Wheezy!
Raphael: Who are you?
Ben: I m a professional programmer, living in Cambridge, England with my long-suffering wife Nattie. In Debian, I mostly work on the Linux kernel and related packages.
Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?
Ben: I started using Debian in 1998 and at some point I subscribed to Debian Weekly News. So in 2003 I heard about the planned Debian 10th birthday party in Cambridge, and thought I would like to go to that. Somehow I persuaded Nattie that we should go, even though it was on the day of our wedding anniversary! We both enjoyed it; we made new friends and met some old ones (small world). From then on we have
both been socially involved in Debian UK.
In 2004 there was a bug-squashing party in Cambridge, and we attended that as well. That s where I really started contributing fixing bugs and learning about Debian packaging. Then in 2005 I made my first package (sgt-puzzles), attended DebConf, and was persuaded to enter the New Maintainer process.
NM involved a lot of waiting, but by the time I was given questions and tasks to do I had learned enough to get through quite quickly. In April 2006 I was approved as a Debian Developer.
Meanwhile, I looked at the videos from DebConf 5 and thought that it would be useful to distribute them on a DVD. That led me to start writing video software and to get involved in the video team for the next year s DebConf.
Raphael: You have been one the main driver behind the removal of non-free firmwares from the kernel. Explain us what you did and what s the status nowadays?
Ben: That s giving me a bit more credit than I deserve.
For a long time the easy way for drivers to load firmware programs was to include them as a blob in their static data, but more recently the kernel has included a simple method for drivers to request a named blob at run-time. These requests are normally handled by udev by reading from files on disk, although there is a build-time option to include blobs in the kernel. Several upstream and distribution developers worked to convert the older drivers to use this method. I converted the last few of these drivers that Debian included in its binary packages.
In the upstream Linux source, those blobs have not actually been removed; they have been moved to a firmware subdirectory. The long-term plan is to remove this while still allowing the inclusion of blobs at build-time from the separate linux-firmware repository. For now, the Debian source package excludes this subdirectory from the upstream tarball, so it is all free software.
There are still a few drivers that have not been converted, and in Debian we just exclude the firmware from them (so they cannot be built). And from time to time a driver will be added to the staging section of Linux that includes firmware in the old way. But it s understood in the kernel community that it s one of the bugs that will have to be fixed before the driver can move out of staging .
Raphael: Do you believe that Debian has done enough to make it easy for users to install the non-free firmwares that they need?
Ben: The installer, the Linux binary packages and initramfs-tools will warn about specific files that may be needed but are missing. Users who have enabled the non-free section should then be able to find the necessary package with apt-cache search, because each of the
binaries built from the firmware-nonfree source package includes driver and file names within its description. For the installer, there is a single tarball that provides everything.
We could make this easier, but I think we have gone about as far as we can while following the Debian Social Contract and Debian policy.
Raphael: At some point in the past, the Debian kernel team was not working very well. Did the situation improve?
Ben: Back in 2008 when I started working on the Linux kernel package to sort out the firmware issues, I think there were some problems of communication and coordination, and quite possibly some members were burned-out.
Since then, many of the most active kernel team members have been able to meet face-to-face to discuss future plans at LPC 2009 in Portland and the 2010 mini-DebConf in Paris. We generally seem to have productive discussions on the debian-kernel mailing list and elsewhere, and I think the team is working quite well. Several new contributors have joined after me.
I would say our biggest problem today is that we just don t have enough time to do all we want to. Certainly, almost all my Debian time is now taken up with integrating upstream kernel releases and handling some fraction of the incoming bug reports. Occasionally I can take the time to work on actual features or the other packages I m neglecting!
Our biggest problem today is that we just don t have enough time to do all we want to.
Raphael: It is widely known that Linux is maintained in a git repository. But the Debian kernel team is using Subversion. I believe a switch is planned. Why was not git used from the start?
Ben: The linux-2.6 source package dates from the time when Linus made his first release using git. I wasn t part of the team back then so I don t know for sure why it was imported to Subversion. However, at that time hardly anyone knew how to use git, no-one had experience hosting public git repositories, and Alioth certainly didn t offer that option.
Today there are no real blockers: everyone on the kernel team is familiar with using git; Alioth is ready to host it; we don t have per-architecture patches that would require large numbers of branches. But it still takes time to plan such a conversion for what is a relatively complex source package (actually a small set of related source packages).
Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?
Ben: Something I ve already done, in conjunction with the installer team, is to start generating udebs from the linux-2.6 source package. The kernel and modules have to be repacked into lots of little udebs to avoid using too much memory during installation. The configuration for this used to be in a bunch of separate source packages; these could get out of step with the kernel build configuration and this would only be noticed some time later. Now we can update them both at the same time, they are effectively cross-checked on every upload, and the installer can always be built from the latest kernel version in testing or unstable.
I think that we should be encouraging PC users to install the 64-bit build (amd64), but many users will still use 32-bit (i386) for backward compatibility or out of habit. On i386, we ve slightly reduced the variety of kernel flavours by getting rid of 686 and making 686-pae the default (previously this was called 686-bigmem ). This means that the NX security feature will be used on all systems that support it. It should also mean that the first i386 CD can have suitable kernel packages for all systems.
I have been trying to work on providing a full choice of Linux Security Modules (LSMs). Despite their name, they cannot be built as kernel modules, so every enabled LSM is a waste of memory on the systems that don t use it. This is a significant concern for smaller Debian systems. My intent is to allow all unused LSMs to be freed at boot time so that we can happily enable all of them.
I recently proposed to drop support for older x86 systems, starting with 486-class processors in wheezy. In general, this would allow the use of more compiler optimisations throughout userland and the kernel. However it seems that there isn t that much to be gained unless we also drop 586-class processors, and there are still quite a few of those in use. So I think this will have to wait.
Uwe Kleine-K nig has been working to include real-time support (also known as PREEMPT_RT). This can provide low and very predictable I/O latency, which is useful for live audio synthesis, for example. It still requires a number of patches and a build configuration change, resulting in a separate binary package. We re currently only building that for 64-bit PCs. (You may notice this is missing for Linux 3.1, because the real-time developers skipped this release.)
Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian?
Ben: I think we try too hard to accommodate every possible option, without regard for the cost to developers and users in general. As an example, we now have sysvinit, file-rc, upstart and systemd all in testing. Daemon maintainers can t rely on any advanced features of upstart or systemd because we refuse to choose between them. And the decision to support the FreeBSD kernel means that we cannot choose upstart or systemd as the only option. So all daemon maintainers will have to maintain those baroque init scripts for the indefinite future. We really should be able to decide as a distribution that when one option is technically good and popular then it can be made the only option. But no-one really has the authority to do that, so we muddle along with the pretence that all the options are equally valid and functional, while none of them is supported as well as they should be.
We try too hard to accommodate every possible option, without regard for the cost to developers and users in general.
We also try to build every package on every architecture, in general. I m quite sure there are many (package, architecture) combinations that have no users, ever. But if at some point that combination FTBFS, developers will waste time investigating and fixing that time that could have been spent working on bugs and features that users actually care about. Yes, sure, portability is good but you can t prove portability just by making a package compile on every architecture. This also applies to the selection of drivers for the kernel, by the way.
Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?
Well, there are many people, but I will pick out just a few:
Steve McIntyre, for his work as DPL to improve communication with the various Debian derivatives and to bring fresh blood into various core teams. Also for being a generous host for countless Debian social and bug-squashing events.
Stefano Zacchiroli, for improving further on communications with both downstream and upstream projects, and for regularly exercising his power to lead discussions to the benefit of the project.
Julien Cristau, for maintaining good humour while not only fighting against the tide of graphics driver regressions in X and the Linux kernel but also working on release management.
Jonathan Nieder, for taking on the unglamorous and frustrating task of kernel bug triage as a non-maintainer and developing it to a fine art.
Thank you to Ben for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.
00:32 < AbsintheSyringe> I'm with one of the users, that registered and he registered as "sponsored" however now he has no category and of course when he tries doing "sponsored" it doesn't work
00:32 < AbsintheSyringe> is this the way it's suppoused to be
00:33 < nattie> who is this?
00:36 < AbsintheSyringe> he's one of the volunteers, he'll be doing everything that has to do with the sound and concerts and so on, regarding concerts and everything else, in real life he's machinist constructor and works as a dj, very popular and good one
00:36 < nattie> that's not the point. we need the name so we can check his penta logs
00:37 < darst> (and not name publically, preferably)
00:37 < AbsintheSyringe> Mirza Alibalic (nickname: masta)
I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the
story of a great surprise and a big moment for me.
All this started when my wife
Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for
my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early
March or something (I don't yet have all the details).
Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again
into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday
wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many
languages as possible.
Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up
the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work
with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some
in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking
dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday.
Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with
many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible,
poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting
things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in
the Perrier's genes!
And they were doing all this without me noticing.
As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly
turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be
possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost
Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift.
Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of
Christian" album?
But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that
features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book?
But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil,
then Joey doing on the following pages?
And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often
bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards
(one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro
representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all
around the world. All this in a wonderful album.
I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and
emotion was really really intense.
Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what
you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the
investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into
this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they
really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual
family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated
and some were indeed much much much appreciated.
Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the
result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you
were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that
includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!).
Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin
Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto,
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina
Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution
received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall,
Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil
McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema
Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl,
Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and
Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux'
Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in
September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu),
Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and
God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi,
Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets
bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach,
Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE
Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx
cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs
(finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak
Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition"
Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza,
Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam
D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes
the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor"
Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer"
Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli
Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i ,
Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n
Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans
Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is
as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier,
Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by
nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky"
Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su,
Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous
for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe
Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero,
Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi
Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent,
Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam
Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be
REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello.
Let's say it gain:
I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the
story of a great surprise and a big moment for me.
All this started when my wife
Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for
my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early
March or something (I don't yet have all the details).
Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again
into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday
wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many
languages as possible.
Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up
the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work
with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some
in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking
dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday.
Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with
many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible,
poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting
things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in
the Perrier's genes!
And they were doing all this without me noticing.
As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly
turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be
possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost
Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift.
Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of
Christian" album?
But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that
features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book?
But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil,
then Joey doing on the following pages?
And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often
bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards
(one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro
representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all
around the world. All this in a wonderful album.
I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and
emotion was really really intense.
Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what
you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the
investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into
this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they
really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual
family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated
and some were indeed much much much appreciated.
Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the
result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you
were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that
includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!).
Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin
Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto,
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina
Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution
received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall,
Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil
McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema
Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl,
Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and
Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux'
Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in
September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu),
Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and
God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi,
Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets
bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach,
Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE
Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx
cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs
(finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak
Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition"
Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza,
Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam
D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes
the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor"
Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer"
Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli
Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i ,
Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n
Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans
Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is
as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier,
Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by
nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky"
Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su,
Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous
for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe
Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero,
Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi
Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent,
Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam
Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be
REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello.
Let's say it gain:
I'm just back home after Paris mini-DebConf. I'm
happy, excited, and exhausted almost as if it had been a full
fledged DebConf. That's enough in my book to consider the event a
complete success.
As far as I know, it has been the first mini-DebConf held in
Paris and about 150 people have come to attend the event from all
over Europe. Off the top of my head I've met friends from at least:
Spain, UK, France (obviously!), Italy, Germany, Austria,
Switzerland, Greece. I'm still very much impressed by such a
diverse attendance.
Initially, I had planned the first "DPL strike" ever (i.e. not
doing anything DPL-related) for the duration of the conference, in
order to take part into the BSP. That agenda has been
pretty much subverted by a last minute emergency, by chatting with
loads of people, and by actually finalizing the Debian Sprint Program, which
had been at the top of my Debian TODO list for quite a while now.
Nonetheless, I've managed to advance a bit on a couple of RC bugs,
which belong to the "annoying/pointless/but-still-valid" category.
They are not solved yet, but I hope to have good news to share
soon.
Bottom line: I loved the event. and I've even
managed to avoid getting killed by my (local) family for taking
part in a Debian-weekend after an almost full week of Debian
traveling, which is another success on its own right
Closing advice: beside some last minute legwork, I did
essentially nothing to organize this mini-DebConf, your kudos
should be better directed to Carl Chenet
and Mehdi
Dogguy for the organization. Other gifts such as bug
fixes can be directed to the speakers, sponsors, and loads of other
helpers from Debian France
and not in particular Xavier Oswald, Valessio Brito, Tanguy Ortolo,
Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Luca Capello, Stephane Glondu, and others
which surely I'm forgetting to mention here (sorry about that).
Kudos folks ... let's do it again next year! (SCNR)
Lessons learned: using the phrase third, final, and slightly
desperate is an excellent way to motivate people into reacting to
your Call for Talks. I've even had to reject some people now,
unfortunately.
Maybe next year, I'll use that phrase in my first call for
talks.
Then again, maybe not.
Anyway, of course that does mean that there are no slots
available anymore. If you wanted to hold a talk in the Debian devroom,
you've had plenty of opportunity and will now have to wait until next
year.
There are still some minor loose ends that need to be filled in (of
course there are always people who will wait until the very
last moment to send mails they need to send... including me), but once
that's done, I'll announce the schedule on the -events-eu mailinglist,
and probably here too. And if you're worried that the word 'desperate'
perhaps got us some boring talks in the end, don't be; the talks that
are on the schedule are, I hope, all very interesting. Watch this
space!
So, things left to do, in no particular order:
Do a schedule for talk announcers. There's enough volunteers
now, I only need to assign slots.
Come up with something cool for the booth. There's going to be
T-shirts, as always, but more things are always welcome.
Booth volunteers. Since I haven't been at the booth much during
these past few FOSDEMs, and since two years ago it turned out that my
'great idea' about organising that wasn't such a great idea after all, I
did the right thing and decided to delegate organising the volunteers to
someone else. That someone else is Nattie; so if you want to help out at
the booth, be sure to contact her.
That's it for now, I guess. Back to your regularly-scheduled
flamewar.
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The image here comes from an example of building 
Official logo of DebConf23
Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.
Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal
Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.
View from the hotel window.
This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal
Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi
My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio
Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.
Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.
This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.
Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal
Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani
A selfie in memory of Abraham.
Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)
This is the Japanese gift I received.
Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal
Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.
Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA
From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.
Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, 
Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.
Who are you?
My name is Francesca and I'm totally flattered by your intro. The fearless warrior part may be a bit exaggerated, though.
What have you done and what are you currently working on in FLOSS world?
I've been a Debian contributor since late 2009. My journey in Debian has touched several non-coding areas: from translation to publicity, from videoteam to www. I've been one of the www.debian.org webmasters for a while, a press officer for the Project as well as an editor for DPN. I've dabbled a bit in font packaging, and nowadays I'm mostly working as a Front Desk member.
Setup of your main machine?
Wow, that's an intimate question! Lenovo Thinkpad, Debian testing.
Describe your current most memorable situation as FLOSS member?
Oh, there are a few. One awesome, tiring and very satisfying moment was during the release of Squeeze: I was member of the publicity and the www teams at the time, and we had to pull a 10 hours of team work to put everything in place. It was terrible and exciting at the same time. I shudder to think at the amount of work required from ftpmaster and release team during the release. Another awesome moment was my first Debconf: I was so overwhelmed by the sense of belonging in finally meeting all these people I've been worked remotely for so long, and embarassed by my poor English skills, and overall happy for just being there... If you are a Debian contributor I really encourage you to participate to Debian events, be they small and local or as big as DebConf: it really is like finally meeting family.
Some memorable moments from Debian conferences?
During DC11, the late nights with the "corridor cabal" in the hotel, chatting about everything. A group expedition to watch shooting stars in the middle of nowhere, during DC13. And a very memorable videoteam session: it was my first time directing and everything that could go wrong, went wrong (including the speaker deciding to take a walk outside the room, to demonstrate something, out of the cameras range). It was a disaster, but also fun: at the end of it, all the video crew was literally in stitches. But there are many awesome moments, almost too many to recall. Each conference is precious on that regard: for me the socializing part is extremely important, it's what cements relationships and help remote work go smoothly, and gives you motivation to volunteer in tasks that sometimes are not exactly fun.
You are known as Front Desk member for DebConf's - what work does it occupy and why do you enjoy doing it?
I'm not really a member of the team: just one of Nattie's minions!
You had been also part of DebConf Video team - care to share insights
into video team work and benefits it provides to Debian Project?
The video team work is extremely important: it makes possible for people not attending to follow the conference, providing both live streaming and recording of all talks. I may be biased, but I think that DebConf video coverage and the high quality of the final recordings are unrivaled among FLOSS conferences - especially since it's all volunteer work and most of us aren't professional in the field. During the conference we take shifts in filming the various talks - for each talk we need approximately 4 volunteers: two camera operators, a sound mixer and the director. After the recording, comes the boring part: reviewing, cutting and sometimes editing the videos. It's a long process and during the conference, you can sometimes spot the videoteam members doing it at night in the hacklab, exhausted after a full day of filming. And then, the videos are finally ready to be uploaded, for your viewing pleasure. During the last years this process has become faster thanks to the commitment of many volunteers, so that now you have to wait only few days, sometimes a week, after the end of the conference to be able to watch the videos. I personally love to contribute to the videoteam: you get to play with all that awesome gear and you actually make a difference for all the people who cannot attend in person.
You are also non-packaging Debian Developer - how does that feel like?
Feels awesome! The mere fact that the Debian Project decided - in 2009 via a GR - to recognize the many volunteers who contribute without doing packaging work is a great show of inclusiveness, in my opinion. In a big project like Debian just packaging software is not enough: the final result relies heavily on translators, sysadmins, webmasters, publicity people, event organizers and volunteers, graphic artists, etc. It's only fair that these contributions are deemed as valuable as the packaging, and to give an official status to those people. I was one of the firsts non-uploading DD, four years ago, and for a long time it was just really an handful of us. In the last year I've seen many others applying for the role and that makes me really happy: it means that finally the contributors have realized that they deserve to be an official part of Debian and to have "citizenship rights" in the project.
You were the leading energy on Debian's diversity statement - what gave
you the energy to drive into it?
It seemed the logical conclusion of the extremely important work that Debian Women had done in the past. When I first joined Debian, in 2009, as a contributor, I was really surprised to find a friendly community and to not be discriminated on account of my gender or my lack of coding skills. I may have been just lucky, landing in particularly friendly teams, but my impression is that the project has been slowly but unequivocally changed by the work of Debian Women, who raised first the need for inclusiveness and the awareness about the gender problem in Debian. I don't remember exactly how I stumbled upon the fact that Debian didn't have a Diversity Statement, but at first I was very surprised by it. I asked zack (Stefano Zacchiroli), who was DPL at the time, and he encouraged me to start a public discussion about it, sending out a draft - and helped me all the way along the process. It took some back and forth in the debian-project mailing list, but the only thing needed was actually just someone to start the process and try to poke the discussion when it stalled - the main blocker was actually about the wording of the statement. I learned a great deal from that experience, and I think it changed completely my approach in things like online discussions and general communication within the project. At the end of the day, what I took from that is a deep respect for who participated and the realization that constructive criticism does require certainly a lot of work for all parts involved, but can happen. As for the statement in itself: these things are as good as you keep them alive with best practices, but I think that are better stated explicitly rather than being left unsaid.
You are involved also with another Front Desk, the Debian's one which is involved with Debian's New Members process - what are tasks of that FD
and how rewarding is the work on it?
The Debian Front Desk is the team that runs the New Members process: we receive the applications, we assign the applicant a manager, and we verify the final report. In the last years the workflow has been simplified a lot by the re-design of the nm.debian.org website, but it's important to keep things running smoothly so that applicants don't have too lenghty processes or to wait too much before being assigned a manager. I've been doing it for a less more than a month, but it's really satisfying to usher people toward DDship! So this is how I feel everytime I send a report over to DAM for an applicant to be accepted as new Debian Developer:
How do you see future of Debian development?
Difficult to say. What I can say is that I'm pretty sure that, whatever the technical direction we'll take, Debian will remain focused on excellence and freedom.
What are your future plans in Debian, what would you like to work on?
Definetely bug wrangling: it's one of the thing I do best and I've not had a chance to do that extensively for Debian yet.
Why should developers and users join Debian community? What makes Debian a great and happy place?
We are awesome, that's why. We are strongly committed to our Social Contract and to users freedom, we are steadily improving our communication style and trying to be as inclusive as possible. Most of the people I know in Debian are perfectionists and outright brilliant in what they do. Joining Debian means working hard on something you believe, identifying with a whole project, meeting lots of wonderful people and learning new things. It ca be at times frustrating and exhausting, but it's totally worth it.
You have been involved in Mozilla as part of OPW - care to share
insights into Mozilla, what have you done and compare it to Debian?
That has been a very good experience: it meant have the chance to peek into another community, learn about their tools and workflow and contribute in different ways. I was an intern for the Firefox QA team and their work span from setting up specific test and automated checks on the three version of Firefox (Stable, Aurora, Nightly) to general bug triaging. My main job was bug wrangling and I loved the fact that I was a sort of intermediary between developers and users, someone who spoke both languages and could help them work together. As for the comparison, Mozilla is surely more diverse than Debian: both in contributors and users. I'm not only talking demographic, here, but also what tools and systems are used, what kind of skills people have, etc. That meant reach some compromises with myself over little things: like having to install a proprietary tool used for the team meetings (and getting crazy in order to make it work with Debian) or communicating more on IRC than on mailing lists. But those are pretty much the challenges you have to face whenever you go out of your comfort zone .
You are also volunteer of the Organization for Transformative Works -
what is it, what work do you do and care to share some interesting stuff?
The deadline for sponsored registration for DebConf11 in Banja Luka, originally May 8th, has officially been extended to May 19th. The reasons for the extension are as follows:
Thanks to a significant increase in sponsorship from one of our main sponsors, we have been permitted and encouraged to welcome more people to the conference. The extension is a one-off occurrence in response to this new development, and to allow any potential attendees time to access more information before registering.
Registration is required for everybody who plans to attend any part of Debconf. Access to the conference venue, food and accommodation is controlled through the registration badge. The only exception to the registration requirement is for those who plan to only attend Debian Day.
It is possible to request sponsorship for food, accommodation, and travel. Those who have been involved or contributed to Debian or to other open source projects are eligible to apply for sponsorship, which will be decided on a case-by-case basis.
The professional and corporate categories are for those who are sent and sponsored by their companies. Professional registration covers the actual costs of conference attendance, while corporate registration is just over double that price, and is aimed at those who, besides paying the actual costs, also want to contribute money and help Debian.
the DebConf team
I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the
story of a great surprise and a big moment for me.
Closing advice: beside some last minute legwork, I did
essentially nothing to organize this mini-DebConf, your kudos
should be better directed to 
Lessons learned: using the phrase third, final, and slightly
desperate is an excellent way to motivate people into reacting to
your Call for Talks. I've even had to reject some people now,
unfortunately.
Maybe next year, I'll use that phrase in my first call for
talks.
Then again, maybe not.
Anyway, of course that does mean that there are no slots
available anymore. If you wanted to hold a talk in the Debian devroom,
you've had plenty of opportunity and will now have to wait until next
year.
There are still some minor loose ends that need to be filled in (of
course there are always people who will wait until the very
last moment to send mails they need to send... including me), but once
that's done, I'll announce the schedule on the -events-eu mailinglist,
and probably here too. And if you're worried that the word 'desperate'
perhaps got us some boring talks in the end, don't be; the talks that
are on the schedule are, I hope, all very interesting. Watch this
space!
So, things left to do, in no particular order:
