I recently got a question by email about the lecture I presented at FOSDEM, and by that mail I discovered that the video of the lecture was uploaded to YouTube (FOSDEM 2012 – Debian packaging for beginners). While I thank the person who did the upload, he/she did not keep the right license for the video which is CC-BY-SA 3.0 (as noted at FOSDEM archive). You can also grab the webm file directly.
Well, the next task will be to listen to myself in order to improve for FOSDEM 2013… See you there.
Filed under Debian GNU/Linux, FOSDEM
After not attending FOSDEM for a few years, this year I decided to attend and also give a talk about “Debian packaging for beginners”, a replay of a talk given by Gergely Nagy in Debconf11 (video). As the per distribution devrooms were replaced a few years ago with the cross-distributions rooms, I thought it might be a good chance to have this kind of introduction talk to help people started contributing to Debian (or derived distributions).
The talk wasn’t meant to replace reading the documentation (new maintainer’s guide, developer’s references and the debian policy), but it’s a good start for those who want some hands-on experience. The idea is to start with a just the upstream directory and progress trough the various errors and warnings we get during the build process using dpkg-buildpackage. The outcome is of course very basic, but enough to get people ready to do things on their own, including various QA tests on the package (e.g. lintian and debdiff).
The presentation covers the important points of the 3 main files in the debian directory: control, changelog and rules. It addition it holds some information about the various tools one can used to test the packages. I hope to make another version of the presentation to be more standalone than just having the main points during the talk itself.
Filed under Debian GNU/Linux, FOSDEM
Although I really wanted, it seems I’m not going to FOSDEM 2009.
After not attending the last Debconf, I really wanted to see some of the people from the project… But that would have to wait till DebConf 9.
Talks that I think is interesting and worth attending:
So enjoy the mingling and the talks and see you next year.
During FOSDEM’s key signing party I had a few people telling me they didn’t get my signatures on their key. It seems that although I already signed them, there was a problem with sending the signatures (probably my local mail settings or my ISP thinking I’m spamming).
After a few reminders from people, I finally got to do the signing of FOSDEM party (including some people who gave me slips). Seems like some people follow carefully who didn’t signed they key… I hope now everyone will be satisfied (:
If you didn’t get my signature yet, please let me know… I don’t want to hear the same complaints next year (that’s wasn’t fun ): ). For obvious reason I can only re-send you an existing signature I have.
The fun part of the signing party is to meet people and ask them questions according to their e-mail addresses. Even better is to thank them for the work on free software I use. This year I thanked Patrick Brunschwig, the enigmail author. But also like to thank Thijs Kinkhorst from squirrelmail and Eike Rathke from openoffice. It was fun to meet some fellow Debian Developer I didn’t know from DebConfs.
Filed under FOSDEM
People have different methods to handle the overwhelming amount of lecture and events. Some just stick to one or two rooms and hear all the related issues, some goes by topic (which might be presented in different places) and I prefer to try and juggle between the lectures and try to have it all.
I’ve planned the lectures I’d like to go to, always keeping an alternative in case the first one isn’t interesting enough for me. I left some lectures early to get to other lectures (usually leaving during the Q&A parts). And some lectures even required me to arrive a bit earlier just to get a seat (especially important if you intend to stay for a few lectures in a row).
While rushing back and forth between rooms, I’ve tried to find I have questions for and people I’m interested to talk with. Moving enough at the campus usually means you’ll eventually find them.
The only problem with the whole process is that it’s consuming a lot of effort and energy during these two days, and I’m feeling exhusted by the end of FOSDEM. But the productivity of talking so many people face to face and getting new information from the lectures makes it all worthwhile.
So my advise is to try and use FOSDEM to expend your horizons instead of going to these familiar talks about stuff you probably already know enough,
Free Software Universe 