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Sixth DebConf Ends in Success

Posted by Hemos on Mon Jul 25, 2005 10:47 AM
from the great-news-for-debian dept.
Debian Software Linux
fabbe writes "The 6th annual Debian Developers Conference (DebConf) was held in Helsinki, Finland from July 10th to July 17th 2005. With over 300 registered participants from around 40 countries, this was the largest DebConf to date. More than 20 sponsors provided DebConf with a total budget of around 125,000 euros. The conference featured talks, workshops, demonstrations, coding marathons and round table discussions on various aspects of the Debian Project. The presentations were captured by the DebConf5 Video Team and are available online at at Debian's site. "
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  • A question that has been bothering me: (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Do these confrences ever end in failure?

  • The Utnubu Project (Score:4, Informative)

    by ballstothat (893605) on Monday July 25 2005, @10:51AM (#13156720)
    Perhaps one of the more interesting bits to emerge from this was the Utnubu project...

    Link:
    http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/archives/59-Li nux-Ball-Utnubu.html [joachim-breitner.de]

    I think Debian can learn a lot from the rapid success of Ubuntu, and hopefully this project will help heal some of the growing rifts between the two camps.

  • wow...RTFA! (Score:3, Funny)

    by huckda (398277) on Monday July 25 2005, @10:59AM (#13156787) Journal
    It's most interesting with pretty much zero insight as to what made it "successful"...

    • You just described the formula for a successful meeting!
    • It's most interesting with pretty much zero insight as to what made it "successful"..

      I think that it's implied that it was successful because a whopping 300 people registered. I'm not saying that this criteria is either good or bad, but that's what I take from the summary + article.

  • oh my fucking god. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    whoa. just whoa. [debian.net]
    • Gentlemen, start your wget's.

    • Re:oh my fucking god. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by garcia (6573) * on Monday July 25 2005, @11:39AM (#13157149) Homepage
      It's amazing that "women in software" (of any kind) should raise a comment like "oh my fucking god." and "whoa. just whoa". You wonder why they shy away... A bunch of horny geeks getting excited over something completely mundane.

      Get a grip and grow up.

      For those of you that don't want to download the video: It's the opening slide for "Women in Debian and Free Open Source Sofware" by Magni Onsoien and Erin Clark (7/15/05).
      • You wonder why they shy away... A bunch of horny geeks getting excited over something completely mundane.
        Get real. Women who love attention from men don't shy away. Dykes and lipstick lesbian[read bisexual] shy away, while even the traditional prude in her mid-twenties still saving herself for the fantasy white knight still gets a tingle by all the attention.
    • I've had the pleasure to meet most of the Debian women at the debconf. And believe it or not: they were there to hack and improve Debian, not to serve as sexual attractors. Strangely, noone at debconf had a problem with that, or even thought otherwise. So why don't you (average slashdot reading horny male geek) go jack off to some porn site and not come back?

  • "success"? Huh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by diegocgteleline.es (653730) on Monday July 25 2005, @11:08AM (#13156858)
    Sixth DebConf Ends in Success

    Success? Could it be different; I mean, successful here means "it was not cancelled"?

  • and their consensus... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gik (256327) on Monday July 25 2005, @11:09AM (#13156865) Homepage
    "let's use redhat as our base distro from now on!"

    (DUCKS)

  • Define Success (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ari_j (90255) on Monday July 25 2005, @11:12AM (#13156890)
    For some, success is holding a conference on schedule with no deaths or maimings. For others, it is deciding exactly what the goals are for the next release. The blurb does not tell us what success the conference actually met, and from the other comments so far it appears that the article doesn't, either.

    Why not just say "Sixth DebConf Ends" instead of "...Ends in Success" when the additional words are meaningless?
    • Of course. For Debian, success is defined as "relatively few deaths and maimings -- under a free license". HTH.
    • Remember that Debian is a Unix like system, and in the Unix philosophy successful conferences don't print out anything. That extra bit you're talking about was added by the slashdot submitter interface, but you can easily remove it by exporting the environment variable SLASHDOT_PEDANTIC="no". It's really only intended to make the exit code visible in the GUI.
  • ...on the completion of DebConf 1998!

    Ah but I do jest. Huzzah for Debian, my favourite distro
  • Crap. I got two of the three vids before the site slowed to a crawl. Can someone please bundle the presentations and vids into a torrent?
    • Replying to self. I went right to the camp and didn't notice the hundreds of megs in each day's directory. I thought the days were going to hold the PPTs or PDFs. Sheesh.

  • Successful end? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stienman (51024) <<moc.scisabu> <ta> <sivada>> on Monday July 25 2005, @12:05PM (#13157425) Homepage Journal

    Sixth DebConf Ends in Success

    Ok, so how exactly can a conference be unsuccessfully ended? Is this where the attendees launch a sit-in and prevent the conference from ending, or what?

    It just seems like a hollow success.

    "What was good about the conference you jsut attended sir?"
    "Well, it ended. I'm quite thrilled by how well the organizers were able to get everyone to pack up and go - it was quite a success."

    -Adam

  • Sixth? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bioglaze (767105)
    If this was sixth, was the first one 0th?

  • Phew... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Momoru (837801) on Monday July 25 2005, @01:14PM (#13158119) Homepage Journal
    Sixth DebConf Ends in Success

    At least it wasn't like the previous five DebConf's which ended in bloodshed.

    • Sixth DebConf Ends in Success

      Nope, doesn't help. For some reason, I'm still reading this headline as "Sith DebConf Ends in Success".

      So now the Sith have organized, and it's no longer "one master, one apprentice." Damn. Time to get your lightsabers [parksabers.com] ready.

  • Questions on current Sid (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tyrione (134248) on Monday July 25 2005, @01:34PM (#13158353) Homepage
    Some questions (if these were addressed at the conference my apologies for asking here):
    • What is the status on KDE 3.4.1 and accompanying addons becoming current with X.org currently kludging its way through Sid?[alioth hasn't updated its 3.4.1 packages since early June, long before Branden submitted X.org into Sid.]
    • When the hell is GNUstep going to get rebuilt against Freetype 2.1.10?
    • When will the Debian Java Policy become standard and agree upon?
    • Should I just build my own local debs for Eclipse 3.1 or will they be released before 2010?
    • What is the status, or if a plan even exists, regarding Debian working on a seemless Wireless config subsystem similar to say OS X? [waproamd, ndiswrapper, etc are ductape building blocks]*

    I am well aware that all these questions could be directed to a package manager, yet when it's broadcast to a higher level audience more attention helps overcome the inertia in place which always causes those package manager to accelerate their updates and/or be more pro-active on such concerns.

    [Note: I would assume when municipalities adopt the OSS model they plan on having both wired and wireless options accessible to their employees that could only help us regular users in seeing improvements to a vitally overlooked section of networking]

    • Re:Questions on current Sid (Score:4, Informative)

      by andersa (687550) on Monday July 25 2005, @02:42PM (#13159142)

      What is the status on KDE 3.4.1 and accompanying addons becoming current with X.org currently kludging its way through Sid?[alioth hasn't updated its 3.4.1 packages since early June, long before Branden submitted X.org into Sid.]

      Everybody is working on the transition from GCC 3.3 to GCC 4. A big pile of packages have still to be rebuild. During that time the X Strike Force is working on getting Xorg to compile on all architectures. Once all that is in place. KDE 3.4.1 will be uploaded, and the bug squishing on that will begin. I'm guessing a month or so before a fully working KDE 3.4.1 is in sid, give a couple of months/take a week.. ;)

      In the meantime you can still use Alioth KDE 3.4.1 packages with sid and xorg (Yes, Really!). You need to delete all aspell and libjack packages from sid, and get libaspell and libjack from testing, then KDE will install without problems. And hold off on upgrading once you have something that works, unless you are prepared to sort out the dependency issues that are bound to arise

    • Re:Questions on current Sid (Score:4, Informative)

      by Overfiend (35917) on Monday July 25 2005, @04:57PM (#13160475) Homepage

      [alioth hasn't updated its 3.4.1 packages since early June, long before Branden submitted X.org into Sid.]

      Correction: I didn't upload the X.Org X11 packages to unstable (sid). David Nusinow did. David has taken the lead on X.Org X11 responsibilities, as I have recently acquired others.

      Doesn't stop me from helping out and doing commits, but I've been distancing myself from the actual package uploads over the past year or so. For example, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto handled most of the XFree86 4.3.0 uploads.

      • Thanks for the correct. I hadn't figured once you were elected to lead the Debian Ship you'd have to handoff X packages as well.

        I've got them installed with Alioth packages, with a little tinkering it is working.

  • More info on Available Videos (Score:5, Informative)

    by sirmikester (634831) on Monday July 25 2005, @03:27PM (#13159646) Homepage Journal
    Check out http://wiki.debian.net/?DebConf5Talks [debian.net] for more details about the available videos (some including slides).
  • At least there was no rioting, raping or pillaging, I would say it was a success. With these Debian people you can never tell which way things will go.
    • The only possible things that could help with this are:

      1) 100 programmers are hired full-time to reverse-engineer drivers;

      2) More than a handful of manufacturers actually open up their specs;

      3) Linux freezes its ABI, which I for one am not particularly in favour of.

      None of these have happened, to my knowledge. Oh, and Linux Desktop has bigger problems than drivers, but those that can plausibly be solved via hard work are rapidly being addressed.

    • Because they want as many people as possible to be able to play them. Ogg Theora support isn't as widespread as MPEG2.

    • Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)

      by lspd (566786) on Monday July 25 2005, @01:11PM (#13158090) Homepage Journal
      What really upsets me is they made their video files in something other than ogg theora. Why?

      As a member of the Debconf video team, the guy that took all of the video home to finish processing, a Debian Developer and a Free Software nut, I'm probably as well qualified as anyone to answer this question.

      In a nutshell it's mpeg rather than Theora because none of the people arguing now, after the fact, that it should have been done in Theora were volunteering to help when the actual work was underway. Ffmpeg is GPL, it's in Debian main, and it has no problem encoding to mpeg-1. There are enough stupid software patents to be relatively certain that both Theora and mpeg-1 infringe on some. If there is a valid freeness issue against mepg-1, file a bug against the ffmepg package.

      Mpeg-1 allows anyone on any platform to view the files with minimal fuss. The results look remarkably good at the low bitrate used and AFAIK no one is running around suing over the use of mpeg-1. For a low bitrate encoding, what exactly does Theora add?

      It's even more comical that some are saying we should have used Theora while others are arguing that we should make DVD images (mpeg-2, where patents are actively enforced.) You really can't please everyone.

      Still, for anyone who wants the wholesome buzzword goodness of Theora, wait until we're finished processing the videos and Theora versions will be made available.

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