Two talks in the keynotes track will be given by long-time Debian
Developers, Lars Wirzenius and Bdale Garbee, who will talk about how to
innovate the development process of distributions and the FreedomBox
project, respectively. Other Debian Developers will give talks or hold
discussion groups about specific aspects of the project:

Saturday, February 4th

11:30 Serafeim Zanikolas How to replace a legacy tool with 100k
installations

13:00 Wookey Multiarch — why it’s important

13:15 Moritz Muehlnhoff Univention Corporate Server

15:00 Lior Kaplan Debian packaging for beginners

18:15 Enrico Zini I wrote Distromatch, shall we use it?

Sunday, February 5th

11:00 Enrico Zini Debtags.debian.net reloaded!

11:30 Kostas Koudaras, Oliver Burger, Laura Czajkowski, Christoph
Wickert, Donnie Berkholz, Petteri Räty, Stefano Zacchiroli Working
with contributor communities (round table)

12:15 Neil McGovern 29,000 packages in 24 hours — Releasing Debian

13:00 Martin Zobel-Helas, Michael Scherer Distributions’ infrastructure
system administration (round table/Q&A)

15:00 Steve McIntyre ARM BoF

16:00 Lucas Nussbaum Debian Secrets — what I wish I had known before
joining Debian

In addition, thanks to the help of the DebConf video team, streaming
video for a selected number of rooms will be available.

See you in Brussels!

About FOSDEM
————

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting) is a free and
non-commercial event for the community and organized by the community.
Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers and communities
a place to meet.

About Debian
————

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain
Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range
of computer types, Debian calls itself the
“universal operating system” .

Contact Information
——————-
For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at
http://www.debian.org/ or send mail to .

FOSDEM 2012 will happen during the weekend of the 4th and 5th of
February, at the campus “Solbosch” of the ULB in Brussels, Belgium. As
during the past two years, there will be a distributions developer’s
room in which the Debian project will be praticipating. People
interested in hosting a session should submit a proposals to the
distributions@lists.fosdem.org mailinglist, containing the following
information:
- Their name,
- A short bio,
- (optionally) a picture,
- The title for the talk,
- An abstract
- The desired duration for the session.

Acceptable sessions can be any wide range of things, including talks,
BoF sessions, and round tables. Note that for BoFs and round table
sessions, the submitter will be considered the ‘speaker’, who will be
expected to introduce the subject and serve as moderator.

The two cross-distributions devrooms are intended to be for people from
any participating distribution project, so speakers should expect an
audience which may or may not be familiar with Debian’s history and
processes. Having said that, there is no reason why talks on
Debian-specific subjects, or indeed targetted at Debian developers only,
would not be welcome on the schedule; so if you have something
interesting to say, please do not hesitate to send in a proposal.

The deadline for submissions is December 22nd.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/09/msg00003.html

Therefore, I’d like to reiterate my request for talks. Anything is
welcome, as long as it involves distribution work.

If I may make some suggestions for interesting talk proposals that would
fit the miniconf well:
- Our new kFreeBSD port
- Something about the new v3 source formats
- Piuparts, the PTS, buildd, popcon, the website and webwml, or anything
about any other piece of infrastructure,
- A round table about strategies for something which every distribution
must do, such as releasing, squashing bugs, compiling software, or,
heck, marketing,

(Just kidding on that last one, of course, even if talks about
distribution-specific subject matters are welcome at any rate)

Second, though this hasn’t been officially confirmed yet, I’ve asked for
a Debian booth again. Volunteers to help with that are most certainly
welcome.

Regards,

The FOSDEM organizers have decided last year to no longer assign
devrooms to distributions, but to instead group all distributions into a
common devroom, turning that into a distributions miniconf. For the next
edition, on the 5th and 6th of February 2011, the concept will be
similar.

Though it is not yet certain what the details will look like, it is
certain that there will be room for distribution-related talks; so this
is a call for talk proposals for the distributions rooms at FOSDEM 2011.

People interested in doing a talk related to either Debian specifically
or distributions in general, should send a full proposal to the
dist2011@lists.fosdem.org mailinglist.

Thanks, and see you at FOSDEM,

– The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there’s a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html

To get the full details, please see
, with
the note that this mail talks about “fleshing out the details”, when
what they were asking was really for people to propose talks.

For those of you who were waiting for a call for talks from me on this
subject, it’s not really coming. However, if you think your talk may be
of some interest to people working on distributions (Debian or
non-Debian), your talk should be welcome.

Regards, and see you at FOSDEM,

– The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there’s a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html

* Better quality versions will be encoded and uploaded by Ben over the next
days. I’d also like to collect the slides from the talks there, so if you
had a talk there, please send them to Wouter and/or me, and Wouter, please
send me the slides you collected on the presetation computer

* Basically I’m very happy with our results, excpet for two things: sadly
the computer running dvswitch wasn’t powerful enough to do picture in
picture (and due to time constraints we we’rent able to switch to a more
powerful one), so we’ll have to plan this better next year. And second, I
have no real clue how useful our streaming efforts are, I believe the
recordings are useful, but in both cases feedback from people who find
them useful is appreciated! Covering FOSDEM is certainly a lot of fun, but
it’s also a lot of work and leaves not much room for seeing other parts of
the conference. So a short reply (I’ll post this to d-d-a with reply-to
set to -project) will be very much appreciated!

* Big thanks go to Womble2, edrz, xerrako, Q_, danielsan, DaCa, tokkee,
luca, Yoe, Ganneff, franklin, huhn, luk, CarlFK, daven and some more
volunteers I cannot remember right now! Also not to be forgotten the
fosdem crew & volunteers for an awesome event and the people from CCC
Hamburg who came by car and took a lot of audio/video/computer equipment
for us (and left 90min later than planned! Thanks again!)! And also Debian
(via the DPL) for some 120 Euros to rent equiqment and for buying
batteries and the always needed duct-tape!

[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2009/fosdem/
[2] http://fosdem.org/2009/schedule/devrooms/debian

— Holger Levsen Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:03:22 +0100

On a more sad note, the worst talk of the week-end was without any possible doubt Frans Pop’s release team bashing. Nobody is claiming that the release management of the lenny release cycle was perfect: there’s always room for improvement. But given the context and the constraints, I think that they did a very good job.