On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:01:38AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
Executive summary: there will not be a Developers' Room for Debian at
the next FOSDEM (nor for any other distribution, for that matter),
but
instead there'll be a "distribution miniconf" that we'll be able to
participate in. They still need to flesh out the details on that one,
though, and input is requested.
I, for once, think this is a bad idea, at least in the "extremist"
form
(i.e. no devrooms at all) it has been presented. I surely agree that
having only devroom was bad and that FOSDEM can push a lot for
cross-distro collaboration this way. Nevertheless, devrooms were also
offering an amazing service to distro, and the argument that distros
have their conference anyhow is not convincing (Debian has one per
year,
and alternate it around the world, having the additional devroom in a
fixed place once per year was definitively a plus; other small distros
do not have their own yearly conference, etc.).
If I'm not the only one feeling that way, I think we can try to make a
more reasonable proposal to the FOSDEM organizer: having the devroom
*and* the cross-distro meeting room. That can be coped with a simple
room: if you want a devroom for your own, you should participate in
the
cross-distro room *as* *well* filling a number X of slots.