Debconf 3 - the experience
This is a first attempt at summarizing Debconf3 and Debcamp (not sure
whether that is Debcamp3, Debcamp0 or just Debcamp@Debconf3 or
something :) Please contribute to this thread to share your
experiences and give feedback.
First, a huge thanks to all those who helped out, without you, there
wouldn't have been a conference at all. Some names: Andreas Schuldei,
for pestering me and getting all the sponsors lined up. Petter
Reinholdtsen for arranging all the local technical stuff, so we
actually had a working network and so on, Morten Kjelkenes for
arranging food and lots of practical details. Thanks to the people
manning the information desk and those guarding the gym hall, and of
course thanks to all the rest of you who helped out. It was
appreciated and made Debconf3 a success.
The first people started arriving on Friday July 18th, the last left
on July 28th. Debcamp was about double the size of what I expected,
most of the time we were 50-60 people there, happily hacking on
various projects and doing small workshops/discussions. Among the
discussions were one about what role SPI (baby SPIs? Rename it to the
Debian Foundation?) should have and another one on how to solve the CD
mirroring problem (which, for those of you who don't know, is that we
haven't gotten any official CDs which are newer than 2.2r7. Which is
a bit old.) Debian-installer bounced a huge step forward, a lot of
small issues were ironed out and some features were added (we have
working PCMCIA and USB now).
On Thursday, we had a barbecue. Or rather, NUUG had a barbecue which
most of Debcamp attended. It was very nice, both the food and the
drinks.
The conference itself started on Friday July 25th with an SPI
workshop, a FAI workshop and a keysigning party. The keysigning party
was a bit disorganized, it seems like organizing 100 people at once is
quite hard. Many were disappointed about particularly the ID step,
since it was fairly hard to actually see the face of the
participants.
Saturday was packed with talks about everything from CDBS (Common
Debian Build System) to the ftp-masters explaining how katie works to
Bdale talking about the relationship between Debian and HP. In
addition, we had a dinner on Saturday which was quite good (though not
enough meat, due to a misunderstanding with the chef).
Sunday started a bit chaotic when a power station blew up and left the
building dark, not that most geeks noticed. ;) A problem was that our
first speaker, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña was stuck on a subway,
which didn't move (since it's electric). So we rearranged the
schedule somewhat. We had talks about Skolelinux and how it uses d-i
and base-config to set up a custom Debian installation with services
preconfigured using just three questions, and about the renaming of
«Internal projects» or «Flavours» or «Sub-distributions» to «Custom
Debian», and what Custom Debian is. Branden talked about subversion
and at least raised my interest in looking into it.
Debcamp was a lot bigger (in terms of people attending) and was even
more fun than I thought it was. The gym was a great place to hang out
and drink beer/whisk{,e}y/tequila/cognac/... People complained about
Norway being a bit hot, which we, unfortunately, could do nothing
about. I was dead tired when it was over, but I had gotten myself a
few new friends and gotten to know some of the people I've been
IRC-ing with for years face to face. Quite fun. Debcamp should be a
part of the conference as it was now, it was _very_ productive.
I'd like to thank all of you for coming. I had a great time, and I
know I will be at Debconf 4.
--
Tollef Fog Heen ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' :
`. `'
`-
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