Custom Debian Distributions at DebConf 4

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

Hi all,

I recently noticed that at DebConf 4 is no official talk for Custom Debian
Distributions is sceduled at

    http://www.debconf.org/debconf4/?q=node/view/35

Moreover I noticed that many developers do not really know what Custom Debian
Distributions are.  I'd like to attract your notice to the fact that there are
people in the world which have a *very* close look on exactly this issue because
it exactly fits their needs.  Let me tell you two little stories:

  To the OSWC meeting in Malaga about 10 DDs where invited *because* they are
  dealing with Custom Debian Distribution issues.  They where not only invited
  but got all their travel expenses covered and a 150 Euro per night hotel
  (at least the special offer for the web booking told this) was paid for them.
  There was a huge lot of very high quality food and wine available.

  It was similar in the last conference in Valencia.  Even if not as much
  Debian Developers as the organizers invited were able to attend it was
  quite similar.  I had the nice experience to use a business flight.

While I personally would love if organizers would spend only one third of the
money per developer and invite three times more developers instead I learned
one lesson:

   People outside Debian do really care about Custom Debian Distributions.

While we are *free* to ignore this fact as we are free to do other things I
think this is not the best strategy to make Debian popular.  IMHO Custom Debian
Distributions fit exactly in very hot topics like User Linux which was suggested
by Bruce Perens and the latest efforts of Progeny regarding to Componentized Linux.

I want to make sure that you people do not think that Custom Debian Distributions
is only fun for some very special outsiders: It is an effort regarding to
the needs of our users.  It also addresses the never ending story about release
cycles.  Bdale pronounced at the Malaga confrence some very interesting ideas
which were modified slightly by others and came up at Valencia again.  This
stuff is summed up at

  http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/ch-todo.en.html#s-new_ways_of_distribution

and I think that this issue is so general and interesting for all people inside
Debian that it is worth a talk in itself.

So my reaction to all these nice things the Spanish people provided to me and
my fellow developers was to keep the ball roling and provide good documentation
about all these issues to attract more people.  Well I did so at

  http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/

and hope that this is convincing anough to find a free slot for a talk about
Custom Debian Distributions prefered in the beginning of the conference.  If
you are not yet convinced you might consider tha fact that our new installer
was born out of a strong initiative of Debian-Edu - just one Custom Debian
Distribution.

Mako told me that he had applied for a talk but was not accepted (or rather
was ignored by just giving no answer at all).  I will not be able to attend
DebConf but I know that Mako or others will be able and competent to do so
and I would strongly vote for such a talk.

Kind regards and wish you all good success at DebConf 4

        Andreas.