Re: PyCon 2013 -- anyone submitted/planing to go?
On Thu, 05 Sep 2013, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Sep 05, 2013, at 08:37 AM, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> >Since next year PyCon is in the neighborhood (just 3h drive away), I am
> >planing to submit the Debian talk again. Quite probable is that it
> >would not get accepted again but I think it is worth trying. Before
> >going to refurbish the abstract I wanted to check if anyone already
> >considering/working to submit to PyCon on a Debian-related topic?
> I'm definitely planning on going, and thought it would be a good idea to
> submit Something. Can you remind us what your talk is about?
not sure if that was the final version I sent last time (yet to check
etc)... it is yet to be adjusted for the last year advances ;)
Propelling Python to the masses with the universal OS
Python has found appreciation not only among professional developers
but also among students, scientists and programming novices due to its
scripting nature, "batteries included", good collection of 3rd party
libraries, and ability to interface to libraries written in other
languages and computing environments (e.g. R). To conveniently
deliver such a versatile Python platform to users (and their humble
system administrators), the community have been distilling the
ultimate Python distribution utilities and bundling pre-built Python
and core 3rd party libraries and modules for the distribution on
proprietary systems. Meanwhile nearly for two decades Python has been
a part of the largest community-driven software distribution platform
-- Debian. The Debian project delivers a complete operating system
with tens of thousands of FOSS projects available on 11 hardware
architectures and 3 different kernels (Linux, HURD, kFreeBSD). Being
a binary distribution Debian guarantees safer -- free of build-errors
-- installations and seamless upgrades. Coupled with the standardized
specification of build and run-time dependencies, it made it easy to
build, verify, or simply deploy projects of nearly arbitrary
complexity of inter-dependencies and varying implementation origins.
Such agnosticism to the origins of the software made Python-based
products a 1st citizen in this heterogeneous distribution ecosystem,
assuring that Python works well with the rest of it. Recent advances
in hardware virtualization support, followed in tandem with the
explosion of cloud solutions, made Debian systems popular not only
among Linux "fan-boys" but for various, especially scientific and
community-driven, deployments. The ease with which thousands of
Python-based FOSS became available and maintainable made Debian the
Python distribution with "**all** batteries (and virtualenv)
included".
In this talk I would like to briefly present the history of Python in
Debian (which can be traced to nineties with Python 1.4), outline
benefits Debian provides for Python users/developers and present what
to expect in upcoming stable (wheezy) release of Debian. To
familiarize listeners with Python-in-Debian ecosystem I will then
overview core package naming, versioning, and modularization
conventions in Debian and ongoing QA efforts (build-time testing,
full-archive rebuilds, etc). I will briefly present the "Debian
packaging" helper tools, including recent GSOC project aiming to
provide automatic packaging of the packages on PyPI. To facilitate
the synergy between Python and Debian communities, I will accent on
common sense practices (following PEPs, clean and exhaustive legal
terms, CI, etc.) which would make any Debian packaging and
maintainership more efficient and benefit upstream developers. I am
planing to conclude by presenting few easy ways on how to start using
Debian.
As the outcome of the talk, I expect listeners to become more familiar
with the Debian project goals, standards and principles, become aware
of integration aspects involved in delivering such plethora of Python
FOSS solutions, and become intrigued enough to try Debian on their
systems or in the cloud.
--
Yaroslav O. Halchenko, Ph.D.
http://neuro.debian.net http://www.pymvpa.org http://www.fail2ban.org
Senior Research Associate, Psychological and Brain Sciences Dept.
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834 Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik
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