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Re: First Packaging Con 2021



On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 02:19:57PM +0200, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> If you want to exchange ideas, share papers, and have discussion
> periods, but don't waste peoples' time with real-time talks, everyone
> has different speed of comprehension.

Turning this up to eleven means that schools are pointless as kids could
just learn from the textbooks at home. While that is certainly true for
some, it doesn't work out that well for everyone for whatever reasons as
the world found out in a recently ongoing experiment…

Calling online conferences downright pointless and futile seems very
harsh and aggressive to me as a result. After all, Debian does one too,
and always supported and encouraged remote participation if you can't be
there. If it is such a waste of time for everyone, why did we bother…?

The hallway track can certainly be an important part of a conference and
certain presenters/talks, their style and topics lend themselves better
to conferences (or participants) with(out) one, but that just means the
content team (and of course the speakers) have their work cut out for
them.


I at least have "participated" in many more conferences remotely than in
person. Sometimes years after the fact and I don't think I wasted
anyone's time, even through I never got to talk to most of them, usually
can't even remember the speakers name after the first slide (sry, I am
just really bad with names… and faces) and most probably skipped reading
an article if they had written one. Some things just don't work in text.
Just like some things do not work in video.


> On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 09:06:12AM +0200, Wolf Vollprecht wrote:
> > It's the first time that this event happens: we are trying to bring
> > together many different package management communities, compare approaches,
> > share lessons learned, etc.

Good luck, I have to say. I am certainly going to have a look at the
recordings¹ of talks which peak my interest if any…

The main problem I see is that there is no such thing as an "APT
community". APT does a whole lot of things, but it also doesn't do a lot
of things: apt e.g. doesn't build packages (dpkg + debhelper, …) nor
its repositories (dak, …), we don't do release management of packages
(individual maintainers, teams & release team), don't enforce policies
(debian-policy), supply-chains (reproducible-builds) or pipelines, and
to be fair apt doesn't even install packages to disk (dpkg). All of
which a platform-agnostic (= language-specific or things like flatpak)
sort of deals with by necessity as it is THE THING, while apt is just
some cogwheel in the Debian community or even world (= all distros in
the Debian family tree).

APT certainly is iconic in the Debian world, but the RPM world changes
their package manager every other year (or at least it sounds like it
from an outside view) and even in Debian its normal to mix and match
various graphical, curses and text interfaces all the time as long as
they all play nice together as they are all part of the community, not
their own communities. I don't know much more than their name, but
I kinda doubt e.g. Yarn and NPM get along as well as apt and e.g.
aptitude do. Probably help by the fact that apt serves more than just
Debian while nobody would use npm for rust…


A decade ago[0] the deb and rpm world had a meeting to talk about common
problems and solutions especially involving "software centers", but the
hallway was more general. Anyway, "the others" are certainly different
and strange, but at least we had many common anchor points as in the end
we are all distro people.

I am not so sure I could find a common ground with the agnostics as its
kind of their job to hate distro people. It's a bit like talking to
a designer who is super proud to have made a pixel-perfect interface
looking exactly the same on all platforms: You wont be friends if you
point out that you prefer interfaces to look and feel the same on your
platform instead. At least I got that Mars/Venus vibe from listening to
a few Manifest[1] episodes; but secretly, I am hoping you will show me
that my intuition is (as usual) wrong. ;)


On a more general note: DebConf encourages speakers to hand in
a pre-recorded talk with optional live q+a after to rule out all
sorts of technical problems (which, I agree, favours a slight different
speaker/style/talk still).
The bold "live via video chat" also makes me curious what stack that
will be, given Google Forms is used a bit further above. There are
zealots like me who would base decisions on the used tools alone, so
you might want to add that…


Best regards

David Kalnischkies


¹ I am not usually remote-participating as I am relatively remote-living
  Not a real skip zone, but bandwidth requirements and availability
  are constantly at odds, making it not a very stable experience.
[0] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Distributions/Meetings/AppInstaller2011/
[1] https://manifest.fm/

P.S.: I left Wolf in CC as Julian did, even though that is against
our usual mailing list policy… sorry if you had read the CoC and are
now spammed by unrequested copies.

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