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Moikka! Here's Adrián. I work for Igalia.

First day at the DebConf 9

I arrived yesterday at the main venue after a the long trip by car: ~700km in a car without air conditioning. I was very tired so I headed up for my room (which is in an ancient building at the old town area of Cáceres), had a shower and decided to take a nap… with so much success that I slept for two hours and a miracle made me wake up just in time for the Cheese & wine party. It was great to taste an uncountable amount of kinds of cheese, wine and liquors from places all around the world. Among a lot of tasty stuff, it was really enlightening to try out some real japanese sake and the best peanuts I ever tried.

After a quick breakfast today in the morning, my personal schedule included attending the following:

  • Using FOSSology for license analysis in Debian: a tool which determines which license a package has by examining its sources and looking for license disclaimers and similar texts contained in source code was presented. This way even cases where each source file may have a different license can be easily identified. For packagers this makes easier to check whether a software component complies with the packaging policy.
  • Not your grandpa’s debhelper: This one really catched my attention, as I do some packaging from time to time it is very interesting to know about new incarnations of tools which suppose an aid to this task. The new dh thing is able of greatly simplifying build rules. I wanna try it!
  • Debian System Administraors BoF: I thought that it could be interesting to know how systems used for running the Debian infrastructure are configured. Three of the members of the team asked lots of questions from the audience, most of them being about e-mail services and whether it would be possible to improve spam handling.
  • Scratchbox2 for cross-compiling Debian: It was a shame that there was no projector nor something similar for Riku to give an introduction to Scratchbox 2, which looks like a good step forward. For example now it is possible to use it without root privileges at all.
  • Point releases - How to update stable more efficiently: I have missed some bits of this lecture because I was sitting near the end of the room, but if I understood correctly there is a plan for rolling updates sooner into the Debian stable package set by using a repository in the fashion of the Ubuntu “proposed-updates” one, so users can get theirs hands on sooner on the packages in order to provide the needed feedback for stabilization.

After having a light dinner I went along with Diego for a walk along the old town area, to see how does it look at night. The perfect accompaniment was a glass of beer and ice cream.