Debconf5
I’m giving a talk on debbugs at debconf5. Since they’re trying printed proceedings and are planning on handing them out in advance of the talks, I wrote up a paper that should be useful background material for people interested in hacking on debbugs. This is the abstract:
This paper aims to serve as a useful reference for people attending the talk of the same title at DebConf 5, to be held in Helsinki, Finland from the 9th to the 16th of July 2005. It summarises the primary motivations behind the design philosophy of debbugs, the on-disk data formats debbugs uses, and the overall structure of the code. It aims to provide sufficient background on the current status of the debbugs codebase that the interested reader may use as a basis for beginning to hack on the debbugs codebase. Basic familiarity with debbugs from a user’s perspective is assumed.
And you can find it on my CodeWiki.
I’m also meant to be doing a BOF on debootstrap. It seems to have turned into some sort of faux-keynote, being the first talk of the first day without any other scheduled activity, which it’s massively unsuitable for. I’ve tried harassing the organisers into changing it for me, but they seem to want me to spend my time before leaving finding some other speaker to swap with, which I don’t have time for. On the upside, if nothing happens and I remain with an effective keynote slot, I have hatched an evil alternative plan, albeit one that crucially relies on the exact scheduling given. If it eventuates, folks looking to attend a debootstrap BOF should probably expect an unofficial one over a lunch sometime instead.
In other timetabling news, it seems Mark Shuttleworth is giving a talk on a small project called Unubtu or something. Apparently there’s not much interest, and most people will be going to Junichi Uekawa’s library packaging talk instead. Talks on obscure topics like the DSFG are also, unsurprisingly, not attracting much interest.