DebConf 14

While I could not attend Debconf 14 in person, reviewing the video coverage has enabled me to learn new and interesting things about what’s going on. Here’re a few highlights.

A glimpse into a systemd future by Josh Triplett: enumerates a few features that should/could be used in a Debian context to improve integration with systemd. Sadly the video has a few corruption issues, so I hope that the video team (I reported the issue) can issue an improved version.
Quit logging or data minimization by Daniel Gillmor: Food for thought. Daniel’s entry point is that to protect “our users” privacy, default configurations should strive to minimize logging. As one egregious example, apache keeps a full access (IP, URL, username, referer) log for 52 weeks. In the following discussion, many interesting points were touched. From the need to have full logs available for debugging and forensic, over the possibilities to redact logs after “a while” to the necessity that logs mustn’t be kept on permanent storage if one wants to be safe from subpoenas.
Reproducible Builds for Debian a year later by Jérémy Bobbio: With a few tricks, a large number of packages can be made to produce bit-for-bit identical outputs when building from source. This opens up a wide variety of benefits from trivial performance improvements by reusing non-modified bits to the very serious security properties of being able to independently verify the build, like the Tor Browser project does.
Weapons of the Geek by Biella Coleman: a very interesting view into Anonymous workings, evolition and psyche.
debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project by Antonio Terceiro: debci runs tests against installed binaries if and when they or any of their dependencies change. Integrating this properly into a maintainer’s workflow should reduce FTBFS counts and provide a way to run autopkgtests regularily.
dgit: treat the archive as a git remote by Ian Jackson: A two-way gateway between the Debian archive and git. dgit clone fetches the source and all available git history from the archive and dgit push uploads a compiled package to incoming. Very neat and useful. I’m looking forward to the time when this is usable for non-DDs. Also Ian still needs to solve a bunch of integration issues to catch up in patch management functionality with other workflows, especially around quilty packages.
debdry: Debian Dont Repeat Yourself by Enrico Zini: A new approach to reduce packaging overhead. I like it!
Q&A with Linus Torvalds: A very interesting session. Obviously Linux feels at home and often talks about “us” programmers. His views about the lack of binary compatibility guarantees of distros and the problems this generates for application developers sound very sensible. His exaple of subsurface is a mixed bag though as its current version is already packaged in Debian. Looking at the debci talk, and other activities DDs do, I still think that distros can bring value to the table, and - indeed - have to bring to stay relevant. Ever since unit tests and friends have entered the stage, I’m chased by the feeling that distros should be much more involved in upstream development. Why can’t I have an automatically up-to-date SCM snapshot of all development versions in experimental (or a new suite)?