@DebConf17: Work for Debian and FLOSS I got done during DebCamp and DebConf... and Beyond...

People I Met and will Remember

  • Angela, my wife, I met daily on Jabber. Thanks for letting me go to this great DebConf17 conference and keeping our family up and running
  • Andreas asking people to either impersonate his wife or adoptive daughter for a photo shooting. You gave such a touching talk on Friday, together with Minh from Vietnam.
  • Holger for nagging us about stone age bugs in the Debian Blends package and the outdated software list in Debian Edu (Kernel 2.6.32 package are finally not mentioned anymore)
  • Vagrant, Foetini and Alkis for there efforts on LTSP and their success in Greece with bringing Debian into Greek schools
  • Tiago, Jerome and all the others from the local team, providing us with such great food and support. THANKS folks!!!
  • Enrico who showed my his 20 liner version of nodm aka lightdm-autologin-greeter (and also made me curious on staticsite)
  • Jonas Smedegaard for teaching me the solarized theme and loads of other things
  • Siri for being around and really having a stand for making Debian look more like a product
  • Dimitri John Ledkov for chiming in on Ayatana Indicators as next Indicators upstream for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
  • Chrys for chiming on .desktop file proxying, meet you back in #arctica on Freenode
  • Sean for asking me daily, if my luggage had arrived (see below), as he shared the same fate during DebCamp
  • the owner of that nice shop where I bought loads of clothes while waiting for my luggage still stuck in Hamburg
  • Steven for looking into gcc compiler macros with me for nx-libs autotools conversion, also probably - luggage wise - the lightest traveller among us
  • Fabian for sharing is sadness and pain about the FLOSS non-situation in schools all over Quebec
  • Mario from New Zealand and Jos from the Netherlands chiming in on FLOSS and education on IRC after having watch my talk about Debian Edu / Skolelinux. Mario, we will soon ask you for opensourcing your teacher screen over WiFi solution...
  • Lior who thinks about bringing Debian Edu / Skolelinux to Israel. (That would be awesome!)
  • Rhonda for having time for my Debian Backports woes and probably having been quite forgiving ;-)
  • Bobby who is a font engineer during the week and (used to be) a cave explorer and mapper in his spare time
  • Ximin for providing deep insight in the key signing workflow and the caff approach to it
  • Daniel for sharing work experiences and nudging me to go with Remote Desktop stuff (out of pure personal interest *g*, of course, but still)
  • Tzfarir and Gunnar for a nice chat on the last night of DebConf

Topics I have worked on

  • Finding my luggage

    • After I had arrived at Montreal Airport, I found out that my luggage stayed in Hamburg
    • So the first 4.5 days, I was continuously busy with calling Lufthansa for package item tracking...
    • Go shopping twice, to update my plastic bag of fresh clothes...
  • MATE 1.18 in Debian

    • Finalize package builds of MATE 1.18 in Debian unstable (because of some GLib2.0 regression, thanks to Iain Lane for the prompt fix and upload)
  • Debian Edu

    • clear up src:package debian-edu regarding the task files related to Debian Pure Blends
    • this work is still in progress...
  • Debian Blends (esp. the blends-dev part of the blends src:package)

    • You can now have empty Depends: / Recommends: / Suggests: fields with the list of packages then starting in the next line.
    • It is now possible to have real Depends: fields in task files that become Depends: fields in debian/control. Packages targetting Depends: that are not in unstable get de-promoted to the Suggests: field in debian/control.
    • Tested with most available Debian Pure Blends meta-packages
    • I also pointed Daniel Pocock with his new GnuPG clean-room project towards Debian Pure Blends
  • Ring: A 'new' distributed video chat tool without mediating servers. Good concept, however, we could not get it to work on the DebConf campus.

  • Debian Design Team (which I am now a member of, I guess)

    • Dive into and out of the vision of a Debian Uniform set of packages, turning the collection of software in Debian into one thing.
    • Run my terminal applications now with the Base16 profile 'solarized-universal'. However, Debian Design will be much more than 16 colors in a console terminal.
    • Let's turn Debian into something like a potential product!
  • Debian Policy:

    • I even helped with a Debian Policy bug...
  • Skolab Groupware: Forking Kolab (v2) as a new project, named the Skolab Groupware. Instead of migrating my own mail server away from Kolab (v2), I chose continuing maintenance for it, at least for the core compoents:

  • nx-libs: Work on several PRs:

  • Weblate:

    • Become hosted by hosted Weblate for...
    • Ayatana Indicators
    • Arctica Project
    • Skolab Groupware

    Thanks to Michal Čihař for providing this fine translation service

Talks and BoFs

Packages Uploaded to Debian unstable

  • mate-settings-daemon
  • mate-dock-applet
  • brisk-menu
  • mate-optimus
  • caja-actions
  • mate-common
  • mate-tweak
  • plank
  • freerdp (2x)
  • freerdp2
  • gosa-plugin-mailaddress

Packages Uploaded to Debian NEW

  • python-wither
  • lightdm-autologin-greeter
  • caja-rename

I also looked into lightdm-webkit2-greeter, but upstream is in the middle of a transition from Gtk3 to Qt5, so this has been suspended for now.

Packages Uploaded to oldstable-/stable-proposed-updates or -security

  • freerdp (1.1) (actually twice, one of them a security upload)
  • gosa-plugin-mailaddress
  • mate-themes

Other Package related Stuff

  • Prepare upload of caja-admin by asking for release tags upstream
  • Talk Clint Byrums into a fresh upload of the long not touch undistract-me package
  • Breed on different desktop layouts for Debian MATE (like in Ubuntu MATE)
  • Do quite a bit of GnuPG key signing
  • Update my consent with NM to pick up my work on collab-maint request processing again

Thanks to Everyone Making This Event Possible

A big thanks to everyone who made it possible for me to attend this event!!!