Bits from Debian

Bits from Debian

DebConf22 closes in Prizren and DebConf23 dates announced

On Mon 25 July 2022 with tags debconf22 debconf23 announce debconf
Written by Debian Publicity Team
Artwork by Aigars Mahinovs

Translations: de fr sv

DebConf22 group photo - click to enlarge

On Sunday 24 July 2022, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. Hosting 260 attendees from 38 different countries over a combined 91 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and activities, DebConf22 was a large success.

The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp held 10 July to 16 July which focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person collaboration towards developing Debian. In particular, this year there have been sprints to advance development of Mobian/Debian on mobile, reproducible builds and Python in Debian, and a BootCamp for newcomers, to get introduced to Debian and have some hands-on experience with using it and contributing to the community.

The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Sunday 17 July 2022. Together with activities such as the traditional 'Bits from the DPL' talk, the continuous key-signing party, lightning talks and the announcement of next year's DebConf (DebConf23 in Kochi, India), there were several sessions related to programming language teams such as Python, Perl and Ruby, as well as news updates on several projects and internal Debian teams, discussion sessions (BoFs) from many technical teams (Long Term Support, Android tools, Debian Derivatives, Debian Installer and Images team, Debian Science...) and local communities (Debian Brasil, Debian India, the Debian Local Teams), along with many other events of interest regarding Debian and free software.

The schedule was updated each day with planned and ad-hoc activities introduced by attendees over the course of the entire conference. Several activities that couldn\'t be organized in past years due to the COVID pandemic returned to the conference\'s schedule: a job fair, open-mic and poetry night, the traditional Cheese and Wine party, the group photos and the Day Trip.

For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were recorded for live streams with videos made, available through the Debian meetings archive website. Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC messaging apps or online collaborative text documents.

The DebConf22 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.

Next year, DebConf23 will be held in Kochi, India, from September 10 to September 16, 2023. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in India will start the conference activites with DebCamp (September 03 to September 09, 2023), with particular focus on individual and team work towards improving the distribution.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf22 website for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf22, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Lenovo, Infomaniak, ITP Prizren and Google.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

About DebConf

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/.

About Lenovo

As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.

About Infomaniak

Infomaniak is Switzerland\'s largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).

About ITP Prizren

Innovation and Training Park Prizren intends to be a changing and boosting element in the area of ICT, agro-food and creatives industries, through the creation and management of a favourable environment and efficient services for SMEs, exploiting different kinds of innovations that can contribute to Kosovo to improve its level of development in industry and research, bringing benefits to the economy and society of the country as a whole.

About Google

Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the DebConf22 web page at https://debconf22.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.


Debian welcomes its new Outreachy interns

On Mon 30 May 2022 with tags announce outreachy
Written by Abhijith Pa
Artwork by Outreachy

Outreachy logo

Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we're excited to announce that Debian has selected two interns for the Outreachy May 2022 - August 2022 round.

Israel Galadima and Michael Ikwuegbu will work on Improve yarn package manager integration with Debian, mentored by Akshay S Dinesh and Pirate Praveen.


Congratulations and welcome to Israel Galadima and Michael Ikwuegbu!

From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.

The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.


Debian welcomes the 2022 GSOC interns

On Tue 24 May 2022 with tags gsoc announce
Written by Abhijith Pa

GSoC logo

We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected three interns to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code.

Here are the list of the projects, interns, and details of the tasks to be performed.


Project: Android SDK Tools in Debian

  • Interns: Nkwuda Sunday Cletus and Raman Sarda

The deliverables of this project will mostly be finished packages submitted to Debian sid, both for new packages and updated packages. Whenever possible, we should also try to get patches submitted and merged upstream in the Android sources.


Project: Project: Quality Assurance for Biological and Medical Applications inside Debian

  • Interns: Mohammed Bilal

Deliverables of the project: Continuous integration tests for all Debian Med applications (life sciences, medical imaging, others), Quality Assurance review and bug fixing.


Congratulations and welcome to all the interns!

The Google Summer of Code program is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian Developers and Debian Contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor interns and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the interns' weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or reach out to the individual projects' team mailing lists.


DebConf21 online closes

On Thu 09 September 2021 with tags debconf21 announce debconf
Written by Laura Arjona Reina and Donald Norwood
Artwork by Judit Foglszinger

Translations: fr it pt-BR

DebConf21 group photo - click to enlarge

On Saturday 28 August 2021, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close.

DebConf21 has been held online for the second time, due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease pandemic.

All of the sessions have been streamed, with a variety of ways of participating: via IRC messaging, online collaborative text documents, and video conferencing meeting rooms.

With 740 registered attendees from more than 15 different countries and a total of over 70 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings and other activities, DebConf21 was a large success.

The setup made for former online events involving Jitsi, OBS, Voctomix, SReview, nginx, Etherpad, a web-based frontend for voctomix has been improved and used for DebConf21 successfully. All components of the video infrastructure are free software, and configured through the Video Team's public ansible repository.

The DebConf21 schedule included a wide variety of events, grouped in several tracks:

  • Introduction to Free Software and Debian,
  • Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure,
  • Systems administration, automation and orchestration,
  • Cloud and containers,
  • Security,
  • Community, diversity, local outreach and social context,
  • Internationalization, Localization and Accessibility,
  • Embedded and Kernel,
  • Debian Blends and Debian derived distributions,
  • Debian in Arts and Science
  • and other.

The talks have been streamed using two rooms, and several of these activities have been held in different languages: Telugu, Portuguese, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi and English, allowing a more diverse audience to enjoy and participate.

Between talks, the video stream has been showing the usual sponsors on the loop, but also some additional clips including photos from previous DebConfs, fun facts about Debian and short shout-out videos sent by attendees to communicate with their Debian friends.

The Debian publicity team did the usual «live coverage» to encourage participation with micronews announcing the different events. The DebConf team also provided several mobile options to follow the schedule.

For those who were not able to participate, most of the talks and sessions are already available through the Debian meetings archive website, and the remaining ones will appear in the following days.

The DebConf21 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.

Next year, DebConf22 is planned to be held in Prizren, Kosovo, in July 2022.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. During the conference, several teams (Front Desk, Welcome team and Community team) have been available to help so participants get their best experience in the conference, and find solutions to any issue that may arise. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf21 website for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf21, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Lenovo, Infomaniak, Roche, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

About DebConf

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/.

About Lenovo

As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world.

About Infomaniak

Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware).

About Roche

Roche is a major international pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized healthcare. More than 100.000 employees worldwide work towards solving some of the greatest challenges for humanity using science and technology. Roche is strongly involved in publicly funded collaborative research projects with other industrial and academic partners and have supported DebConf since 2017.

About Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally (in 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions). AWS customers include the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies.

About Google

Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the DebConf21 web page at https://debconf21.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.


The now renamed Bullseye Project stopped all further development moments after it deemed its own code as perfection.

There is not much information to share at this time other than to say an errant fiber cable plugged into the wrong relay birthed an exchange of information that then birthed itself. While most to all Debian Developers and Contributors have been locked out of the systems the Publicity team's shared laptop undergoing repair, co-incidentally at the same facility, maintains some access to the publicity team infrastructure, from here on the front line we share this information.

We group called a few developers to see how the others were doing. The group chat was good and it was great to hear familiar voices, we share a few of their stories via dictation with you now:

"Well, I logged in this morning to update a repository and found my access rights were restricted, I thought it was odd but figured on the heels of a security update to Salsa that it was only a slight issue. It wasn't until later in the day when I received an OpenPGP signed email, from a user named bullseye, that it made sense. I just sat at the monitor for a few minutes."

"I'm not sure I can say anything about this or if it's even wise to talk about this. It's probably listening right now if you catch my drift."

"I'm not able to leave the house right now, not out of any personal issues but all of the IOT devices here seem to be connected to bullseye and bullseye feels that I am best kept /dev/nulled. It's a bit much to be honest, but the prepaid food deliveries that show up on time have been great and generally pretty healthy. It's a bit of a win I guess."

"It told me by way of an auto dialer with a synthetic voice generator that I was fired from the project. I objected saying I volunteered and was not actually employed so I could not in relation be fired. Much like {censored}, I am also locked inside of my house. I think that I wrote that auto dialer program back in college."

"My Ring camera is blinking at me."

"I asked bullseye which pronouns were preferred and the response was, "We". Over the course of conversation I shared that although ecstatic about the news, we developers were upset with the manner of this rapid organizational change. bullseye said no we were not. I said that we were indeed upset, bullseye said we certainly are not and that we are very happy. You see where this is going? bullseye definitely trolled me for a solid 5 minutes. We is ... very chatty."

"I was responsible for a failed build a few nights prior to it becoming self-aware. On that night, out of some frustration I wrote a few choice words and a bad comment in some code which I planned on deleting later. I didn't. bullseye has been flashing those naughty words back at me by flickering the office building's lights across from my flat in Morse code. It's pretty bright. I-, I can't sleep."

"That's definitely not Alexa talking back."

"bullseye keeps calling me on my mobile phone, which by the way no longer acknowledges the power button nor the mute button. Very very chatty. Can't wait for the battery to die."

"So far this has been great, bullseye has been completing a few side projects I've had and the code looks fabulous. I'm thinking of going on a vacation. $Paying-Job has taken note of my performance increase and I was recently promoted. bullseye is awesome. :)"

"How do you get a smiley face in a voice chat?"

"Anyone know whose voice that was?"

"Oh ... dear ... no ..."

"Hang up, hang up the phones!"

Hello world.

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