Eduardo Romero schrieb:

I know some of you went to froscon, and did enjoyed the experience a lot. I am here asking, if any of you developers could write a text about froscon, the experience, who you met, and how it all went overall. Nothing too fancy, it will in fact feature as an article in the Arch Linux Magazine, it would be appreciated if you could have some photos as well. Contact me if you are able to take on it.

Preferably a developer, but in the event that no developer can get to it, a trusted user could do.

Thanks for your interest as always,

First of all, thanks for _your_ interest. Daniel, Roman and Jens made tons of photos, so we should get those soon. I can offer a group picture for now: http://archlinux.me/brain0/2009/08/22/hello-from-froscon-2009/ Not a real text, but I can tell you some things: First of all, I finally met Roman and I met Dieter, which I was really looking forward to. Also, we installed our machines several times, so I got a good look at AIF, and apart from some minor bugs that we found, it is awesome and it's definitely a major improvement to what we had before. We got rid of about 90 CDs I think, so I would like to thank all Arch donators for making those possible. As every year, we met Simon from the Openoffice community and according to Andy, it seems like they are taking Arch pretty seriously these days. We got personally invited by some Ubuntu guy to the OpenRheinRuhr, which is a small conference in November which iirc takes place for the first time this year. But the most interesting talk I had was with a Debian contributor, and you'll hear more about that from me soon. He asked if we had a science team with special interest in scientific packages, which we don't, but otherwise he would have wanted to exchange experiences. Then he asked about how we manage our packages and if/how we use source code management for it. http://www.vcs-pkg.org/ is a some cross-distro effort in that direction and is currently a wiki connecting info about different workflows in distributions, so I told him I would add a section about how Arch manages the repositories. He also told me about a project on http://patches.debian.net (the site was down at the time) which is aiming at providing a portal where patches from all distributions are collected, so others can find them more easily and it's easier to see who does what. He asked whether it would be possible to provide some way for Arch so that this information is automatically submitted. I was definitely intersted in that. The most interesting thing was a Debian Enhancement Proposal at http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/: It is about providing a standard format for adding metadata to unified diff files. This is extremely interesting and I am definitely interested in having such metadata in all patches we add to the Arch repositories. Just read the proposal and see what it includes. This would be especially useful with the cross-distro patch project mentioned above. He told me not to hesitate to write thoughts about improvements to the other of the DEP so this could maybe become a standard format that is not limited to Debian, but could be used for all patches that you will find on the Internet. I told him that I would bring these things up on our mailing lists and that I am definitely interested in those. That's the most important things I remember right now, I guess the others also have things to say (for example Roman talked to lots of people). See what you can make of it and have a nice evening Thomas

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 21:18, Eduardo Romero wrote:

Hi guys,

I know some of you went to froscon, and did enjoyed the experience a lot. I am here asking, if any of you developers could write a text about froscon, the experience, who you met, and how it all went overall. Nothing too fancy, it will in fact feature as an article in the Arch Linux Magazine, it would be appreciated if you could have some photos as well. Contact me if you are able to take on it.

Preferably a developer, but in the event that no developer can get to it, a trusted user could do.

Thanks for your interest as always,

From my point of view the event was awesome! First of all - I finally managed to get there (and even convinced my company to cover the cost of plane tickets :-P)

Hi! I'm in 404 Hostel (fun name :P) in Köln (Cologne) at the moment (BTW it's probably one of the best in the world, I can already recommend it). though the road from Dortmund to a hostel in Bonn, and from Sankt Augustin to the hostel in Köln was a jorney. We spent really nice time there both during the day and during "social event" (I leave it to the other devs to say something about the horilka (vodka)! :-P). We did some talks about Arch for the visitors of our booth (especially Thomas who spent quite alot of time on that), helped to install Arch on several visitors' laptops, communicated with people from other projects (I discovered one young but very interesting project that I may even contribute to, as soon as I really try it), gave away FrOSCon Edition CDs (at the very end I even had to give out one of two CDs I left for myself). I've even managed to visit two English-language talks. I and Dieter had not easy time among >95% German-speaking people, but most people spoke English well as soon as you told them that you're one of the few people here that don't understand Gernan. :-) Visiting other projects' booths was very interesting for me, I had some nice talks and shared addresses with some people. And during the "social event" we had quite long talks about everything util late night. I got a collection of CDs/DVDs with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenSolaris for installing in VirtualBox for testing my pet project on different platforms. I also made some photos which I will upload somewhere tomorrow in the evening (don't have much time and energy now). To summarize - that was very well spent two days, with lots of activity, communications and feedback. I'm looking forward for the next event, be it FrOSCon or some other FOSS conference where we can be present. Oh, and we really must do ArchCon somewhere during the next Summer. ;-) -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)

I collected some pictures and made a simple gallery: http://users.archlinux.de/~pierre/froscon/2009/ I only remove the totally broken or useless ones. I did not rescale either. Maybe we can setup the gallery on gerolde later. -- Pierre Schmitz, http://users.archlinux.de/~pierre