[arch-dev-public] To the developers that went to froscon 09

[Thomas Bächler]

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 260 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/attachments/20090823/e52499b8/attachment.pgp>