Bangalore Debian Developer Conference
Today I attended the First Annual Bangalore Debian Conference. I am not sure if lot of people knew about it. I got to know about it from the Bangalore Linux Users Group mailing list. This post is an attempt to capture what happened as part of it. The meet did bring in some memories of the only ILUGC meet I ever attended. sunson used to take the meeting minutes and the fame of his minutes are part of ILUGC folklore now. A whole of lot of things were going through my mind while the meet was on. As a result, I might have missed out on details.
The meet was held at IIIT-B, Bangalore. Prof. Sadagopan, of IIIT-B, inaugurated the meet. The person behind the meet was S Nagarajan (HP, India). He also happens to handle the Advanced Operating Systems Course at IIITB. Before the meet started a video of Jaldhar Vyas was being screened.
The goal of the meet was to have more Debian Developers from India. At present we have only two of them, Ganesan and Ramki. Both of them were to talk about their experiences of being Debian developers. Nagarajan (SN henceforth) mentioned that thaths was too a Debian developer and they had somehow missed out on getting this bit of info earlier. thaths had apparently signed off Ramki's GPG key.
After short talks by Prof Sadagopan and SN, the developers took centre stage. Ganesan and Ramki swapped their talk schedules. Ramki, an amateur radio enthusiast, touched upon how Debian is governed as a project in considerable detail. He mentioned how ILUGC (especially Arun, Raghavendra Bhat, Thaths) got him hooked onto Debian. It must have been a really proud moment for him when he had thaths sign his GPG key. Ganesan focussed more on the developer aspects of it. Lot of information on how to start contributing to the Debian project were discussed. You might as well find all this at the Debian website, but to hear them from the horses' mouth is a different thing altogether. Ramki's handled his personal preference of the term "Free Software" over "Open Source" very well I should say. SN stepped in everytime the discussions digressed towards licensing/philosophical issues and tried to keep the focus on the discussing Debian development.
After a tea break, it was an open session for all. Chirag Kantharia (I remember seeing his postings on mailing lists) narrated, how getting the netdump project onto Debian was tough and how it remains stagnant now for want of infrastructure. IndLinux and it's relationship with Debian were also well discussed in the meet. The inherent difficulty in maintaining a stable distribution for over 12 CPU architectures explained the long release cycles. I also learnt there are proposals to drop a few architectures like the m68k, Alpha to shorten the Debian stable release cycle. Both Ganesan and Ramki expressed doubts if this would ever happen. Debian and embedded systems were also discussed.
There was an install fest to happen at the end of the meet. But I did not wait and started home with my mind grappling with quite a lot of stuff (not about the meet though).
The goal of the conference was to have atleast 20 Debian Developers in the next one year. Both Ganesan and Ramki are available for mentoring aspiring people. Ganesan and Ramki became Debian developers when internet connectivity in India was not very convenient. Now with broadband and PC costs spirally down, the goal is definitely not impossible. But I must admit we would have done exceptionally well if we had 20 developers in a year's time.
Update:
Ramki's entry is here
Ganesan's entry is here
The meet was held at IIIT-B, Bangalore. Prof. Sadagopan, of IIIT-B, inaugurated the meet. The person behind the meet was S Nagarajan (HP, India). He also happens to handle the Advanced Operating Systems Course at IIITB. Before the meet started a video of Jaldhar Vyas was being screened.
The goal of the meet was to have more Debian Developers from India. At present we have only two of them, Ganesan and Ramki. Both of them were to talk about their experiences of being Debian developers. Nagarajan (SN henceforth) mentioned that thaths was too a Debian developer and they had somehow missed out on getting this bit of info earlier. thaths had apparently signed off Ramki's GPG key.
After short talks by Prof Sadagopan and SN, the developers took centre stage. Ganesan and Ramki swapped their talk schedules. Ramki, an amateur radio enthusiast, touched upon how Debian is governed as a project in considerable detail. He mentioned how ILUGC (especially Arun, Raghavendra Bhat, Thaths) got him hooked onto Debian. It must have been a really proud moment for him when he had thaths sign his GPG key. Ganesan focussed more on the developer aspects of it. Lot of information on how to start contributing to the Debian project were discussed. You might as well find all this at the Debian website, but to hear them from the horses' mouth is a different thing altogether. Ramki's handled his personal preference of the term "Free Software" over "Open Source" very well I should say. SN stepped in everytime the discussions digressed towards licensing/philosophical issues and tried to keep the focus on the discussing Debian development.
After a tea break, it was an open session for all. Chirag Kantharia (I remember seeing his postings on mailing lists) narrated, how getting the netdump project onto Debian was tough and how it remains stagnant now for want of infrastructure. IndLinux and it's relationship with Debian were also well discussed in the meet. The inherent difficulty in maintaining a stable distribution for over 12 CPU architectures explained the long release cycles. I also learnt there are proposals to drop a few architectures like the m68k, Alpha to shorten the Debian stable release cycle. Both Ganesan and Ramki expressed doubts if this would ever happen. Debian and embedded systems were also discussed.
There was an install fest to happen at the end of the meet. But I did not wait and started home with my mind grappling with quite a lot of stuff (not about the meet though).
The goal of the conference was to have atleast 20 Debian Developers in the next one year. Both Ganesan and Ramki are available for mentoring aspiring people. Ganesan and Ramki became Debian developers when internet connectivity in India was not very convenient. Now with broadband and PC costs spirally down, the goal is definitely not impossible. But I must admit we would have done exceptionally well if we had 20 developers in a year's time.
Update:
Ramki's entry is here
Ganesan's entry is here