Debconf6 day 3: BOOT!

May 16th.

In the morning I was kind of lazy and watched the talks via the webcast which worked very nice. I was even able to give some comments via IRC feedback. Very nice experience. One good idea popped up in the IRC there - it would also be useful to have an audio only webcast to conserve bandwidth.

The "early" morning discussion about etch release and kernel to use in it was quite interesting to watch while I did not necessary got all the things that were said there.

Then in the tower there was a great BOF session about speeding up the boot. It was a very nice session because there was a lot of discussion, lot of questions and comments from the audience.

A GPL license talk followed the boot BOF and again I watched it via the webcast from the hacklab. Convenient. But then my network went down somehow I found it faster to walk to the tower then to get it back up. Several good questions were asked about the problems with current GPLv3 draft. Some ideas formed about how to fix the Affero clause using "public performance" phrasing. An insightful insight into the brain of debian-legal.

Mao is deep ingrained into the brains of Debian Developers

 
marga: it has been observed that debian members respect each other. 
Myon: are you explaining the rules? 
marga: Myon, actually, I wasn't, but I wouldn't mind explaining them 
dondelelcaro: Myon, is that against the rules? 
Myon: I would have to take a penalty card if I said 'yes' 
dondelelcaro: talking.

Enrico did the social guidelines dance outlining the recommendations for peaceful coexistence without resorting to telletubbie or inquisition practices. It sounded very reasonable as recommendations, but those must never be promoted to any kind of policy. Enrico also mentioned that.

Penny Peach, we miss you.

After dinner a bunch of small mexican-looking females bunched first around the Japanese guys and then around the group where I was in. They were all smiling and very exited. They spoke very fast Spanish while rubbing their clothes and making horizontal back-and-forth motions with their hands. Nobody of us spoke Spanish. And they kept speaking and rubbing. My mind raced to present one unlikely reasoning after another, but nothing really fitted the situation. After a few minutes of total confusion we found a Spanish speaker who found out that they wanted ... an iron. An iron to iron their clothes. Doh! I was so confused that I only got 1 blurry photo from the ... incident.

Random note: the fan control system here is quite ... buttony.

Then we had a BOF about packaging of web applications and other applications that need database access. Maintainers and users of such things will be happy to hear that the situation is being resolved and there will most probably be a policy for etch+1 for that. Large ISPs and hosting providers will be happy to hear that their need are also heard (or will be heard if you join the process) and most probably it will be possible to activate/deactivate a web application for a certain user at a certain path of a certain virtual host with a single command that can also be scripted. In any case if you are interested in this development, please participate now, so that your need can be heard too.

After the BOFs the, now official and scheduled, wine and cheese party started. It was briefly interrupted by rain, but the tables were moved under the roof in seconds and the party continued. There were around 40 different cheeses. Most of them were French and almost all of them were very tasty (some were .. an acquired taste :)). I can't say anything about the wine (I do not like the taste of alcohol), but other tasters were expressing very positive remarks. The party went on for a long time with more and more cheeses and vines brought up with time.

There was some more hair coloring going on.

Then there was the demonstration of use of duck tape on an almost professional HD 1080i video camera.

And then there was the public demonstration of present Debian swirl tattoos. Impressive.

When I was just going to go to the bed, I was lured into another game of Mao. I must say that playing Mao right after the wine and cheese part is ... interesting. Some girls got ... lucky ... seven.

And there was still quite a lot of hacking going on around two in the night when I went to sleep. Tomorrow is the daytrip.