Report on Debconf5, Helsinki

July 24th, 2005

The 6th Debian conference - Debconf 5 took place in Helsinki, Finland between the 10th and 17th July this year. Quite a number of Emdebian developers were present and we had a great deal of useful discussion and even did some actual hacking.

Debconf is a remarkable experience. I (Wookey) was only there for three of the 8 days but that was enough to get a good idea of how much fun the whole week would be.

Wookey gave a talk on the project. There were also a number of other talks which are more or less related to embedded systems and cross building: Tollef Fog Heen on Multiarch, a scheme for having libraries for more than one architecture installed at once, Timo Savola on "Building Debian from scratch using Scratchbox" and crocodile, Carlos Aguiar on "Cross-compiling applications and creating Debian packages for embedded systems" by Carlos Aguiar, and Simon richter spoke about "Alternate Approaches to Package Management and autobuilding". Wookey was also involved in the panel discussion on Debian deriviative distributions. All of these are available as videos, along with all the other talks from the week.

On Monday after the talks and on Tuesday we had a useful hacking session, talking about packages to go into a minimal base system, cross-building, and small-package meta-data positioning and representation. On wednesday our hacking was somewhat resptricted by the daytrip to a Finish fort on an island, but we still managed some more discussion on the boat there.

I hesitate to name names as I will forget someone, but those who could reasonably be called the 'Emdebian people' present were Hector Oron Martinez (zumbi), Vartan Khachaturov (wart), Peter de Schriver (p2), Riku Voipio (nchip), and Timo Savola (thain). I also had useful input or conversation with Sven Luther (recommended using udeb/d-i infrastructure), Max Hofer, Jonas Smedgaard (happy to help with cdbs stuff), Lauri Leukonnen, and Joey Hess. Thanx particularly to zumbi for his enthusiasm.

Overall I'd say Debconf is an unrivalled opportunity for high-bandwidth interaction. We made some real progress, and I hope we can do it again next year. And thanx to the organisers and hosts who did a brilliant job.

Back to other Emdebian news.

Back to the Emdebian Project homepage.

See the emdebian contact page for information on contacting us.