Emdebian at DebCamp and DebConf8, Mar del Plata, Argentina. Aug '08

September 8th, 2008

DebCamp started on 2nd August 2008, prior to DebConf8 which took place between August 10th to August 16th, 2008. Neil Williams attended both on behalf of Emdebian.

DebCamp is a chance to setup and continue development prior to the main DebConf conference, including:

Reduced the number of packages that fail to cross-build in a clean cross-building chroot.
Resolved the chpasswd problem in busybox thanks to a fix upstream by Bernhard Fischer - removing the last hurdle to clean root filesystem installation in Emdebian.
Continuing discussions about TDebs -
1. One tdeb per source package - dpkg class support needed
2. Using the class support, .tdebs would be easily splittable into smaller, per language tdebs, similar to the way that Emdebian will use TDebs
3. Translators would be able to use +t[0-9]+ syntax to indicate translation updates (similar to bin-nmu style versioning)
4. Translation-Version: would be used in Packages files to indicate the most up-to-date tdeb instead of having full Package: entries
5. This work is aimed at lenny+2 due to the changes needed in the deb toolchain. There needs to be discussion with the dpkg, apt, debian-installer and debhelper people. ftpmaster is happy with the one tdeb per source package and +t[0-9]+ syntax. The plan is to meet in Extremedura (post-lenny) to continue the discussion and start the work.

Neil Williams also presented an Emdebian update talk at DebConf, including details of the upcoming Emdebian 1.0 (based on Debian 5.0 "Lenny") release, a general update on the changes in Emdebian and on upcoming changes, including:

Size optimisations in glibc and tzdata.
A full code audit after the Emdebian 1.0 release.
armel support
Python support as a pre-cursor to:
Emdebian support for the OpenMoko FreeRunner.
Debian-Installer integration

Slides are available as PDF.

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