[Talk meister] Grab a seat please, there's lots of seats around here, or there.
It's my pleasure to introduce our current and new DPL,
Neil McGovern for his annual bits from the DPL
[Applause]
[Neil] Thanks very much, hi everyone.
I'm aware that this talk is due to cut in to lunch so I'll try and keep it slightly
... in to dinner, so I'll keep it slightly more refined [laughter]
so people can get their food early.
Hopefully everyone's ok with that anyway.
I'm also kind of glad that it's in this slot when it was originally proposed
and I got my initial time slot it was going to be a 9am slot just after the
cheese and wine party so I [laughter]
probably wouldn't expect quite so many people as we have here today.
So, welcome everyone, this final day of the open weekend. Anyone who isn't a
regular person, hi and welcome to Debian!
Welcome to the huge Debian family which is certainly growing all the time and
is something that's really good to see.
It's quite fantastic that there's just so many people involved, especially this year
When I last checked the stats I think we had 383 people who had so far checked in
slightly less than for DebConf 7, but I'm certain... [laughter]
I'm certain over the next few days that'll go up and definitely surpass us.
I just want to remind everyone what the size of the project we are.
It's such a huge effort, one of the biggest open source and free software
projects in the world.
Combining around 1000 developers, a few thousand maintainers and contributors as
well, and also our users.
It's really a huge effort that we manage to still be here after 22 years and still
be going strong.
Hopefully a DebConf in future will look a little bit like that
I think the orga team might be slightly more stressed if we end up with numbers
but what a fantastic thing.
Also over the last few years we've had 42 new project members have joined us.
This is over the last year, we've had all these people.
Huge welcome to everyone there. [Applause]
Especially one or two on there which I decided to get back into doing application
management, especially for our non- uploading developers as well, which has
been a huge boost to really grow where we're going.
Also welcome back. I've noticed a few people this year who I haven't seen in a
few years, so stand up if you've been away for a few years and you're returning
I know there's certainly some people, excellent,
Tolimar? [laughter] There he is! [Applause]
Kris Rose? Is he here? [points] Excellent.
Was active before I even joined Debian, and essentially has come back again, so
it's great to see everyone back and thanks very much for remembering us.
There's been a few new people as well.
Very, very new people who I haven't kinda seen around before in previous DebConfs
Where did all these children come from? I think there must have been something...
[laughter]
I think the Switzerland DebConf, there might have been something in the water,
because it's suddenly been a huge... it's absolutely fantastic to see not only
our usual developers around, but their families as well, and new people being
introduced to Debian and to technology.
The TecKids workshops I think are absolutely fantastic initiative I think
that really helps broaden Debian and what we do.
So, when I first became DPL, I always knew Debian was a big thing in free software,
in the communities and things we do.
I went along to my running club
and we went for a run,
went to the pub afterwards as you do in the UK,
you can't have sport without excessive alcohol consumption afterwards so it seems
and about 7 or 8 people all came up to me
and said "Hey, congratulations on being DPL, I'm going to buy you a pint!", which
[laughter]
which is great
So if anyone wants to run for DPL you get free beer, this is a good thing.
But it did really impress on me that
Debian's a big deal, it's a really huge deal.
If you have a look at some of the latest server stats for web servers,
Debian's number one.
It's about 32% of Linux distributions, and and if you combine Ubuntu as well, and
all our derivatives, we're about 62% of all linux servers out there
Basically Debian really does run the world
Not only that, but the amount of embedded devices that Debian's involved with
from, as mentioned before, the HP talk, running huge teleco systems
to assistive devices. I know Andy's around somewhere.
That product is essentially being based on Debian and it's a speak and spell type
device.
It's for people who can't talk.
You have a little keyboard, you type in what you want to say, it has predictive
technology in there, and then it gives people a voice.
Debian is literally being used to give people voices who can't speak.
This is the sort of impact that Debian have, and free software can have
on the world.
A few things happened, certainly over the last year.
Apparently we released.
I was only DPL for about a week, but I'm going to take credit for this
like any good politician, anyway. [laughter]
I've already had a stable release.
This has hugely welcomed.
I don't know if anyone followed the DevOps Reactions tumblr page, but they were
following along and huge cheers from everyone when Debian releases.
It is a big deal.
Strangely I also saw a press release that that said they're
having a party to celebrate the release of Debian 8 at Linux Fest North West,
But this press release was from Microsoft [laughter]
I thought it might be a spoof at first, but I diligently checked the certificates
and domains and made sure it went back.
I think people, certainly large organisations are realising now that this
open source, free software thing isn't going away
This isn't something that they can just ignore, or they can fight against.
This is something that they have to embrace
Certainly for someone like Microsoft to throw away a load of cake and do a press
release because Debian's released is something I never thought I'd see when I
first joined the Debian Project.
We've had some new good things which have started recently as well
Fantastic areas if anyone knows what this might be for a current initiative that's
going on?
[Picture of four similar potted plants]
I was trying to do reproducible builds.
They all sort of look the same, so near enough [laughter]
It's the nearest I could find on Flickr to something being reproducible.
These are all CC by the way.
So this is perhaps a bit of a better slide to explain just how impressive it is
where we've got.
I don't know if everyone here's aware of reproducible builds and what this is
trying to do, and the importance of it.
When you get a source package
and you produce a binary from that
there hasn't traditionally been a way of knowing that what you've produced here
comes from this source package and it hasn't been tampered with.
This is incredibly important for the trust that people have in Debian
and how we produce things
So if we're able to say "Look, this thing here has definitely come from here,
look we've rebuilt it again, you can check for yourself, it comes from here.",
then people can trust Debian as this platform for where we run everyone's
computers.
I'm quite impressed with the remarkable progress we've seen here.
From zero to a huge share of things being reproducable and that work I'm sure will
continue, especially thanks to the Linux Foundation's grants as well in supporting
this progress.
I did a "ask me anything" recently and it was one of the things that came up as
being a hugely popular thing that Debian is doing and that we're driving forward.
Not just for Debian itself but for all distributions and making sure we're
able to do that.
Interestingly I was also asked what I'm most jealous of other distributions and
I think I said the Arch wiki because it is pretty good. [laughter]
Often when I'm on #debian and answering questions then it comes up with the best
answers a lot of the time.
But, hey, I'm rubbish at writing documentation so...
Another effort we've come up with is ddebs
Ability to automatically have debug symbols
Something which a few other distributions have had for a while and it's really,
really good to see that this sort of effort is happening as well.
If Niels is around.... well done! [applause]
Not the only one but.
So, what's next?
What's the next things that Debian can do?
Where can we go from here and what sort of ideas can we have?
There's a whole range of things we can do
but I'm just going to pick up two or three
that we want to kinda concentrate on and see where we're going.
First, PPAs. [picture of a parcel]
It's near enough a package, that'll do me.
I've got a BoF scheduled on Friday, to try and look at what we're doing with this and
trying to finish it off.
It was in my platform as something I want push and it's something I believe will
really help the development of Debian.
Now, it's slightly different from Ubuntu PPAs as they're well known.
It's not going to be somewhere that you can just dump random software and people
install various quality packages.
This is going to be a very useful tool to aid Debian development itself.
As far as I remember, most of the work is actually done now.
Huge thanks to the FTP Masters and DSA etc for this.
So the actual code is there in DAK.
The only missing bits is the control functions,
how you create new PPAs and the wannabuild system and we build stuff and
touch releases.
So it is going to, hopefully, come any minute now
and something that we will hopefully be able to use and will ease the,
sometimes the pain of when we freeze.
Sometimes the ability to easily create backports
or even to ease library transitions.
If you can create a PPA where you stage your library, check everything works and
you can fix all your breakages then that should help unstable and testing as well.
One on outreach I guess is near enough.
It's kinda interesting, I've mentioned that Debian is in a huge position to touch
many people's lives and it was slightly worrying that compared to the amount of
Jessie release parties we had all over the world,
I video called into one in India for example and it was globally popular.
[XXXX 13:19 XXX]