lca2008 — state of debian miniconf

Martin Krafft gave this talk, and I found it to be pretty good. Among the things he presented that I found interesting:

• Little Miss Sunshine full
• debtags — I guess this has been around for a while now, but I never knew about it. Basically, it allows people to add tags to the zillions of debian packages. The canonical example given was that people have a hard time finding the Gimp because they ask apt-cache to search for “image editor” but the Gimp is an “image manipulation” program. Oops. debtags lets other people tag any given package with whatever they want, so hopefully the collective mind will eventually figure out the proper description for a package so that mere mortals can find it.
• etch-and-a-half — kernel update for etch. The cool thing is they’re adding a new kernel (2.6.24) to the repo, but not removing the old (2.6.18), so a sysadmin can try out the new kernel and easily revert back to the old one if needed. Good idea, and good job, guys.
• debian maintainers — a new classification in the debian hierarchy. Now, you don’t need to find an existing debian developer (DD) to sponsor you if all you want to do is upload packages to the repo. You can get maintainer status, which is a lot lower overhead (although it comes with fewer privileges, which is fine). This is also a great idea.
• dpkg symbol resolution — dpkg will now actually look at the symbols in a package to help calculate and resolve dependencies. No longer does it rely on hard-coded version strings. Yikes! Sounds so easy when you think about it, and one wonders why it hasn’t been done before (there must be a good reason, although I don’t know it). Another great idea, and one that’s been a long time coming.
• debcheckout — there’s a lot of movement afoot to try and get a handle on the bazillions of source control management systems out there. debcheckout will abstract that out so the poor developer doesn’t have to learn svn, cvs, git, hg, bzr, darcs, etc. etc. etc. whew!