[loki at fosdem.org: FOSDEM 2010: Distribution Miniconf]

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 10:49:31PM +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote:
> On 10/28/2009 07:35 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 01:38:04PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> >>> If I'm not the only one feeling that way, I think we can try to make a
> >>> more reasonable proposal to the FOSDEM organizer: having the devroom
> >>> *and* the cross-distro meeting room. That can be coped with a simple
> >>> room: if you want a devroom for your own, you should participate in the
> >>> cross-distro room *as* *well* filling a number X of slots.
> >>
> >> Given the above, and given that this would involve one "shared" devroom
> >> *plus* a single devroom for each and every distribution, I can't agree
> >> that this is "a more reasonable proposal".
> 
> Indeed :)
> 
> > OK, by reading your detailed explanation I now imagine that the room
> > shortage is so severe that they cannot afford more than one devroom for
> > all participating distros. If that is the case, obviously this is the
> > only viable solution. I was imagining / hoping that a less consistent
> > reduction in distro-related devrooms was enough, according to that I was
> > seeing my proposal as "more reasonable" in the sense that it required
> > less room, but still not as few as one single room.
> > 
> > If there is room for one more room (pun not intended), I believe that
> > all distros would benefit from having a time-share of the extra room to
> > be handled with a distro-specific schedule. If there is not, obviously
> > we will cope with that.
> 
> We could imagine something like that but one room to time-share just
> wouldn't be enough. If Debian would like to have that, then there is no
> reason we would deny it to the others. And if we have openSUSE, Fedora,
> CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu (pending), Arch (pending), Gentoo, Exherbo and
> Mandriva at FOSDEM 2010, that's 7 to 9 distro projects. Cannot possibly
> time-share a single room on 2 days amongst that many participants.

There's no need for that. I do think that there should be space for
distribution-specific talks that are really of interest to people of
that distribution alone. But this can be organized in the same way as
the other distribution talks; that way, if no distribution-specific
talks are submitted from one distribution, then you don't have the
problem that you've got alotted time for them which nobody claimed.

> We could already have more specialized topics as we will use 2, 3 or 4
> rooms (4 currently being the upper limit IMO, although I'd much prefer
> using 3 rooms max for the distro projects), such as a half-day track on
> packaging, with one room being about RPM/zypp/yum/smart/..., the 2nd
> room around dpkg/apt.
> Also, there is absolutely no problem with proposing and holding sessions
> about things that are specific to Debian. The difference is that it
> should be geared more towards showcasing it to other distributions,
> outlining the pros and cons, discussing with others how they (solve
> those problems|accomplish those features), etc...

I don't think that's necessarily true. Yes, speakers should assume that
not just people from their pet distribution will be attending. However,
FOSDEM is supposed to be technical -- it should be fair game if speakers
assume pre-existing knowledge about their subject, whether this is a
programming language or a distribution.

-- 
The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters
works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is
trying to fool the system.
  http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html