Largest DebConf Ever Will Hit Heidelberg In Mid-August

New submitter alfino writes: Less than two weeks away, DebConf15, the 16th Debian Conference, scheduled to take place 15–22 August in Heidelberg, Germany, has been officially announced. The organisers are expecting more than 550 participants from 53 countries (making it the largest DebConf so far, and the first in history that will be closing registrations early), and have presented a schedule packed with talks and events, including several prominent, invited speakers, and yet plenty of room for informal and ad-hoc collaboration. Most events will be streamed live to allow for remote participation, and archived for later consumption.

The celebrations of Debian's 22nd birthday on 16 August, the traditional "Cheese & Wine BoF", a screening of the Oscar-award-winning documentary Citizenfour (which mentions Debian in its end credits), and a day trip for all attendees top off the programme. Additionally, DebConf15 will be preceeded by DebCamp, a week of sprints, workshops and hacking sessions. It is expected that much progress will be made on Debian (gcc5 transition, planning of the next stable release "stretch", etc.), and of course Free Software in general. The conference itself begins with an Open Weekend geared to the public, and featuring a job fair.

Attendance is free of charge thanks to numerous sponsors, including Platinum Sponsor Hewlett-Packard. Registration is required nonetheless and only very few places are left.

The conference will be tracked on various social media sites using hashtag #DebConf15. Even though Debian does not endorse proprietary services, @DebConf will have the news.

Comments

systemd

[4im]

Add systemd rants here, if you must.

Yes, systemd is there in the schedule:
https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/304/systemd-how-we-survived-jessie-and-how-we-will-break-stretch/
https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/305/your-systemd-tool-box-dissecting-and-debugging-boot-and-services/

I guess it will be a while before we see that kind of conference with devuan.

Otherwise: thanks a lot to Debian for an environment that has been a joy
to work with for a long time. My personal server is still running Debian, but
I for one most probably won't be joining the systemd bandwagon.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, systemd pretty much ruined Debian for me. Everything about it is so contradictory to everything about Debian.

Re:systemd

[gweihir]

Also my take. The decision to go that way is still a complete mystery to me. And no, I will not use systemd anytime soon. Maybe I will have a look at it in 5 or 10 years when it may (or may not) have reached a stable feature set and some code maturity, but not before.

Re:systemd

[gmack]

It has been ages since systemd caused me any trouble. The last one being a system that took a full 5 minutes to boot that but a subsequent update that added a display of what it is waiting on that revealed to be a bad entry in /etc/fstab. Debian has even helpfully preconfigured the systemd to forward all logs through the syslogd so everything is exactly where I expected.

Re:systemd

[Phil Hands]

Let's not overreact:

apt-get purge systemd works just fine.

The result is: apt-get will automatically suggest removing systemd and install sysvinit-core

That may work until systemd is a hard dependency for everything on your machine.

CAPTCHA: sleepers

this is Debian remember -- it'll work as long as anyone thinks it's worth the effort to make it work.

If the volume of noise made by the anti crowd had any correlation with available effort then that would indicate that it would work forever, but my suspicion is that those people are all mouth and no trousers.

Re:systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to love systemd. I really did. Yet, when it didn't work for me at least I still had the option of sysvinit in Jessie right? Wrong! Not when I wanted to install libvirt and kvm. Then systemd became a dependency - even with the shim and every other work around.

I know that other init systems have their problems --- and if you really wanted systemd you had CentOS or even Debian as an option. Now with Debian and Ubuntu adoption you don't have an option (not a real one) unless you want to go to BSD, compile software for days, or go back to Windows.

I joined many a linux community because it was about community. The people participating in what they wanted. Now the community is dead and we produce software for the developers? Not the users? If you aren't a developer then you are SOL because you can't build your own or fix what is broken. At least this is the way it seems with Ubuntu's decisions on Pulseaudio, Plymouth, and Unity; and now Debian's choice of Gnome 3 and SystemD.

I really hope that someone fixes this mess. I am not a software dev. I was a volunteer. I did documentation - and helped linux newbies for years. I was an active community member - now I am just disappointed.

Please stop telling me that I don't like systemD because I am not smart enough to appreciate it. I run several datacenters around the states. I have been an admin and an engineer for a very long time. Maybe what we had didn't work well for developers - but it worked well for me - a user. This shouldn't be a "option A" verses "option B" argument. There were other options.

Re:systemd

[antdude]

What happens when ALLLinux OSes use systemd? :(

Re:systemd

[gweihir]

It should have been "we only take in systemd as default if the distro stays fully functional with sysvinit". By not retaining that choice, the Debian technical committee has screwed over the Debian user community.

irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

debian is irrelevant now that they use systemd.

Re:systemd made my laptop unusable

[Phil Hands]

When I upgraded to Jessie, it installed systemd, and the laptop started going into suspend all the time. I'd unsuspend it, and it would suspend again 30 seconds later.

In diagnosing it, I found that using journalctl is much nicer than grepping though the tangle of partial and redundant logs that syslogd generates -- how is it that that particular collective itch seems not to have provoked anyone to scratch it previously in the decades we've been suffering it?

I also discovered that the laptop's lid switch was stuck in, and needed a squirt of lubricant to get it working again -- for some reason sysvinit/acpi/etc. conspired to ignore that fact.

One gets the impression that the bulk of people still whining about systemd have either never used it, or have very little real experience of the tangle of string and duct tape that is sysvinit. If whining about Debian, they also seem to be incapable of basic reading comprehension -- One only uses the word "default" when other choices are available.

Re:systemd made my laptop unusable

[Carewolf]

When I upgraded to Jessie, it installed systemd, and the laptop started going into suspend all the time. I'd unsuspend it, and it would suspend again 30 seconds later.

In diagnosing it, I found that using journalctl is much nicer than grepping though the tangle of partial and redundant logs that syslogd generates -- how is it that that particular collective itch seems not to have provoked anyone to scratch it previously in the decades we've been suffering it?

I also discovered that the laptop's lid switch was stuck in, and needed a squirt of lubricant to get it working again -- for some reason sysvinit/acpi/etc. conspired to ignore that fact.

One gets the impression that the bulk of people still whining about systemd have either never used it, or have very little real experience of the tangle of string and duct tape that is sysvinit. If whining about Debian, they also seem to be incapable of basic reading comprehension -- One only uses the word "default" when other choices are available.

Actually that is due to a particular annoying default in systemd, where it suspends if it detects the laptop is closed instead of reacting to the laptop-close event. It is quite frustrating. It default exists because Pottering has a laptop with an power button on the side that can turn it on in his bag, so systemd is configured to shut down on boot up if it detects the laptop is closed even though that makes no sense. He convinced me it just a default though, but I haven't yet figured out where to change it, so far I just open up the laptop before I can power off from the docking station.

Re:systemd made my laptop unusable

[gweihir]

In Debian, one rightfully expects the "default" to be rock-solid, and minimal-fuss. This implicit promise is broken by systemd. Also notice that systemd as default implies no full alternatives are possible long-term, as a lot has to be adjusted to whatever systemd needs. This means that over time, the "default" will be the only way to use the fill distro. Doubtlessly, that is what the systemd-mafia wants.

While I do not know how your reading comprehension is, you have at least failed to read any documents detailing the impact of making systemd the "default".

Re:Disliking systemd doesn't imply liking sysvinit

[gweihir]

The point is that if sysvinit has problems, you can usually diagnose and fix them yourself. You can also work around it. So while not perfect and sometimes a pain, you can adapt it to be not broken for your particular needs and after that it usually stays non-broken, because it is stable and mature.

With systemd that is no longer possible. Even creating bug-reports for systemd seems to be a real challenge, and not only because the dev-team is mostly unresponsive.

Re:gweihir's a trolling blowhard punk

[gweihir]

Really, you should start to take your medication again.