Mon, 15 Jan 2007

LCA2007 Day 1.

Wow! What a whirlwind!

We started with registration and catching up with the out of towners. That was followed by the Jdub's entertaining and poignant opening address.

From there I went to the Debian Miniconf. First up was Debian Project Leader Anthony Towns with a Debian state of the union address. AJ covered a lot of ground, particularly with respect to legal issues surrounding the Firefox/Iceweasel and Java (pre SUN GPLing Java), the near dropping of the m68k port and most of the flame-wars with Debian in the past year. What he didn't cover was the one issue I was there to hear about; the flame war surrounding Sven Luther. Sven is a prominent developer for the Debain PowerPC port and also one of the main Ocaml maintainers within Debian. As a lurker on the debian-powerpc list and a user of Ocaml I was disappointed to see the treatment of Sven Luther. I know I don't know the whole story, but I had always found Sven to be helpful, thoughtful and pleasant on the mailing lists. In my opinion, with my limited knowledge of the history, I thought Sven had been treated unfairly and hoped to hear something from AJ about the issue and how problems like this could be resolved in the future.

After AJ, B'dale Garbee gave a talk about HP and its involvement with Debian. I was very impressed to hear the HP is now selling support for Debian on certain HP servers. I was also impressed to hear that HP's marketing people claim (if I heard correctly) that by the end of the year, 30% of all mobile telephone calls will be routed by HP Itanium boxes running Linux. Awesome!

After lunch, Keith Packard gave another of his engaging talks about all the great things that are happening in the X project. One of the highlights of this work was the dumping of about 40,000 lines of code without losing any functionality.

After Keith, I missed a could of talks because I had some fiddling around to do to get wireless running on my laptop, but thats a topic for another blog post.

The day ended with the speakers dinner. Since I'm giving a paper and a tutorial with Rob Collins and Peter Miller later in the week I had the privilege of joining the other speakers on a dinner cruise on Sydney harbour. The cruise was marvelous and the only complaint I could possibly make was that it ended at 11pm and I would have liked another hour on the harbour. However, I think making that complaint would be a little churlish so I withdraw it.

Seven team, you have done a wonderful job so far. Cheers!

Posted at: 23:58 | Category: LCA07 | Permalink