Opening Day Debconf8, Argentina
After 24hours of travel I finally arrived yesterday afternoon at the hotel here in lovely Mar Del Plata, Argentina. I'll have to admit that I'm still confused by this whole Winter-in-the-Southern-Hemisphere thing with the cooler temps and sun setting early.
The Mar del Plata boardwalk. The low building on the far right is the Casino.
The Conference Kick-off
Team Argentina - our hosts.
A couple of hours ago the conference kicked off with an introduction from our local hosts who have been busting their butts over the last year to get ready for this week.
After that was the introductory keynote from the current Debian Project Leader (DPL), Steve McIntyre. This debconf is special since it marks the 15th anniversary of the starting of the Debian project.
My notes from Steve's talk
- It was 15 years ago that Ian Murdock sent out an email announcing the starting of Debian
- There have been 11 project leaders since then, 10 releases
- The releases, since the Toy Story theme was adopted, are in order: Buzz, Rex, Bo, Hamm, Slink, Potato, Woody, Sarge, Etch and soon, Lenny.
- The stats
- There are 24,000 binary packages in Lenny (about 10k source packages)
- 1000+ registered Debian developers
- Millions of users (?)
- The Good
- Huge dedicated developer community
- Huge number of packages
- Widest architecture support of any distro
- The Bad
- History of struggling to release
- Flamewars
- People often not willing to work together
- PR & artwork
- Why does Debian Matter
- Often described as the most important distro
- Massive number of users
- Free and Open
- The Challenges going forward: Need to be able to scale
The Mar del Plata coatsline from the air.
The Mar del Plata International Airport (I wonder if I could have flow here directly from Austin?)
The fishing club as the sun starts to go down.
I spent some time poking around the downtown area after I got in.
Pau for now...
