This would be a big longish post.
I have been a wordpress.com user for a long time and before that blog post for a long long time. Sometime back on few blog posts I began to notice that on planet.debian.org the pictures were not appearing. I asked the planet maintainers what was going on. They in turn shared with me a list of filters that they were using as a default. While I’m not at liberty to share any of the filters, it did become clear from reading of the regular expressions of the filters and conversations with the planet maintainers that wordpress.com was at fault and not Planet.debian. I tried to see if there was anything as a content producer I could do but apparently nothing. The only settings for media or even for general has no settings through which I could stop tracking.
Sharing a screenshot below –
Sp while there’s nothing I can do atm, I can share about the Debian event that we did in reserved-bit about couple of months ago. Before I start, here’s a small brief about reserved bit, it’s a makerspace right next to where all the big IT companies are and where they come to pass the time after work. It’s on top of a mall.
Reserved-bit is run jointly by Siddhesh and Nisha Poyarekar husband-wife duo. Siddhesh was working with Redhat and now does his own thing. Works with Linaro and is a glibc maintainer and I read somewhere that he was even a releaser of couple of glibc releases (Update = actually 2.25 and 2.26 of glibc which is wow and also a big responsibility.) Pune is to India what Detroit was to the States. We have number of automobile companies and siddesh did share he was working on the glibc variants for the automobile, embedded market.
Nisha on the other hand is more on the maker side of the things, his better half and I believe she knows quite a bit of Aurdino. I believe there was a workshop yesterday on aurdino but due to time and personal constraints was not able to attend it or would have got more to share. She is the one who is looking at the day-to-day operations of maker-bit and Siddhesh chips in as and when he can.
Because of the image issue, I had been dragging my feet to post about the event for more than couple of months now. I do have access of a debconf gallery instance but was not comfortable for this. If I do attend a debconf then probably that would be the place for that.
Anyways, about 3 months back Gaurav shared an e-mail on the local LUG mailing list . We were trying to get the college where the LUG meets as it is one of the central parts of the city but then due to scheduling changes it was decided to be held at reserved-bit. I had not talked with Praveen for some time but had an inkling that he might be bringing one of the big packages which has a lot of dependencies on them which I shared in an email . As can be seen, I also shared the immense list that Paul always has and as can be seen free software is just growing leaps and bounds, what we are missing are more packagers and maintainers.
I also thought that it is possible that somebody might want to install debian and hence shared about that as well.
As I wasn’t feeling strong enough, I decided to forgo taking the lappy along. Fortunately, a friend arrived and we were together able to reach the venue on time. We probably missed about 10 minutes which probably was the introduction session a bit.
Image – courtesy Gaurav Sitlani
Praveen is in middle, somewhat like me with the beard, and white t-shirt.
I had mentally prepared myself for newbie questions but refreshingly, even though there were lot of amateurs, most of them had used Debian for sometime. So instead of talking about why we need to have Debian as a choice or why X disto is better than Y we had more pointed topical questions. There were questions about privacy as well where Debian is strong and looking to set the bar even higher. I came to know much later than Kali people are interested in porting most of their packages and maintain it in main, more eyes to see the code, a larger superset of people would use the work they do than those who would only use kali and in time higher quality of packages which is win-win to all the people concerned.
As I had suspected Praveen shared two huge lists of potentials software that needs to be packaged. Before starting he took some of the introductory part of the npm2deb tutorial. I had played with build programs before but npm2deb seemed a bit more automated than others, specifically with the way it picks up the metadata about software to be packaged. I do and did realize that npm2deb is for specific bits only and probably that is the reason that it could be a bit more automated than something like makefile, cmake, premake but then the latter are more generic in nature, they are not tied to a specific platform or way of doing things.
He showed a demo of npm2deb, the resultant deb package, ran lintian on top of it . He did share the whole list of software that needs to be packaged in order to see npm come into Debian. He and Shruti also did a crowdfunding for it sometime back.
I am not sure how many people noticed but from what I recollect both nodejs and npm came around June/July 2017 in Debian. While I don’t know it seemed Praveen and Shruti did the boring yet hard work to bring both the biggish packages into Debian. There may be some people involved as well which I might not know about but that is unintentional. If anybody knows any better feel free to correct me and will update it here as well.
Then after a while Raju shared the work he has been doing with Hamara but not in great detail as still lot of work is yet to be done. There were questions about rolling release and how often people update packages, while both Praveen and Raju pointed out that they did monthly updates, I am more of a weekly offender. I usually use debdelta to update packages and its far much easier to track and have the package diffs cheaply without affecting the bandwidth too much.
I wanted to share about adequate as I think it’s one of the better tools but as it has been orphaned and nobody has stepped up, it seems it will die a death after sometime. What a waste of a useful tool.
What we hadn’t prepared for that somebody had actually wanted to install Debian on their laptop then and there. I just had the netinstall usb stick by chance but the person who wanted to install debian had not done the preparatory work which needs to be done before setting up Debian. We had to send couple of people to get a spare external hdd which took time, copying the person’s data and then formatting that partition, sharing the different ways that Debian could be installed onto the system. There was a bit of bike-shedding there as there are just too many ways. I am personally towards have a separate / , /boot (part of it I am still unable to resolve under the whole Windows 10 nightmare, /home, /logs and swap. There was also a bit of discussion about swap as the older model of 1:1 memory doesn’t hold much water in the 8 GB RAM+ scenario.
By the time the external hdd came, we were able to download a CD .iso and show a minimal desktop installation. We had discussions about the various window managers and desktop environments, the difference and the similarities. IIRC, CD 1 has just LXDE as none of the other desktop environments can fit on CD1. I also shared about my South African Debconf experience as well the whole year-long preparation it takes to organize Debconf. IIRC, I *think* I shared having a conference like that costs north of USD 100,000 (it costed that much for South Africa, beautiful country) – the Canadian one might have costed more and the Taiwan one happening coming July would cost the same even though accommodation is free. I did share that we had something like 300+ people for the conference, the Germany one the year before had 500 so for any Indian bid we would have to grow up a whole lot more before we think of getting anywhere of hosting a debconf in India.
There was interest from people to contribute to Debian but this is where it gets a bit foggy, while some of the students want/ed to contribute they were not clear as to where they could contribute. I think we shared with them the lists, shared/showed them IRC/Matrix and sort of left them to their own devices. I do think we did mention #debian-welcome and #debian-mentors at possible points of contact. As all of us are busy with our lives, work etc. it does become hard to tell/advise people. Over the years we have realized that its much better to just share the starting info. and let them find if there is something that interests them.
There was also discussion about different operating systems and how the work culture and things differed from the debian perspective. For e.g. I shared how we have borrowed quite a bit of security software from the BSD stable and some plausible reasons of where BSD has made it big and where it sort of failed. The same was dissected for other operating systems too who are in the free software space and quite a few students realized it’s a big universe out there. We shared about devuan and how a group of people who didn’t like systemd did their own thing but at the same they realized the amount of time it takes to maintain a distro. In many a ways, it is a miracle that Debian is able to be independent and have its own morals and compasses. We also shared bits of the Debian constitution and Manifesto but not too much otherwise it would have become too preachy.
Coming towards the end, it gives me quite a bit of pleasure to share that Debian would be taking part in Outreachy and GSOC at the same time. While the projects seem to be different, I do have some personal favorites. The most exciting to me as a user are –
1. Wizard/GUI helping students/interns apply and get started – While they have narrow-cased it, it should help almost everybody who has to get over the learning curve to make her/is contribution to Debian. Having all the tools configured and ready to work would make the job of on boarding on to Debian a whole lot easier.
2. Firefox and Thunderbird plugins for free software habits – It’s always a good idea to start of with privacy tools, it would make the journey of free software much easier and enjoyable.
3. Android SDK Tools in Debian – This I think would be a multi-year project for as long as Android is there as a competitor in the mobile space. Especially for Pune students doing work with Android might lead to upstream work with Linaro who have been working with companies and various stake-holders to have more homogeneity to a kernel which would make it more secure, more maintainable in the short and long run.
4. Open Agriculture Food Computer – This probably would be a bit difficult but for colleges like COEP who have CNC lathes and 3-d printer and a benefactor in Sharad Pawar and other people who are interested in Agriculture, Nitin Gadkari . The TED link shared and reproduced below does give some idea. Vandana Shiva, who has been a cultural force and has a seed bank so we have culture, recipes and food for generations would be pretty much appropriate for the problems we face. It actually ties in with another ted talk which is also a global concern, the shortage of water and recycling of water.
This again from what I could assess with my almost non-existent agricultural skills, would be multi-year project as the science and understanding of it are in early stages. People from agriculture, IT, Atmospheric Science etc. all would have a role in a project like this. The interesting part of it is that from what has been shared, it seems there are lots that can be done in that arena.
Lastly, I would like some of the more privacy consciously people to weigh in on 1322748. I have used all the addons which have been mentioned on the bugzilla one time or the other and am stymied as my web experience is poorer as I cannot know who to trust and who to not without the info. about what ciphers the webmasters are using. Public pressure can only work when that info. is available.
I am sure I missed a lot, but that’s all I could cover. If people have some more ideas or inputs, feel free to suggest in the comments and I will see if I can incorporate them in the blog post if need be.
Experiences in the community 
