Joachim Breitner's Homepage

I’m writing this blog post on the plane from Portland towards Europe (which I now can!), using the remaining battery live after having watched one of the DebConf talks that I missed. (It was the systemd talk, which was good and interesting, but maybe I should have watched one of the power management talks, as my battery is running down faster than it should be, I believe.)

I mostly enjoyed this year’s DebConf. I must admit that I did not come very prepared: I had neither something urgent to hack on, nor important things to discuss with the other attendees, so in a way I had a slow start. I also felt a bit out of touch with the project, both personally and technically: In previous DebConfs, I had more interest in many different corners of the project, and also came with more naive enthusiasm. After more than 10 years in the project, I see a few things more realistic and also more relaxed, and don’t react on “Wouldn’t it be cool to have crazy idea” very easily any more. And then I mostly focus on Haskell packaging (and related tooling, which sometimes is also relevant and useful to others) these days, which is not very interesting to most others.

But in the end I did get to do some useful hacking, heard a few interesting talks and even got a bit excited: I created a new tool to schedule binNMUs for Haskell packages which is quite generic (configured by just a regular expression), so that it can and will be used by the OCaml team as well, and who knows who else will start using hash-based virtual ABI packages in the future... It runs via a cron job on people.debian.org to produce output for Haskell and for OCaml, based on data pulled via HTTP. If you are a Debian developer and want up-to-date results, log into wuiet.debian.org and run ~nomeata/binNMUs --sql; it then uses the projectb and wanna-build databases directly. Thanks to the ftp team for opening up incoming.debian.org, by the way!

Unsurprisingly, I also held a talk on Haskell and Debian (slides available). I talked a bit too long and we had too little time for discussion, but in any case not all discussion would have fitted in 45 minutes. The question of which packages from Hackage should be added to Debian and which not is still undecided (which means we carry on packaging what we happen to want in Debian for whatever reason). I guess the better our tooling gets (see the next section), the more easily we can support more and more packages.

I am quite excited by and supportive of Enrico’s agenda to remove boilerplate data from the debian/ directories and relying on autodebianization tools. We have such a tool for Haskell package, cabal-debian, but it is unofficial, i.e. neither created by us nor fully endorsed. I want to change that, so I got in touch with the upstream maintainer and we want to get it into shape for producing perfect Debian packages, if the upstream provided meta data is perfect. I’d like to see the Debian Haskell Group to follows Enrico’s plan to its extreme conclusion, and this way drive innovation in Debian in general. We’ll see how that goes.

Besides all the technical program I enjoyed the obligatory games of Mao and Werewolves. I also got to dance! On Saturday night, I found a small but welcoming Swing-In-The-Park event where I could dance a few steps of Lindy Hop. And on Tuesday night, Vagrant Cascadian took us (well, three of us) to a blues dancing night, which I greatly enjoyed: The style was so improvisation-friendly that despite having missed the introduction and never having danced Blues before I could jump right in. And in contrast to social dances in Germany, where it is often announced that the girls are also invited to ask the boys, but then it is still mostly the boys who have to ask, here I took only half a minute of standing at the side until I got asked to dance. In retrospect I should have skipped the HP reception and went there directly...

I’m not heading home at the moment, but will travel directly to Göteborg to attend ICFP 2014. I hope the (usually worse) west-to-east jet lag will not prevent me from enjoying that as much as I could.