Travels with Mr. Brown

My return from Debconf12 has been tinged with a little wistfulness, I had a great time but wish I could have spent a little more time there to justify the seventeen hours travel each way. I took a lot of pictures which gave me a good record of my trip.

The talks, BOF and discussions were, as usual, very useful. The release team explaining what needed to be done for Wheezy was both informative and amusing.

The numerous BOF from Steve Mcintyre were a great source of discussion and ideas and appear to have generated progress on some quite contentious issues.

I especially enjoyed the Sylvestre Ledru talk on building the archive with clang and how this might be another useful tool in finding bugs.

Hideki Yamane gave a really useful talk "Let's shrink Debian package archive!" He gave a practical explanation on how Debian could benefit from using xz compression, where it is not appropriate and had a selection of real numbers to help the discussion. Given this was Hideki first talk at a Debconf I must congratulate him on doing an excellent job.

There were many other talks which I have not singled out here but that says nothing about their quality or usefulness, more about why I should blog immediately after an event and not leave it a week. Though the video team have managed to capture many of the talks so you can go and watch them too.

The event was well organised and the accommodation was pleasant, if a little crowded with three to a room. The hotel had a pool which was the centre for evening activities most days, though I did miss Neil McGovern (one of my room mates) unintentionally swimming in his kilt.

The lunch and dinner catering was outdoors which was novel. The food was generally good if a little limited for those of us with less straightforward dietary requirements.

Some of us did venture out to have dinner at the continental hotel on one evening for a change of scene.

There was of course the obligatory conference meal by the lakeside and an awesome day trip where I saw a mangrove swamp and (fortunately) no salt water crocodiles.

All in all I had a fabulous and productive time. I would like to thank Collabora for travel sponsorship to the event and to Neil who was a great travelling companion.