The registration started at about 9. On the side people got to the real business, exchanging GPG keys. Thierry Laronde opened the conference opened at Edward rushed to set up a webcam so that people could watch each other also virtually if meeting in person would feel too odd. If you don't have time to exchange keys with everyone in the conference you can continue it in the restaurant.
Bordeaux offers a nice variety of affordable dining places. On the first night we went to a restaurant serving Swiss specialities. Martin Michlmayr gave a presentation about quality assurance in the Debian project which induced a lively discussion.
Most packages are maintained by people that really care about them and achieve very high quality but at times somebody loses interest or system breaks due to unexpected conflicts. As Debian grows the testing procedures and ways to treat problems have to become more systematic - without destroying the innovation and spirit of course. Martin's slides. System administrators in charge of dozens of computers will warmly welcome Thomas Lange 's latest achievement.
The Fully Automatic Installation provides a flexible method of installing Debian without any manual intervention. Besides clusters with identical nodes FAI is suitable for more diverse environments thanks to it's class structure of configuration files. Thomas's slides. The OpenBSD project has undertaken a huge and tedious task of auditing the code of kernel code and certain popular server programs. Their approach is to have a small system where security goes ahead end user convenience in the cases these are in conflict.
Debian is happy to welcome new software and this is not likely to change so the solution would be to propose a certain set of packages considered secure along with the OpenBSD kernel. Andreas's slides. After lunch the Debian developers and a few hangarounds like me gathered in the hall for a group photo. We joked about the stand not being stable and weird architecture as well but the resulting photo was pretty nice.
