(forw) Re: Debian Meeting tomorrow: Ian Jackson, Dale Sheetz, LinuxWorld

[Joey Hess]

David Welton wrote:
> Mph.. so, I wasn't able to stop by:-( Anyone care to recap any of the
> more interesting points?  How long will Dale be around - any plans for
> other meetings?

I know Dale and Ian are going to be in town through monday, but I don't know
how much longer and I don't have any plans to do anything more. If you want
to try to get in touch with them you probably could via Dan Quinlan.

Meeting summary... all right. I thought it was all going to fall apart at
the last minute, but it turned out just fine. Dale's flight was canceled and
he was an hour late. Ian was in the Coffeenet from 8:30 on though, and soon
after I arrived at 9:30, people just started pouring in. I think we had
about 17 people there for the meeting. Rick Moen saved the day by driving to
the airport to collect Dale so Ian could stay in the Coffeenet and enjoy his
wine and talk with us. The Coffeenet staff was very helpful as well, when it
closed at 11 they let us stay on right through their clean-up and some of us
didn't leave until 2 am.

A lot of what we talked about touches on the LSB, since that's why Ian and
Dale are in town. Of course the contriversial issue there is which package
format should be used, and Ian is suprisingly in favor of allowing rpm
format files to be the LSB standard, and he intends to modify dpkg so it can
use rpm files in comatibility mode. I know a lot of the issues involved in
that from working on alien and I bounced some of the problems with it off
him and it looks like he can handle them and at the same time keep the .deb
package format alive and well. Ian's a pretty impressive guy. :-)

We talked about loads of other stuff. Lots of interesting historical tidbits
from Ian. Of course we had to have an argument about copyright, this is
debian after all, but we veered into organic farming too.. :-) Dale showed
us his Debian book, it's an interesting feeling to see debian presented in a
slick commercial way on the cover of a book.

I met a lot of the people who are going to be at the LinuxWorld booth,
thanks for coming on such a wet night on short notice and I hope you had as
good a time as I did.

-- 
see shy jo