Hello,
Am Dienstag, 9. Juni 2015 schrieb Henne Vogelsang:
On 08.06.2015 19:52, Robert Schweikert wrote:
<snip>
Given that the published videos get a good number of viewing I'd also say that the content is interesting to people.
Obviously not interesting enough for an on-site visit which is our 'problem'.
Maybe the problem is that we don't have videos of the hallway track ;-) The talks are interesting, no doubt, but the real value of a conference is meeting people in person - either just to see the face behind the mail address, or to discuss and solve technical problems. That's nothing you can do over video, and it's also something that can't be measured in money.
oSC by the openSUSE Community for the openSUSE community
vs.
oSC by the openSUSE Community for the FOSS community
Maybe we need something between those two extremes.
But that would also mean that you have to make the event interesting to the FOSS community. I doubt that we can pull this off (all general FOSS events except FOSDEM struggle to attract people) and I still fail to see the benefit for us.
Cross-distro topics might be interesting and bring benefit for all involved distros.
Just as an example, Debian is currently working on getting reproducable builds [1] - something we have solved with OBS since some years, so they could probably benefit from some openSUSE input. OTOH, they came up with some interesting ideas like setting the timestamps to the last changelog entry[2] with the goal to make the resulting package exactly the same binary (for comparison: our build-compare is a bit more fuzzy and ignores timestamps and some other details).
To sum this up - both can learn from each other, and both can end up with something better than before. And even if it doesn't happen this way, personal contact is worth a lot and can make our life easier - for example by sharing patches between package maintainers of several distros or looking at and helping with each other's bugreports.
A good start might be to visit "foreign" conferences. Speaking of that...
DebConf will be in Heidelberg, Germany this year [3], and I'll be there at least on some days. The primary reason is to meet some upstream AppArmor developers, but I'm also looking forward to learn some things about how Debian does $whatever.
In case someone wants to give a talk at DebConf - the CfP is open until June 15 (yes, that means only 5 days left!). Given what Debian has to build their packages (and especially what they do _not_ have), I have a feeling that an OBS talk would be interesting ;-)
Regards,
Christian Boltz
PS: no worries - I'm not going to switch to Debian ;-)
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
[2] personally, I'd take the timestamp of the newest source file to cover cases without a changelog entry, but that's a technical detail
[3] http://debconf15.debconf.org/