Last week-end, I attended the mini-DebConf organized at EPITA (near Paris) by the French Debian association and sponsored by Logilab.

The event was a great success, with a rather large number of attendees, including people coming from abroad such as Debian kernel maintainers Ben Hutchings and Maximilian Attems, who talked about their work with Linux.

Among the other speakers were Loïc Dachary about OpenStack and its packaging in Debian, and Josselin Mouette about his work deploying Debian/GNOME desktops in a large enterprise environment at EDF R&D.

On my part I gave a talk on Saturday about Debian's release team, and the current state of the wheezy (to-be Debian 7.0) release.

On Sunday I presented together with Vladimir Daric the work we did to migrate a computation cluster from Red Hat to Debian. Attendees had quite a few questions about our use of ZFS on Linux for storage, and salt for configuration management and deployment.

Slides for the talks are available on the mini-DebConf web page (wheezy state, migration to debian cluster also viewable on slideshare), and videos will soon be on http://video.debian.net/.

Now looking forward to next summer's DebConf13 in Switzerland, and hopefully next year's edition of the Paris event.

From June 24th to June 26th, the European Synchrotron organises a workshop centered around Debian. On Monday, a number of talks about the use of Debian in scientific facilities will be featured. On Sunday and Tuesday, members of the Debian Science group will meet for a sprint focusing on the upcoming Debian 7.0 release.

Among the speakers will be Stefano Zacchiroli, the current Debian project leader. Logilab will be present with Nicolas Chauvat at Monday's conference, and Julien Cristau at both the sprint and the conference.

At the sprint we'll be discussing packaging of scientific libraries such as blas or MPI implementations, and working on polishing other scientific packages, such as python-related ones (including Salome on which we are currently working).

Logilab will be present at the upcoming Debian BSP in Paris this week-end. This event will focus on fixing as many "release critical" bugs as possible, to help with the preparation of the upcoming Debian 7.0 "wheezy" release. It will also provide an opportunity to introduce newcomers to the processes of Debian development and bug fixing, as well as provide an opportunity for contributors in various areas of the project to interact "in real life".

The current stable release, Debian 6.0 "squeeze", came out in February 2011. The development of "wheezy" is scheduled to freeze in June 2012, for an eventual release later this year.

Among the things we hope to work on during this BSP, the latest HDF5 release (1.8.8) includes API and packaging changes that require some changes in dependent packages. With the number of scientific packages relying on HDF5, this is a pretty big change, as tracked in this Debian bug.