Aigarius Blog

Finally I took my time and uploaded all my good Debconf7 photos to Flickr, 193 photos in total. Most interestingly I have created a much improved version of the group photo.

Please do note that these photos are under Creative Commons Attribution licence, so please do give credit where it is due. And I also would love if you would send me an email telling where you have used my photos of the event.

Links to other photos (and mugshots) can be found via the corresponding wiki page.

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Tokkee and I are doing the mugshots this year and we need your cooperation. Mugshots are a great way for people to link the name to a face and remember that link even after several years. Liw did this as his project last year and it was great success - many people have now a better way to link a persons IRC nickname to their face which in turn reduces the tension in communication as you can very easily know who is the person you are speaking to.
There are people who avoid the mugshots and i wanted to ask them to reconsider. Mugshots is not a beauty pageant - in Debian people are judged by their merits. Mugshots are useful tools in future on-line communications, tools that could reduce the aggressiveness and flammability in the Debian IRC and mailing lists.
It is not the holy grail, but it helps. So I ask every participant of Debconf - help us make this mugshot gallery complete by contributing your own picture. And thank you very much to the many people that already did.
If you want to have your mugshot taken then listen out to when mugshot sessions are taking place - we take all mugshots in front of the cafeteria door, usually during the food times, so you have easy time finding me and tokkee there.

UPDATE: First 120 mugshots are uploaded here. Next mugshot shooting session will be tomorrow - on the 18th of June, during scheduled lunch and dinner.

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My blog server has been down ever since I left off to Edinburgh for the 7th Debian conference. Since then I have been busy taking photos of everything and everyone here AND I am not alone in that. Enjoy!

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Debconf is coming. And I fully agree with Amaya regarding the much needed battery recharge that brings to people (and me in particular.
And to the contrary to the information two posts ago, thanks to getting an unexpected side income from the nice folks of FFII, I did manage to buy myself a Canon 400D instead of my old camera that was stolen from me recently. Unfortunately, I do not earn well enough to also buy a good lens, so I will have to document this Debconf with the kit lens :P. If you want something better, then I beg you to lend me some better Canon (EF or EF-S) lens for the time of the Debconf. Canon EF 17-40 f/4 L (like the one that I took the last years group photos) would really be great!
This year I am thinking of doing both the group photo and the mugshots. Any other ideas for the paparazzi?

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After last post about a FHS amendment to address the structure of user’s home folders, I received a lot of comments and there is one very significant thing that can be changed in the proposal - instead of having $HOME/{.data|.cache|.config}/appname structure, to change that to a mandatory $HOME/.library/appname/{cache|config|…} . This version still has all the benefits of the first solution (configuration for an application can be easily identified and erase, and all cache can easily be excluded from backups using “$HOME/.library/*/cache” regexp) and also has additional benefits, main of which is the ability to later introduce the concept of user installed packages. The idea is that it would be possible to support having /bin, /lib and /share subdirectories in these application directories thus making an ability for the whole application to e packed in a single directory and allowing the application to be installed simply by unpacking this directory. I admit that much of this is glanced over from MacOS X world, but I do not think that it diminishes the idea itself.
Some problems appear there - support of these distributed bin folders, support of separate lib folders, handling of application plugins, handling of dependencies, handling of the application menu, upgrading notifications for the user software vs. system software. But nothing there that can not be solved. I feel that this can bring together FHS and LSB by providing something of an API for software being installed by users. Having no registry of the software in this solution allows for some interesting things, for example having multiple versions of one program just by renaming the application folder.
A lot of specification work is required here, therefore I proposed a workshop on this topic in Debconf7. I hope to have something that everyone can agree on and maybe even some code by then, so that after Debconf7 there can be a formal policy amendment proposal.

So there are two questions:

1. Is there something better in $HOME/.cache/appname vs. $HOME/.library/appname/cache ? Any other trade-offs that I have forgot?
2. What do you think about the further idea of users having the ability to install software in their home folders or remove such software in a very simple fashion?

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