Short report from FOSDEM

[Fred Kiefer]

As some of you could not make it to the FOSDEM, I think that those who
did should report to this mailing list about the experience. Somebody
may be able to distill a Wiki entry from these mails.

Friday evening:
The chosen hotel turned out to be sub standard.
At 9pm only Nikolaus Schaller and me are in the breakfast room, instead
of starting a GNUstep hacking session we install the newest QuantumStep
in my Zaurus and I am quite impressed about the progress that Nikolaus
has made and even more by the amount of hardware he brought along.
Half an hour later two French hackers show up, the name were Daniel and
Mathew if I remember correctly. They hadn't eaten so they went to find
something and come back later, but they never showed up again. Surely
they are from the Etoile group, we regularly loose them :-)

At about 11pm Gerold and Axel Becker show up. I start to install GNUstep
from SVN on one of Nikolaus micro PCs. On the next day it turns out that
the rest was in a hotel, less than 500 meters away. We really need to
work on our coordination.

Saturday:
I miss out on all the FOSDEM talks, but have some very nice chats at the
GNUstep stall.
I met Pirmin Braun from seat-1 (www.seat-1.de, in German, sorry). This
company has a GNUstep web based application IntarS,
a very promising ERP solution. They may need some support in GUI
programming later, we will stay in contact.

Talked to Fabien Vallon about his planed NSGradient and NSShadow
implementation. The former should be rather easy to do with cairo and
for the later he will have to look at groups in cairo and implement a
lot himself. What about the other backends?

Had a short chat with a guy from the Foresight Linux group blocking
access to our stall for some time. Turns out they are using a very
promising packaging module called Conary
(http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary), there is a FOSDEM lightning talk on
it on Sunday. The guy claims that this is the future of packaging and
most likely he is right, there must be something better then current
package managers.

For now we will need something better and in steps Will Stephenson from
Novell/Suse. His aim is to get clean packages for Oolite
(http://oolite-linux.berlios.de/). This is a computer game that goes
back to BBC Elite and it is already in our Wiki
(http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Oolite.app).
To get packages for Oolite Will wants to package up GNUstep itself.
Working for Suse he is quite familiar with the Suse build service
(https://build.opensuse.org/) and has set up initial project for the
GNUstep parts he needs for his toy project. We agreed that I will
register myself at that web site and have a look. If I like what I find,
I may take over his GNUstep packaging projects. The benefit will be that
this not only offers packages for Suse, but for a lot of other
distributions as well. As I understand it, this works mostly by
supplying one description file. We will see what comes from this.

Most of the rest of the day I was hacking with Richard trying to solve a
problem I have with KeyValueBindings. We failed and I will have to
extract that code to give him a simple example to work on.

In the evening we all (Richard, Nicola, Gerold, Helge, Lars, Nikolaus,
Valentino, Axel and me) went out to have diner together. We found a very
nice Thai restaurant near Sanct Boniface. On the way there we met
Nicolas Roard, who had just arrived.

I did not go to FOSDEM on Sunday, so somebody else will have to report
from there. Later that day I met Nicola and Lars at the train station,
so I know that Nicola worked hard on getting Renaissance to work with
newer Apple releases. This is because somebody from OpenOffice wants to
use Renaissance as the basis for a native OO release on MacOSX. Nicolca
will have to provide more details himself.

Cheers,
Fred