I’m just back from DebConf18, which was held in Hsinchu, Taiwan. I went without any real concrete plans about what I wanted to work on - I had some options if I found myself at a loose end, but no preconceptions about what would pan out. In the end I felt I had a very productive conference and I did bits on all of the following:

  • Worked on trying to fix my corrupted Lenovo Ideacentre Stick 300 BIOS (testing of current attempt has been waiting until I’m back home and have access to the device again, so hopefully within the next few days)
  • NMUed sdcc to fix FTBFS with GCC 8
  • Prepared Pulseview upload to fix FTBFS with GCC 8, upload stalled on libsigc++2.0 (Bug#897895)
  • Caught up with Gunnar re keyring stuff
  • Convinced John Sullivan to come and help out keyring-maint
  • New Member / Front Desk conversations
  • Worked on gcc toolchain packages for ESP8266 (xtensa-lx106) (Bug#868895). Not sure if these are useful enough to others to upload or not, but so far I’ve moved from 4.8.5 to 7.3 and things seem happy.
  • Worked on porting latest newlib to xtensa with help from Keith Packard (in particular his nano variant with much smaller stdio code)
  • Helped present the state of Debian + the GDPR
  • Sat on the New Members BoF panel
  • Went to a whole bunch of interesting talks + BoFs.
  • Put faces to a number of names, as well as doing the usual catchup with the familiar faces.

I managed to catch the DebConf bug towards the end of the conference, which was unfortunate - I had been eating the venue food at the start of the week and it would have been nice to explore the options in Hsinchu itself for dinner, but a dodgy tummy makes that an unwise idea. Thanks to Stuart Prescott I squeezed in a short daytrip to Taipei yesterday as my flight was in the evening and I was going to have to miss all the closing sessions anyway. So at least I didn’t completely avoid seeing some of Taiwan when I was there.

As usual thanks to all the organisers for their hard work, and looking forward to DebConf19 in Curitiba, Brazil!