OK, I've gotten myself roped into doing some talks for the BSP next Saturday (must remember to duck *then* dodge next time <g>). The problem is, there's a lot of different stuff which *could* be useful, but there's only a limited amount of time for me (and others <g>) to talk.
So, in the spirit of openness, I thought I'd put it open to people to suggest what they wanted to hear. From the list below, select out the talks which you would go and listen to if they were on (and I'll be holding you to that <g>). I'll do the talks that are most popular, so on down the line until people get sick of listening to me. Popularity will also determine which ones I do slides for first. As an aside, if anyone wants to take on any of these topics, I'd be more than happy to let them go. Probably better if people *don't* have to listen to my voice all day. TOPICS: * Playing with the Debian BTS (30 min). What it is, what it does, and how to do everything from submitting bugs, manipulating bugs, and the many ways of closing bug reports. If there's enough time, I'll go through some of the other BTS-associated things (like the PTS). * Methods of package building (30 min). From the basic debian/rules binary, to dpkg-buildpackage, debuild, and pbuilder. If I've worked it out by then, also, permanent chroots. * The Process of Packaging (30 min). How does a random collection of files get turned into a Debian package? What all the files in a debian/ directory are, what they do, and why they do it. Will cover both pure hand-coded build scripts, as well as more automated methods (debhelper and dpatch, most likely - maybe cdbs if I've looked at it by then). * Packaging and Building (1 hour). An amalgum of the above two talks, with all the interdependencies between the two parts followed. Please note that I'll likely only do one or the other - it all depends on whether people want to be bored in short blocks or in one large chunk. <g> * Alex Comfort's Joy of Debconf (30 min). What is it, how it works, and why it's so cool for your packages. With special emphasis on Debconf abuse and how to avoid it. * New Maintainership and Sponsorship (30 min). Probably should be titled "everything you wanted to know about becoming a DD but were afraid to ask". Mostly my ramblings on what I think it means to go through NM, and how mentoring, sponsorship, and other similar "new DD" type things work from my perspective. * Basic debugging with GDB and friends (30 min - 1 hour, depending on how much I cover - pick your depth!). Although a lot of software these days is written in higher level scripting languages, with their own debugging infrastructure, being able to get into GDB and get a stack trace or similar is quite useful. Also handy is memory leak checking and bounds checking with ccmalloc and electric fence. Note: this will not be an in-depth investigation of how to use GDB. Pretty much it'll follow what I wrote some time ago at http://ieee.uow.edu.au/~mjp16/prog/debugging - but it'll have live, interactive screwups for extra entertainment. <g> * Version Control Is Your Friend (30 min). Why you should learn a version control system, and the basics (*very* basics) of using CVS. While the world seems to be moving to subversion, CVS is still very widely used, and the basic concepts I'll be showing should transfer fairly easily across to other version control systems. If people could let me know their votes by Wednesday sometime, I'll spend some of Thursday and Friday getting notes put together for whatever talks are decided on. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
