Re: Short report from FOSDEM

[Nicolas Roard]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 2:28 PM, Fred Kiefer <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

Indeed, more than sub standard. So that everybody remembers it, It's
the Sun Hotel, 38 rue du Berger, 1050 brussels. Do not go there.
Really. One of the worst hotel experience I had in Brussels.

>  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.

Thanks very much for this interesting report ! Sadly I missed most of
fosdem the sunday, as I only arrived around 15:40 (!).
I barely had time to talk with the remaining people, then everybody
was leaving and we packed the stand.. as far as I could see, having a
looping video showing a demo was a great idea, but the big hits were
apparently the 'gadgets' running gnustep brought by helge and nikolaus
(an openmoko device and a toshiba libretto), which attracted many
people :)
I took a couple of pictures of the booth, I'll post them soon.

I missed most of it, but it looked that it was a great edition...
hopefully next year will be even more interesting.

Also, I have to remind people that there is a gnustep/etoile coding
party organized over easter at Swansea University in Wales (UK), and
people are more than welcome !

-- 
Nicolas Roard
"Java, the best argument for Smalltalk since C++ " -- Frank Winkler