Raphaël Hertzog
Debian developer. Author.
Member of the Debian QA team. Maintainer of Distro Tracker (tracker.debian.org).
Member of the Debian LTS team. Organizing the LTS funding through Freexian.
Member of the Debian Derivatives team as representative of Kali Linux.
Accepted Talks:
With Debian LTS, we are now offering something that users expected for a long time and we are keeping users that we lost to Ubuntu in the past. Debian LTS would not exist without the work of paid contributors and the financial support of its sponsors.
Can we learn what we got right in Debian LTS and try to see how we could use money to improve other parts of Debian? In this BoF, we will make some propositions and expect the audience to react to them, highlighting what is good and what is problematic, making suggestions on how to fix/improve the propositions. The Debian Project Leader is a central role in the way Debian spends his money. He will thus take an active role in this discussion.
Kali Linux is a Debian derivative since 2012, it is maintained by Offensive Security and dedicated to penetration testing.
Initially it was based on Debian Stable (Wheezy then Jessie) but since late 2015, it now tracks Debian Testing with its daily changes. There are upsides and downsides to this and I'll try to present those as well as the infrastructure that we have setup to run Kali Linux (repositories, build daemons, jenkins checks, etc.).
This talk is interesting for other Debian derivatives that want to learn from Kali's experience, but it's also interesting for the Debian community to learn of the problems that derivatives are facing when they try to track Debian Testing.
July 2014 was the first month where Freexian used the money collected from many sponsors to pay Debian contributors to provide security updates for Debian 6. The Debian LTS project is now 2 years old: this talk is a restrospective of how we got started, a presentation of how we work today and of our plans for the future.
This talk will also serve as an introduction to a BoF discussing the usage of (Debian) money to fund Debian projects. The Debian LTS project, despite its public reliance on sponsorship, and the fact that it is paying Debian contributors, has been well accepted in the Debian community. The talk will thus cover extensively the precautions taken when it comes to the handling of the money.