The conference is the week after next, and I will be presenting twice: once on the Monday and once on the Friday. On Monday in the Distro Summit miniconf I am speaking on the somewhat opaque topic of “Integrating domain-specific package managers into distribution package management systems”. That’s /System/Aliens, or trying to tie systems like CPAN, RubyGems, LuaRocks, and an ever-increasing number of others into the distribution package manager in order to avoid user conflicts and get automatic access to the full repository of their software. I seem to be just about the only speaker there who isn’t from Debian, so I’m not sure how that’s going to go down. My talk is at 13.30 in Civic Suite 3 inside the Town Hall.
In the main conference on Friday, in the very last presentation slot, I will be speaking on “An updated directory hierarchy for Unix”. That’s a broader GoboLinux paper where I will talk about the hierarchy we’ve chosen and discuss a little of the history behind the standard structure, particularly why we feel it’s ok to break with it. I’ll be talking about the advantages the new structure brings for the administrator, including some of the lesser-known traits that fall naturally out of it, and a couple of other (not so hierarchy-related, but interesting) features that we have. That part will probably include a brief discussion of Aliens too, looking at it from more of a user perspective than the implementor’s view in the miniconf. I’ll also try to dispel a few of the more common misconceptions we run into, but that may be a bit much to hope for. That presentation is at 15.45 Friday in Renouf Foyer 1 in the MFC.
At least the second talk should be recorded and the video available afterwards (for the miniconfs it’s “best effort”, and there’s bound to be a few kinks on the very first day). There will also be more comprehensive written papers available here afterwards, particularly for the Aliens system. I’ve tried to document it as fully as possible in the written version, while the twenty-minute talk has a lot of the less-important details left out. That one’s going to be cutting it a bit fine as it is, and I may need to trim more still to make sure there’s time for questions. If there’s anything important cut I’ll work it into the other paper to make sure we get it out somewhere. It’s been suggested there might be room for a lightning talk during the open day on Saturday too, but I’m not sure whether I’ll be talked out by that point, so we’ll see how it goes.
Registrations for the conference have been extended so there’s still an opportunity for anybody to come along and watch me if they want. There are a lot of other presentations as well that look more interesting still, so it should be an enlightening week.