[logilab] DebConf15 wrap-up

I just came back from two weeks in Heidelberg for DebCamp15 and DebConf15.

In the first week, besides helping out DebConf's infrastructure team with network setup, I tried to make some progress on the library transitions triggered by libstdc++6's C++11 changes. At first, I spent many hours going through header files for a bunch of libraries trying to figure out if the public API involved std::string or std::list. It turns out that is time-consuming, error-prone, and pretty efficient at making me lose the will to live. So I ended up stealing a script from Steve Langasek to automatically rename library packages for this transition. This ended in 29 non-maintainer uploads to the NEW queue, quickly processed by the FTP team. Sadly the transition is not quite there yet, as making progress with the initial set of packages reveals more libraries that need renaming.

Building on some earlier work from Laurent Bigonville, I've also moved the setuid root Xorg wrapper from the xserver-xorg package to xserver-xorg-legacy, which is now in experimental. Hopefully that will make its way to sid and stretch soon (need to figure out what to do with non-KMS drivers first).

Finally, with the help of the security team, the security tracker was moved to a new VM that will hopefully not eat its root filesystem every week as the old one was doing the last few months. Of course, the evening we chose to do this was the night DebConf15's network was being overhauled, which made things more interesting.

DebConf itself was the opportunity to meet a lot of people. I was particularly happy to meet Andreas Boll, who has been a member of pkg-xorg for two years now, working on our mesa package, among other things. I didn't get to see a lot of talks (too many other things going on), but did enjoy Enrico's stand up comedy, the CitizenFour screening, and Jake Applebaum's keynote. Thankfully, for the rest the video team has done a great job as usual.