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Like you most likely know, I've been at the openSUSE Conference last week. I've been representing Debian through a talk about Debian - The Project and its Resources, covering services and resources that are usable and useful for other distributions too. The invitation to submit talks were sent to various projects and distributions because of the set topic on Collaboration across Borders for the conference. My impression was that very few distributions have followed the invitation, I am only aware of some Fedora people that have attended. Vincent Untz from GNOME gave a combined keynote with Cornelius Schumacher from KDE.

The abstract of my talk and the slides are available from the conference website. The talk was well received and interested people also asked about some of the services like how our buildd network works, or whether the screenshots service has support for localized images too, or if it would be expandable for more general usage of non-Debian based distributions.

One topic raised was with respect to the whohas tool: A mapping layer/tool/database for package names. We divert from upstream naming schemes for consistency reasons, like with our library, Perl and Python naming schemes. Other distributions have similar approaches but a different naming scheme. To make inter-distribution tools really useful it would require to have some layer that is able to map the package name from one distribution to another one. One idea for it that was thrown in was to use upstream homepage, but not all packages do have proper homepages, some only live in some git repository, others would either like to link to sourceforge's project page instead of the project's homepage, and other tricky issues. Something unique is clearly called for here and needed to get stored in the package's metadata.

Apart from my talk and the occasional mentioning of openSUSE is on my desktop, but I run Debian on my server I noticed that the beverage of openSUSE is their own beer. Taste is a tough topic, personally I rather prefer our Debian wine. And I missed the chance to seduce them into playing Mao, I forgot to bring playing cards along. I hope to get a second chance at anoter event.