From WorkOutWiki2008

Number of People attending the workout - ~24

• 10 minute Presentation about Packaging on Debian
• setting-up cowbuilder and pbuild

1. Workout 1 done with an application called 'Spice Bird' - (a suite for collaborative work, built on Thunderbird)

1. Workout 1 done with the 'libcgroups' module. More details about libcgroups here:Low_level_plumbing_for_cgroups.

Both packages successfully ran dh_make and edited the relevant files under 'debian/'. As a result the packages *were* built on the developers' own machines.

Important Things:

• build the packages using pbuilder/cowbuilder and check using lintian.
• in the case of libcgroup, an ITP (intend-topackage) bug has to be filed against pseudo-package "wnpp" at bugs.debian.org. Use reportbug to do this.
• look at the guidelines for sponsor-ship at http://people.debian.org/~codehelp/#sponsor if you want your package to be sponsored for inclusion into Debian.
• ask for sponsor on debian-mentors after posting your source package to a public location. There is a service for this at mentors.debian.net
• fixed issues raised by Debian mentors.

Contents 1 Participants 2 Failures 3 Suggestions for future projects/workouts 3.1 Port-a-Debian 3.1.1 Footnote

Participants

• libcgroup (ibm)

- Balbir Singh : balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com

- Dhaval Giani : dhaval@linux.vnet.ibm.com

• SpiceBird (synovel)

- Prasad Sunkadi :prasad@synovel.com

- Sunil Mohan Adapa : sunil@synovel.com

Failures

The things that did not pan out.

- build custom debian packages of existing debian packages (for packages like vim which have many possible combinations of configuration options).
- build debug versions of existing debian packages in order to find/fix bugs.

Both of these tasks could have been attempted by relative newcomers but these tasks were not made explicit in the original wiki page.

Some people (who were perhaps up to these tasks) left some time during the workout as we could not co-ordinate with everyone.

Suggestions for future projects/workouts

Port-a-Debian

One of the participants (K. K. Subbu (sp?)) suggested an idea which could be expanded as a future project.

Now that portable disks are relatively easy to obtain, it would be nice to create a way in which we could boot a given disk image using various different virtualization tools like:

* QEMU
* UML
* chroot

The idea is that the user would connect the disk to an available machine. Depending on the user's privileges on that machine, the user could boot the machine using the portable disk or run an appropriate virtual machine.

The main idea is that the resulting work environment should be invariant regardless of what or where the host is.

To begin with we require some scripts to start the processes. The scripts should take care of:

* using UUID to identify the disk image.
* using environment variables or kernel cmdlin to indicate to the
vm the actual environment in which the machine is running.

Rather than writing everything from scratch we should use things like debootstrap, mindi, etc. to create the disk image. For expanding this project to rpm-based distributions one could use rinse or mock.

Footnote

We need to have more interaction between the participants instead of all interaction happening with the workout lead.