This is my second time now — writing from my netbook. Last time, in March, I was invited to make a presentation about the Ubuntu developer community, process, and technical details of packaging. (Incidentally, this upload was made from there when I was showing the process of fixing a bug in a package.)
The atmosphere is not very different — perhaps more summery, though, as back then it was cold like it always is in early March, and now it’s +30 Celsius outside. There are about 17 people in a local university, most of whom look like your average geeks.
This time, technical details of packaging were explained right before me, allowing me to jump straight to the matter when the time came for practice session. Unfortunately, it turned out wireless wasn’t working on my Eee PC 1000H when I arrived (even though it always worked out of the box here, under Karmic, Lucid and Maverick), but downloading 300 MB worth of Maverick updates fixed that. The attenders were pleasantly impressed with Unity, although it took some time to explain what was “that network thing that replaced Network Manager), and how indicators were better than the notification area.
My presentation was about the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. I explained the difference in release cycles and the processes by which packages and patches are exchanged between the two distributions. I cited the recent statistics on people who are both Ubuntu and Debian developers, stressing that they can help Ubuntu contributors share their changes with Debian, and get started with Debian developer teams.
Finally, as the second part of my topic, I demonstrated merging package changes with Debian and Ubuntu in the case of a VCS-maintained package, by using xvidcore and git-buildpackage as an example.
I hope that these presentations running together got people interested, if not about joining the Ubuntu and Debian development teams (although one was curious how long it took for me to become a MOTU), then at least about contributing to their packages.