Eda

Fediverse Profile link: https://framapiaf.org/@eda

I am an (ex) developer, a free software activist at April and La Quadrature du Net in France and I am currently doing a PhD in computer science about code sustainability and code obsolescence, in an ecological perspective. My study focused first on Android OS (highly obsolescent world) and now, on the second part of my PhD, on Debian and efforts of the community for maintenance and sustainability.

Accepted Talks:

Discussion on my research work on sustainability of Debian OS

In my PhD on digital obsolescence, I am trying to see how we can make sustainable systems, and because I love Debian, I chose it as an example. I know my choice is biased from the beginning, but I have good reasons :).

My guess is that Debian is a sustainable socio-technical system, and that the community is making a lot of efforts to keep it this way.

What I mean by sustainable in the case of Debian is :

  • Debian is working on a lot of various architectures (it is maybe the OS that works on the greatest number of architectures today);
  • Debian is stable and this stability is important to the world, and to the numerous distributions that rely on Debian;
  • Debian has a big community, with values and ethics, that keep the community solid through the time (more than 30 years old OS and community).

If it helps I can also give examples of unsustainable systems.

I want to discuss the sustainability aspects of Debian, try to find new ones that I have not yet identified, and try to deepen my understanding of how technically and socially Debian tries to achieve this. For example is this inherent to the way a package is born and maintained through time ? What I call the lifetime cycle of a Debian package? I tried in a previous miniDebCamp to understand how a package maintenance process works, and I can try to discuss with you what I identified as important in maintenance efforts of a package through its lifetime.

But also maybe, how is the release of the next stable Debian influencing sustainability and package maintenance? How does LTS help?

This will be a horizontal talk, sort of a discussion on this topic.