This Monday I was the first time guest and speaker at (contrary to it’s name) local Czech conference Europen. It was interesting experience. And I would like to share a bit of what I experienced. What made it different from conferences I usually speak at was the audience. Not many Linux guys and quite some Windows guys. I was told that this conference is for various IT professionals and people from academia interested in Open Source.
I was asked to speak there about something techy, low-levelly, genericy, and not SUSE only stuff. I offered OBS and Studio introduction as these are crown jewels of openSUSE environment, but I was told that they would prefer something more generic and little bit more hardcore. So in the end I decided to speak about packaging as that is something I do that since a long time ago. And to make it nor a workshop nor SUSE specific talk, I put in two more packaging systems that I worked with apart from rpm – Portage (from Gentoo) and BitBake (from Open Embedded).
Whenever I visit open source event in Czech Republic, I always know quite some people there already. I know the most prominent people from Linux magazines, other distributions and some other people who are big open source enthusiasts. On this conference, I knew something like six attendees in total (and all of them were there to give a talk and not sure what to expect from audience). Almost everybody was running MS Windows with few MacOS exceptions. Really quite different world.
As I said, in the end I spoke about why do we do software packages in Linux and how do we do it. I spoke about rpm and spec files, about Portage and BitBake showing how nice it is to have inheritance. And in the end I put in part about how great OBS is anyway.
From the almost a day I was at the conference, most questions and feedback got LibUCW library, but Martin Mareš gave amazing presentation and he had a really interesting topic. LibUCW is cool. If I’ll find a free time, I’ll write something about it separately. Otherwise audience was quite calm and quiet. For my presentation, I got question about cross-compilation of rpms, so in the end after the talk I could recommend OBS once more 😉
It was definitely interesting experience as these people were mostly out of our usual scope. If you are interested in browsing the slides, you can, sources are on my github, but they contain quite some pages of example recipes that I was commenting on the spot.