# FOSDEM Distributions Devroom - meeting notes

Ongoing notes and follow-up tracking for meetings with the review and planning committee of the Distributions DevRoom at FOSDEM in Brussels, BE.

Connection Details: ………………… [meet.google.com/fri-nxro-ecd](https://meet.google.com/fri-nxro-ecd)

## Scratch space for selecting talks

Absolute acceptances, no negative comments, sorted in descending order of average review score:
* [Boot from network attached devices using mkosi-initrd (or why systemd distributions should really start considering mkosi-initrd)](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/RXN3G7/)
* [Flatcar and Gentoo sitting in a tree - A collaboration of distributions](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/TU9UTL/)
* [Rust, RPMs, and the Fine Art of Dependency Bundling](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/Z3U7M3/)
* [Fedora Silverblue With Disk Encryption: How I Almost Lost Everything But Gained Much Wisdom (Side Story: Bmaptool And Ddrescue: Why One Should Never Ever Use Dd)](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/XBKK7M/)
* [Packit: Bridging the Gap Between Fedora and openSUSE](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/CQREMD/)
* [CentOS Stream and the Power of SIGs: KDE, Hyperscale, and Beyond](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/JJBMYM/)
* [From Manul to Kitten: 4 years of AlmaLinux development evolution](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/RVYFT7/)
* [a tale of several distros joining forces for a common goal: reproducible builds](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/KXZKQL/)
* [openSUSE: Engineering Stable Rolling Releases with OBS and openQA](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/VH87VK/)
* [Being different takes Aeons - a tale of the endless RC?](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/7FU8X8/)
* [How to push your testing upstream](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/7KFESF/)
* [Fixing CVEs on Debian: _almost_ everything you should know about it](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/7JH8HF/)
* [Enabling Architectural Features in Debian: PAC and BTI on arm64](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/FFE3AJ/)
* [Rhino Linux and Pacstall: Towards a Rolling Ubuntu](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/DWKMZB/)
* [The Ubuntu patch pilot program](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/MBQPME/)
* [Building the Future: Understanding and Contributing to Immutable Linux Distributions](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/submissions/UFNPHT/)

## Meeting notes

### 2024-11-19

The Distributions DevRoom is officially accepted for 2025! Let's check in and review the CFP and outreach templates that benny prepared. We can discuss any other important topics in the timeline leading up from now until the end of the year.

### 2024-10-25

* Justin W. Flory (JWF); he/him; US Eastern; Red Hat/Fedora; night owl
* benny Vasquez; she/her US Eastern; AlmaLinux; early morning (unless it was a late night)
* Sumantro Mukherjee; he/him; IST; Red Hat/Fedora; night owl
* Aoife Moloney
* Shaun

**Notes**:

* Reviewing 2025 CFP edits by benny
* Small edits made. It looks good!
* Two places to post out: fosdem attendees list, devroom-managers list
* Remember to put the public CFP URL in Pretalx, so it shows up on fosdem.org website
* https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2025/p/devroom-dashboard/
* benny tackles the mailing lists post
* Sumantro for the Fedora Magazine
* Everyone please take the template

Template blog post for folks to use if they want: https://hackmd.io/@U5ly21ksRQafrnsv9_2bqg/HJnpMLHekl
CFP for this year:
https://hackmd.io/du5sqgz_QBWFbMpR2fGBqA?both

### 2024-10-03

_And so we're back!_

**Attendees**: Name, pronouns, location/geography, professional association, meeting prompt.

This meeting's prompt: Favorite time of day?

* Justin W. Flory (JWF); he/him; US Eastern; Red Hat/Fedora; night owl
* benny Vasquez; she/her US Eastern; AlmaLinux; early morning (unless it was a late night)
* Mauro Gaspari; EU Central; Ubuntu; I like so late that it might be early?
* Sumantro Mukherjee; he/him; IST; Red Hat/Fedora; night owl
* Richard Brown
* Aoife Moloney
*

**Agenda**:

* Intros, getting to know each other
* Ideas for how to help
* Content & outreach
* benny will put together a plan here
* Design
* Speaker management (all of us)
* Event production
* Notes from FOSDEM devroom email
* They're going to be very strict about deadlines
* Must accept talks through their Pretalx during November.
* Timeline:
* 10 October - deadline for developer room proposals
* 21 October - accepted developer rooms announced
* 30 October - developer rooms issue Calls for Participation.
* 1 December - deadline for Call for Participation
* 15 December - developer rooms publish complete schedules
* Reviewing last year's CFP
* [FOSDEM 2024 Distro Devroom submission form](https://hackmd.io/@fedora-mindshare/Bk7QOwEbp)
* Theme or vision this year?
* Growing, participating, and working with communities around distributions
* Automating building and testing to minimize human involvement
* Cross-distribution collaboration on common issues
* Distribution construction, installation, deployment, packaging, and content management
* Balancing new code and active upstreams versus security updates and minimization of breaking changes
* Delivering architecture-independent software
* Working with vendors and including them in the community
* The future of distributions and emerging trends
* Non-engineering topics inside of distribution communities (e.g. documentation, marketing, internationalization, design, community operations, etc.)
* Creating a secure supply chain by evaluating upstream components and providing a secure source for downstreams
* Propose changes/edits and announcement comms?
* Access to the distributions-devroom@ mailing list; we should all be moderators
* @jwf: Submit application based on our final edits
* Social outreach after acceptance
* Use our individual channels? Social media, forums, chats, etc.
* FOSDEM mailing lists
* Party Party Party! Who/when/how/where?
* Scope of event: Light food, drink tickets, open bar?
* Friday night?
* Venue ideas? Brussels favorites?
* Dividing organizational duties. Ideally someone already in Europe to lead on venue?
* Action items:
* JWF: Submit the DevRoom proposal using last year's template; add all co-organizers to Pretalx submission
* benny: I'd love to put my hand up for communications in general: building a promo schedule/plan, and putting together some templates for folks to use (like last year), and staging up the CFP announcement.
* Rich: Come up with a list of 2-3 possible party venue locations
* Follow-up:

### 2023-10-23

**Attendees**: Name, pronouns, location/geography, community/company of association, meeting prompt.

This meeting's prompt: Favorite travel snack (e.g. planes, trains, cars?)

* Justin W. Flory (JWF); he/him; Biscoff cookies :cookie: + coffee :coffee:, OR red :wine_glass:
* benny Vasquez; she/her; Michigan, US; AlmaLinux; trail mix and ginger ale
* Richard Brown (sysrich); he/him; openSUSE; Based in Fürth, Germany, though expected to be in Brussels from Mid Nov till after FOSDEM; Beer
* Philipp Kewisch (he/him); Hamburg, Germany. Works at Canonical on the Ubuntu Community Team. Loves coffee + Kinder chocolate
* Shaun McCance; he/him; CentOS, but also GNOME old fart; Zone snack bars

**Agenda**:

* Intros, getting to know each other
* Reviewing last year's CFP
* More community topics
* [FOSDEM 2024 Distributions Devroom - Call for Participation](https://hackmd.io/@fedora-mindshare/SJ2z98Yza)
* Propose changes/edits and announcement comms?
* Distro centric cross-section of topics. Not just "the core of linux"
* Theme or vision this year?
* We can also give proposals to other devroom, e.g. BSD, Security, Community
* Social outreach before the proposal
* Use our individual channels, have folks reply
* Reminder: [HackMD pad for FOSDEM 2024 Distro Devroom submission form](https://hackmd.io/@fedora-mindshare/Bk7QOwEbp)