I'm at DebConf7 now, in Edinburgh, and it is great to catch up with the great bunch of geeks that is the Debian community once more. As well as working on general stuff through DebCamp (the week leading up to DebConf proper) I'm helping out in producing the video streams running the sound desk or one of the cameras. The streams are highly recommended, and you can find them on http://streams.video.debconf.org:8000/, though for the New Zealanders reading this they do, of course, happen at seriously silly times of the day. Here is the DebConf7 schedule if you want to watch :-(. We'll get the talks up in a downloadable format as soon as we can, and I'll point people at them again then.

Highlights of the conference so far have been a talk by Nick Mailer on Debian Day, which was a very nicely presented run-down on the ancient history of intellectual property laws here in the UK, and the very interactive session this evening on Maintaining Packages with Git, which had some very good tips from David Nusinow as well as a lot of support from the audience. I now better understand why Penny is so keen on "git rebase", though hopefully I would have figured that out if I worked on more shared projects.

It's great to see 150-odd people in the room, many of whom had some experience with Git, and there were some very heavy users with great insight into it's strengths and weaknesses. Contrast that with DebCon5 in Helsinki where I almost felt Martin Langhoff and I were unheard when we acclaimed it, or even at LCA in 2006, where Martin did a first pass at importing X.Org into Git. Of course Git itself has come a long way from then too.

Another very interesting session was Martin Krafft talking about 'netconf', which is his proposal for a replacement of the ifupdown infrastructure using a much more stateless, event driven approach. This definitely looks like a well considered design and I hope he can pull it off.

I've got my own talk on Thursday, so I'll be concentrating on pulling that together for the next few days. If as many people come as have said they will (50% of the people signed up for any talk at that time) then it will be a very stuffy BoF room. The venue here in Edinburgh is great, and it's nice to have a good network connection. Everything has been running very smoothly for the participants, as far as I can see, though I know plenty of people have been working very hard to make it so, behind the scenes.

Weirdly, after only a short time using IPv6 at home and at work, I am finding I miss not having it readily available IPv6. I unfortunately had to disable my tunnels because adding 350mS latency to everything makes the web very frustrating. Perhaps next year we'll be able to add IPv6 to the desired network features for DebConf8 in Mar del Plata. Good to see that in the meantime the availability of the new IPv6 nameservers for .nz has been announced in my absence though.