Linux.conf.au 2003 | Abstracts

more, More, MORE! - Porting Hints and Horror Stories from the Debian Project

Bdale Garbee

Bio

Paper

Audio

Bdale Garbee is the Debian Project Leader, and over the years helped initiate the ports to five of the eleven architectures Debian supports. Along the way, it became clear to Bdale that solving portability issues improves overall software quality, and is therefore something everyone should care about! This talk will look at how the combination of source packaging, an autobuilder network, and related policies enable the Debian distribution to maintain over ten thousand packages on eleven released architectures. A few horror stories about problems encountered and what it took to fix them provide hints on how to write software that will run on many architectures.