Bdale Garbee - HP

Portability from a Debian perspective

This talk will tackle the general theme that solving portability problems improves software quality, by examining how (and why!) Debian handles the "10k+ packages on 11 architectures" problem. It will explain in detail how the Debian distributed autobuilder network works, and will discuss how Debian packaging policy, the Debian archive management tools, and the Debian bug tracking system interact with the autobuilder network. The talk will conclude by exposing classes of frequently observed build failures, with speculation on why they happen and how they can be avoided.