Ubuntu Developer Summit

It looks like I’ll be starting to blog on our main company site before too long, which will hopefully include someone standing behind me with a sharp stick, poking me and making me write more.

In the meantime, here’s my quarterly blog post.

I was finally able to attend an Ubuntu Developer Summit last month, this time in Dallas (not quite as nice a location as the last one – Barcelona).  My reason for being there was that they had 3 or 4 sessions devoted to Puppet-related concepts, and they wanted upstream (that would be me) to provide some insight and get involved in getting the work done.

It was a really interesting and different conference.  I’ve actually participated in other UDSes in the past via phone and IRC, and now that I’ve been to the conference, I realize how structural that remote participation is, and I’d love to copy it as we hold more Puppet conferences (e.g., the PuppetCamp Europe we’re planning for next year).  Every room had a session-specific IRC channel, plus live streaming video and audio, so you really could participate from anywhere in the world.  The last UDS, I could hear an audio stream and would type on IRC my responses to questions.  It was a bit awkward, but it meant I could actually be involved.

I think the focus on coming away with action plans is another thing that sets UDS apart.  So many other conferences are the destination – get your talk written, your presentation presented, and then drink and talk all week.  While there’s lots of drinking and talking at UDS – there was a really lively bar scene, I think partially because there’s so little hallway track — the sessions are really focused on “we’re all in the same city for a week, let’s knock this out”.

That’d be another great takeaway, but it’s hard to know how to copy it without having thousands of motivated, active, involved community members, like Ubuntu does.  I might decide to try for something like its blueprints in a one-day pre-PuppetCamp session or something; I like the idea of a “get shit done” focus for at least part of any conference.

In terms of how it affects Puppet, it’s a couple of different ways.  Since Puppet is now in Ubuntu Main, they are concerned about the long-term support of whatever we release, because they have to support it for five years.  They’re also looking at integrating it into various aspects of the system, and in particular, etckeeper and the installer.  So far, Ubuntu is the only OS out there that I’ve seen really look for ways to integrate a CM system into the heart of the OS.  As they should be, they’re taking baby steps, but those steps are clearly harbingers for what’s to come.

The etckeeper integration is not something you’d use in a normal environment, but I could see how it could be useful for some cases.  It’d kind of be a filebucket on steriods.

The goal of the installer integration would be, at the least, to make sure that you could have a complete functional machine once out of the installer, so Puppet would need to be able to run chroot’d by the installer.  We also talked about converting the catalog into a format that the installer can understand — essentially a preseed file — which would allow the installer to take care of the majority of the package installs, which would be much faster on the first big run.

Hopefully both of these integrations will yield great results, and either way, it was a great conference and I hope that we and Canonical/Ubuntu continue finding interesting things to work on together.