FOSDEM 2006

FOSDEM is an event with conferences and meetings about open-source, it takes places in bruxelles.

This page is a report for 2006.

Libconf
Gentoo as many distribution wanted to have a tool that permit the understanding of configuration files

The presenter who is the creator of libconf studied some others' approach to this problem (for example yum) and reached the conclusion that they were specific to certain configuration files or they were making some errors and in a long term vision the distributions gained problems because of this. This issue is particulary critical in gentoo because they can never re-install and always upgrade...

So he decided to code an api that can understand configuration files so there would be no errors and at the same time wouldn't be file specific...

Practically speaking this api makes the use of classement and has the help of template, that render possible this understanding and keep comment, and abolish the order of the lines and keeps only the information...see the slide for more information...see the example and the lines of code...

This technology is used by some projects including mandravia(ex mandrake) that used it with a configuration wizard for samba.

But not a lot of persons use it despite the fact that it can be used in many programming languages(C/C++,python...).

It's programmed in perl, maybe because such data handling is easy to do in pearl(that's not a troll:all programming languages have advantages(such as rendering particular things easy to do, speed, portability, correctness...) and weaknesses (particular things hard to do, speed, portability, uncorectness, possibilities limitations...) but certain particular things are easier to do in certain languages...)

Gnustep
Basically it's gnustep library on top of linux...but this offers the possibility, with a recompilation to run mac-osX programs.

Videos

 * general and embedded videos(including some of others conferences)
 * generalistic fosdem 2005 and 2006 videos

Project specific fosdem pages

 * gnustep

Slides

 * http://www.fosdem.org/2006/index/speakers/slides

Howto help

 * complete the schedule with the help of the pdf here
 * add the videos to the schedules
 * add the presentation of people to the people's name
 * review a conference or add explanation about a conference or subject explaining what it is about(for example what is AppArmor)

Links

 * linux devices

Reviews

 * a review of fosdem 2006 in french