Bits from the DPL

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Dear Debian community,

This is bits from the DPL for August.

Debian Birthday parties and new release cycle
=============================================

Although I'm almost completely disconnected from my city's local user
group (which is rather small, just like the city itself), I was
invited to a nice barbecue. I joined the party together with Debian
enthusiasts from Taiwan who were staying at my place, which turned the
gathering into an international one. Meeting Debian people always
means encountering interesting individuals with fascinating user
experiences. I hope you all enjoyed the parties - not only celebrating
the birthday, but also the release.

The start of the new release cycle is clearly visible in the activity of
our contributors. In a mail to the debian-devel list in January [d01],
we counted 2930 packages not maintained on Salsa. By the end of August,
that number had dropped to 1994. Uploading packages after the freeze has
brought back all the fun, and many teams have now completed their
migration from Alioth to Salsa, even announcing it in the Vcs fields.

[d01] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/01/msg00128.html


Open Source Summit Europe in Amsterdam
======================================

At the end of August, I had a business trip to the Open Source Summit
Europe[a01], one of the major gatherings where companies, foundations,
and communities involved with Free and Open Source Software meet. The
event brought together a wide range of participants, with topics
spanning from kernel development to emerging application domains.

One observation I took away is the central role that Yocto Linux plays
in many industrial and embedded setups. Yocto is widely used as a base
to build tailored systems, while Debian is more often the choice for
general-purpose environments. Still, there is room for Debian to deepen
its involvement in adjacent fields - for example by ensuring smooth
integration paths, or by providing more ready-to-use building blocks for
these use cases.

Another area that received visible attention was robotics. A number of
sessions and discussions highlighted robotics as a growing field with
high relevance for open source. I also realized that the work of the
Debian Science team, who maintain many of the packages used in robotics,
is still widely unknown. I'd like to use this chance to point to the
robotics task[a02] and the robotics development task[a03]. With the
new feature in the installer that allows selecting Blends, these tasks
may hopefully become more visible to newcomers.

In short, Debian already provides important tools from the software
stack that robotics projects rely on. Investing more in this
direction - whether through packaging, integration, or outreach - could
strengthen Debian's position and visibility in a field that is both
technically exciting and socially relevant.

A central role in the robotics ecosystem is played by the Robot
Operating System (ROS). ROS has become a de facto standard for research
and development in robotics, and Debian already provides many of the
core packages and dependencies that ROS builds upon. Continued packaging
work and collaboration with the ROS community can further reinforce
Debian as a natural platform for robotics projects, bridging the gap
between research prototypes and production systems.

[a01] https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-europe/
[a02] https://blends.debian.org/science/tasks/robotics
[a03] https://blends.debian.org/science/tasks/robotics-dev


Kind regards
    Andreas.

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