Pietro Abate

Governance is a big topic in the blockchain world. Deciding on the evolution of the protocol, even changing a constant can fracture the community. Hard forks are not uncommon with often negative consequences. Tezos, an emerging blockchain, has been designed from the ground up with the idea of on-chain Governance, where changes are decided by the community on the Tezos blockchain using an open and democratic process.

In particular in the context of FOSDEM, this talk will focus on the benefits that this type of governance can offer to the developer community in terms of visibility, rewards and potential for open collaboration.

I'll provide background on the topic, an overview of Tezos and its current protocol in relation to voting and governance, and close the talk with a few ideas about the future.

FOSS distributions are increasingly over pressure to deliver stable releases including the most up to date upstream software. Time-based release strategies has exacerbated this problem putting even more pressure on QA teams. The recently concluded Mancoosi project has developed a number of tools to automatically analyse large packages collections for a range of problems, from installability checks to speculative analysis of software repositories. In this talk I'll present four command line tools to identify and correct potential problems as soon as possible during the release cycle.

In particular : * Debcheck: This tools helps to identify all broken packages within a repository and provides a detailed explanation of the problem. This can be used to prevent shipping releases that contain packages that cannot be installed because of missing or malformed dependencies. * Buildcheck: Given a Sources file and a set of binary repositories, this tool identifies those source packages that cannot be compiled because their build dependencies cannot be satisfied. * Outdated: This tool identifies those broken packages that need special attention because of outdated meta-data. * Challenged: This tool performs a speculative analysis of the repository to identify those packages that, if upgraded to a specific version, would break a large number of other packages in the repository. This tool would be particularly useful during the upgrade of a specific component to evaluate its impact on the software archive. Most of our tools support both rpm (version 4 and 5) and deb based distributions.