Sam Thursfield

In a world of complex algorithms to recommend music, Calliope is a simple toolkit of ~6000 lines of Python that you can use to build different types of playlist generators.

This talk will touch on: open sources for music metadata, example playlist generators, and tools to speed up working with this kind of "small data".

Integration testing of GNOME, a desktop environment built from more than 200 separate components, is tricky. Since 2010 folk have been working towards better testing, and one outcome is the testing-only VM image "GNOME OS", built from the latest "main" and "master" branches of GNOME.

Now we're trialling OpenQA to automatically detect regressions in GNOME OS as soon as they happen. In this talk, I'll speak a bit about how we got here, where we're going and some tips for getting started with your own OpenQA testing.

There are many, many ways of writing build and integration instructions for software packages. I am going to talk about them!

Package build and integration instructions are usually written as code. It's hard to analyse code and get any interesting info out of it. It's hard to share fragments of code and expect them to still work.

A well-defined, structured format for build and integration instructions would allow developers and integrators to share, analyse and use packaging rules and build instructions, independently of any distribution.

The Baserock definitions format is a YAML format that can describe how to build a whole Linux system from scratch. It's been developed over the past 4 years. I am going to talk about the choices behind it, compromises, the pain points, and I will compare it with the other options we have for describing packaging rules.