Linux.Conf.Au has a reputation for being one of the best FLOSS conferences in the world, and it more than lived up to my high expectations. The last one I attended was also in New Zealand, but further south - in Dunedin.
Day 1 - Monday
As usual the actual conference was preceded by two days of miniconfs. On the first day I attended some of the talks in the Open Languages track.
mwhudson gave a talk about pypy - Python implemented in Python. He discussed the reasons for doing what they do and the progress they’ve made so far. Like so many of the custom Python implementations, one of the main things that’s holding them back is the lack of support for the extensions written in C for CPython.
Rusty gave a quick tutorial to talloc after lunch (“it’s a shame K&R didn’t think of this!”) and explained why it’s so great.
In the afternoon I caught some of the talks in the distro summit track. Both of the sessions that I attended happened to be Ubuntu-related - first Dustin gave a quick introduction to the components of Launchpad, followed by a talk from Lucas about the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. There was a discussion afterwards about interoperability between the various hosting sites and bug trackers. Several audience members questioned the relevance of Debian and suggested everything should just switch to Launchpad, but this seemed to be founded in ignorance. (For the record, none were actually Launchpad developers).