[FOSDEM] Call for Participation: Debugging Tools DevRoom at FOSDEM 2018

[Ivo Raisr]

Debugging Tools developer room at FOSDEM 2018
(Brussels, Belgium, February 3th).

FOSDEM is a free software event that offers open source communities a
place to meet, share ideas and collaborate.  It is renown for being
highly developer-oriented and brings together 5000+ hackers from all
over the world.  It is held in the city of Brussels (Belgium).
http://fosdem.org/

FOSDEM 2018 will take place during the weekend of Saturday, February 3th
and Sunday February 4th 2018.  On Saturday we will have a devroom for
Debugging Tools, jointly organized by the Valgrind and GDB projects.
Devrooms are a place for development teams to meet, discuss, hack and publicly
present the project's latest improvements and future directions.

We will have a whole day to hang out together as community
embracing debugging tools, such as Valgrind, gdb, RR, Infinity, radare...
Please join us, regardless of whether you are a core hacker,
a plugin hacker, a user, a packager or a hacker on a
project that integrates, extends or complements debugging tools.

** Call for Participation

We would like to organize a series of talks/discussions on various
topics relevant to both core hackers, new developers, users, packagers
and cross project functionality.  Please do submit a talk proposal by
Friday December 1st 2017, so we can make a list of activities during the
day.

Some possible topics for talks/discussions are:

- The recently added functional changes (for users).
- Get feedback on what what kinds of new functionality would be
useful. Which tools and functionality users would like to see.
- Discuss release/bugfixing strategy/policy (core hackers, packagers).
- Connecting debugging tools together.
- Latest DWARF extensions, going from binary back to source.
- Multi, multi, multi... threads, processes and targets.
- Debugging anything, everywhere. Dealing with complex systems.
- Dealing with the dynamic loader and the kernel.
- Intercepting and interposing functions and events.
- Adding GDB features, such as designing GDB python scripts for your
data structures.
- Advances in gdbserver and the GDB remote serial protocol.
- Adding Valgrind features (adding syscalls for a platform or VEX
instructions for an architecture port).
- Infrastructure changes to the Valgrind JIT framework.
- Your interesting use case with a debugging tool.

** How to Submit

There are two ways.
The first one is to use the FOSDEM 'pentabarf' tool to submit your proposal:
https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM18

- If necessary, create a Pentabarf account and activate it.
  Please reuse your account from previous years if you have
  already created it.

- In the "Person" section, provide First name, Last name
  (in the "General" tab), Email (in the "Contact" tab)
  and Bio ("Abstract" field in the "Description" tab).

- Submit a proposal by clicking on "Create event".

- Important! Select the "Debugging Tools devroom" track
  (on the "General" tab).

- Provide the title of your talk ("Event title" in the "General" tab).

- Provide a description of the subject of the talk and the
  intended audience (in the "Abstract" field of the "Description" tab)

- Provide a rough outline of the talk or goals of the session (a short
  list of bullet points covering topics that will be discussed) in the
  "Full description" field in the "Description" tab

The second way is to email your talk proposal to
valgrind-devroom-manager at fosdem.org alias.

Julian, Philippe, Mark, Ivosh, and Pedro will review the proposals and
organize the
schedule for the day.  Please feel free to suggest or discuss any ideas
for the devroom on valgrind-devroom-manager at fosdem.org alias.

** Recording of Talks

As usually the FOSDEM organisers plan to have live streaming and
recording fully working, both for remote/later viewing of talks, and
so that people can watch streams in the hallways when rooms are full.
This obviously requires speakers to consent to being recorded and
streamed.  If you plan to be a speaker, please understand that by
doing so you implicitly give consent for your talk to be recorded and
streamed.  The recordings will be published under the same licence as
all FOSDEM content (CC-BY).

Important dates:

  Talk/Discussion Submission deadline:    Friday        1 Dec 2017
  Devroom Schedule announcement:        Friday      15 Dec 2017
  Devroom day:                                          Saturday   3 Feb 2018

Hope to see you all at FOSDEM 2018 in the joint Debugging Tools devroom.
Brussels (Belgium), Saturday February 3th 2018.

On behalf of the devroom committee,
Ivo Raisr