Ada-Belgium Spring 2013 Event

Saturday, June 29, 2013, 12:00-19:00

Leuven, Belgium

Announcement

The next Ada-Belgium event will take place on Saturday, June 29, 2013 in Leuven.

For the sixth year in a row, Ada-Belgium decided to organize their "Spring Event", which starts at noon, runs until 7pm, and includes an informal barbecue, a key signing party, the 20th General Assembly of the organization, and a round-table discussion on Ada-related topics the participants would like to bring up. Afterwards, those interested can once more get practical hands-on experience on packaging Ada software for Debian with Ludovic Brenta, principal maintainer of Ada in Debian.

This page gives an overview of all relevant information. Announcements that were distributed to mailing lists and newsgroups are also available on the separate Ada-Belgium Spring 2013 Event Announcements page.

Schedule

12:00 welcome and getting started (please be there!)

12:15 informal barbecue

14:45 key signing party

15:00 Ada-Belgium General Assembly

16:00 Ada round-table + informal discussions

19:00 end

Participation

Everyone interested (members and non-members alike) is welcome at any or all parts of this event.

For practical reasons registration is required. If you would like to attend, please send an email before Wednesday, June 26, 21:00, to Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be> with the subject "Ada-Belgium Spring 2013 Event", so you can get precise directions to the place of the meeting. Even if you already responded to the preliminary announcement, please reconfirm your participation ASAP.

If you are interested to become a new member, please register by filling out the 2013 membership application form and by paying the appropriate fee before the General Assembly. After payment you will receive a receipt from our treasurer and you are considered a member of the organization for the year 2013 with all member benefits. Early renewal ensures you receive the full Ada-Belgium membership benefits (including the Ada-Europe indirect membership benefits package).

As mentioned at earlier occasions, we have a limited stock of documentation sets and Ada related CD-ROMs that were distributed at previous events, as well as back issues of the Ada User Journal. These will be available on a first-come first-serve basis at the General Assembly for current and new members. Ada-Belgium sponsor AdaCore provided us some Ada books, and we'll organize a small raffle to hand them out to interested members.

Informal barbecue

The organization will provide food and beverage to all Ada-Belgium members. Non-members who want to participate at the barbecue are also welcome: they can choose to join the organization or pay the sum of 15 Euros per person to the Treasurer of the organization.

Note: if spring would still not have arrived yet in Belgium at this (theoretical) summer day (read: if heavy rain is expected), the barbecue might be replaced with an alternative; but rest assured: food and drinks will be available!

General Assembly

All Ada-Belgium members have a vote at the General Assembly, can add items to the agenda, and can be a candidate for a position on the Board. See the separate official convocation for all details.

Key Signing Party

Wouldn't it be nice if a majority of people used GPG to sign their email every day so that you could send all non-signed email into the spam bin? To make that dream come true, please join and expand the global Web of Trust!

What you should bring with you:

an official ID card issued by your national government;

your GPG key fingerprint (i.e. the output of gpg --fingerprint) on small paper slips; a dozen copies or so should be enough.

What you will go home with:

signatures from all other participants;

automatic inclusion in the global Web of Trust;

the ability to digitally sign or encrypt anything you like.

Ada Round-Table Discussion



This year, we plan to keep the technical part of the Spring event informal as well. We will have a round-table discussion on Ada-related topics the participants would like to bring up. We invite everyone to briefly mention how they are using Ada in their work or non-work environment, and/or what kind of Ada-related activities they would like to embark on. We hope this might spark some concrete ideas for new activities and collaborations.

Afterwards, those interested can get practical information and hands-on experience on "Packaging Ada Software for Debian".

Debian, "The Universal Operating System", is simply the best platform for the enthusiast Ada developer. The features that distinguish Debian from the rest are:

a binary distribution that avoids the need to recompile Florist, ASIS, GtkAda and all other Ada packages;

a large number of packages intended for Ada developers;

a clear and consistent policy making all packages integrate seamlessly and interoperate;

outstanding support for the Ada part of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) with unique innovations like libgnatvsn and libgnatprj not found anywhere else;

backports of bug fixes from the bleeding edge of GCC development into the safe and stable compiler used for all Debian packages;

support for more hardware architectures than any other Ada distribution: alpha, amd64, hppa, i386, ia64, kfreebsd-i386, powerpc, s3980 and sparc (with mips, mipsel and ppc64 added recently).

a choice between "stable", "testing" and "unstable" versions of Debian to suit personal preferences;

Debian is the mother of Ubuntu, Knoppix and dozens of other distributions which sometimes incorporate the Ada packages.

The goal is to help people participate in this effort to bring even more Ada software to Debian, or to help maintain the existing packages.

If you're interested, what you should bring with you:

your computer, already installed with Debian unstable or with an unstable chroot already created (see below);

network cables (or WiFi already configured);

monitor and keyboard, if your computer is not a laptop;

power cables;

some Ada software you would like to see in Debian but is not there (not necessarily software that you wrote; any software with a license permitting redistribution in source and binary form will do).

Note 1: if your computer does not run Debian as its main operating system, you can install Debian in a virtual machine (VMWare or other), in a jail on a FreeBSD system (Debian kfreebsd-i386), or in a chroot on any other distribution. Danny Beullens will offer help and assistance to those who would like to install Debian in a VMWare virtual machine.

Note 2: if you would like to install Debian as your main operating system but are uncomfortable doing so by yourself, please get in touch with your nearest Linux User Group (e.g. http://www.bxlug.be in Brussels).

What Ludovic Brenta will do for you:

set up a local Debian mirror, so you can install or upgrade packages necessary for Ada package development;

explain how to package Ada software for Debian;

help you package your own program or library;

answer questions about GNAT, GCC, Debian, etc.;

if your package is suitable for inclusion in Debian, sponsor it for you.

What you will go home with:

your own .deb packages installed on your computer;

better understanding of how packaging works;

better understanding of the Debian Policy for Ada;

if your package is suitable, your name on the Debian Package Tracking System and your package on the next Debian DVD or CDROM distribution.

Directions

To permit this more interactive and social format, the event takes place at private premises in Leuven. As instructed above, please inform us by e-mail if you would like to attend, and we'll provide you precise directions to the place of the meeting. Obviously, the number of participants we can accommodate is not unlimited, so don't delay...

Looking forward to meet many of you!

Dirk Craeynest

President Ada-Belgium

Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be

Information on this and other Ada-Belgium events is available on the Internet at the Ada-Belgium World-Wide-Web pages and is updated regularly. Check out URL http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/events/local.html

To the Ada-Belgium home page.

Last update: 2013/06/23.