Capitole du Libre 2024

In my PhD on digital obsolescence, I am trying to see how we can make sustainable systems, and because I love Debian, I chose it as an example. I know my choice is biased from the beginning, but I have good reasons :).

My guess is that Debian is a sustainable socio-technical system, and that the community is making a lot of efforts to keep it this way.

What I mean by sustainable in the case of Debian is :

Debian is working on a lot of various architectures (it is maybe the OS that works on the greatest number of architectures today);
Debian is stable and this stability is important to the world, and to the numerous distributions that rely on Debian;
Debian has a big community, with values and ethics, that keep the community solid through the time (more than 30 years old OS and community).

If it helps I can also give examples of unsustainable systems.

I want to discuss the sustainability aspects of Debian, try to find new ones that I have not yet identified, and try to deepen my understanding of how technically and socially Debian tries to achieve this. For example is this inherent to the way a package is born and maintained through time ? What I call the lifetime cycle of a Debian package? I tried in a previous miniDebCamp to understand how a package maintenance process works, and I can try to discuss with you what I identified as important in maintenance efforts of a package through its lifetime.

But also maybe, how is the release of the next stable Debian influencing sustainability and package maintenance? How does LTS help?

This will not be a horizontal talk, more of a discussion on this topic.