On Sunday I arrived to DebConf 13. It has been so much fun that I didn't have the time to post anything about it!

As usual, I really enjoy meeting old friends and putting faces to nick names. Last night the Cheese and Wine party was once again great.

Not everything has been partying, though. I've been discussing with Enrico ideas for recognising Debian Contributors, as he presented on his talk on Sunday. We still have to discuss further, and obviously, sit down and write a lot of code

Yesterday we also met with Luk, and discussed what to do with the ancient net-tools package. We had had the idea of writing compatibility wrappers using iproute2, but that turned out to be too complicated and brittle. After looking a the current state of net-tools, and its reverse dependencies, we decided that the best way to go is to deprecate it by asking rdepends to migrate to iproute2 (for most of them it should be trivial), and then downgrade net-tools to optional. It won't be removed from the archive, as people will still want it, but it will not be required by any core functionality any more.

In the next few days, we will be sending an email to debian-devel, and filling about 80 bugs to get rid of the dependency on net-tools, many with patches.