Phew! FOSDEM was great this year. Just like last, I was there as part of a huge openSUSE showing.
I plan on writing a full report, but here's a short anecdote that really sums up why FOSDEM is such a great event and openSUSE is such an awesome project.
Early in the morning on the second day, we're setting up our booth when a gentleman comes over. He's an openSUSE user, and is broadly happy, but he brings up an area we are weak in - when installing packages on openSUSE, users have no way of knowing when its avoided configuration files and instead made rpmnew files.
These rpmnew files are normally really useful, often containing new defaults, new parameters and new comments, all of which might be of use to a sysadmin who wants to keep their openSUSE box running as trim as possible.
I thought the idea of doing something about that was awesome, so I open up openFATE on the demo machine (http://features.opensuse.org) and throw the mans problem down as a feature request. He leaves our booth with a big smile.
Later that day I'm talking to Michal Hrušecký , a SUSE guy who also does a lot with gentoo. His eyes light up as I'm explaining the situation to him "etc-update! Gentoo has a tool to do that, maybe we can port that?".
Before lunch he had his port written and built in the Open Build Service, and he soon had it installed on the ARM Chromebook running openSUSE at the booth.
I've given it a pretty good testing and there are no major issues, its almost certain to make it as a new package for openSUSE 13.1.
From feature idea to working package in a few hours all from the FOSDEM conference floor - with a solution that crosses over from one FOSS project to another.
Stuff like this is why I love open source.
Mystery man whose name I forgot to take, thank you, your idea has gone far, fast, I hope you like it when its in openSUSE 13.1