My experience at DebConf 2026 in Santa Fé

Last month, I attended DebConf 2026 in Santa Fé, which was my 5th DebConf. As always, it was an amazing experience, and I met a lot of great people there.

For those unfamiliar with the event, it takes place over the course of two weeks. The first week is called DebCamp and is geared more towards hacking and organizing the event itself, while also offering a great opportunity to discuss ideas with others. The second week is the DebConf. We still have the hacklabs, but the talks and workshops are the main focus.

My Activities during DebCamp

My main activity was working on the python-click transition that I started in May. There were only a few packages left, and with the help of Guilherme Puida, we managed to work through all the remaining bugs.

I plan to talk in details about this transition in another blog post, where I will focus on the tools I used and my experience with mass rebuilds and mass bug filing.

I also helped with de Golang Sprint. I worked on a few packages and experimented with the dak API to generate a list of packages that needed manual action.

There was a lot of manual, repetitive work and false positives, so I eventually moved on to some other, more fun stuff.

I also learned a few thinks about kernel live patching while talking to David Tadokoro. I had to work on the Ubuntu Kernel package recently as part of my job, so we exchanged some ideas, and the conversation was really helpful.

He also taught me two commands that I wasn't familiar with, since I'm a newbie in kernel development. Here are the commands:

$ b4 am https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240730071904.1047-1-sergiosacj@riseup.net/
$ b4 diff *mbox

By the way, this is the first and only patch I have submitted to the Linux Kernel. I worked on it during DebConf 2024, when I attended the workshop Helen Koike runs to help newcomers submit their first patch to the Linux Kernel.

Another great interaction was with Marcos Talau. He showed me his remote access setup, which he is using to help students make contributions to Debian without the struggle of setting up the development environment.

Another cool thing is that Puida showed me the command:

$ gbp clone vcs-git:typer

After that, I decided to read the gbp manpage because these little details really improve the overall experience.

I also had many other amazing interactions. I just decided to write down the ones that I felt made the most sense for this kind of "blog report" post.

My Activities during DebConf

I gave a talk about dh-make-vim, a tool I have been working on sporadically. An interesting detail is that one of the video team volunteers for the talk, Piotr, spoke to me about his tool, pypi2deb, which is similar but aimed at the Python ecosystem. There are many tools of this kind in Debian, and they are all interesting pieces of software. I plan to write more about them in the future.

I attended several talks and participated in a few BoF sessions, and they were all great. But something that really stood out to me was the workshop on the Debian Installer, led by Alper Nebi Yasak. I didn't know anything about the Debian Installer, and I liked the way he approached the subject and showed the specific details.

I'll take some time to read the Debian Installer internals documentation. I was not familiar with udebs or with the fact that the Debian Installer uses debconf under the hood.

Wrap up

It was an amazing event. Unfortunatly, a lot of people I know were not able to attend for different reasons, and they were missed.

There were many other things that I enjoyed during this trip. Here are a few more highlights:

• World Cup matches
• A day trip around Santa Fé
• The Cheese & Wine party
• Empanadas!!

19 Aug 2026 11:02pm GMT

Another maintenance release of RcppMsgPack got onto CRAN today. MessagePack itself is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it is faster and smaller. Small integers are encoded into a single byte, and typical short strings require only one extra byte in addition to the strings themselves. RcppMsgPack brings both the C++ headers of MessagePack as well as clever code (in both R and C++) Travers wrote to access MsgPack-encoded objects directly from R.

This release is once again chiefly maintenance. Besides standard upkeep to the README.md and continuous integration setup we had to add one #include. The clang++-23 compiler, when also running with its own library, now now needs the type_traits.h header file (in the upstream MessagePack code) so we added that. No other changes, so no user-facing changes. Details follow from the NEWS file.

Changes in version 0.2.5 (2026-08-19)

• Explicitly include header "type_traits.h" to appease clang++-23

• Standard maintenance updating continuous integration, adding minor helper script, and updating README.md

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

19 Aug 2026 8:07pm GMT

Previously in this series: The Four Horsemen of the LLM Apocalypse.

In a post to oss-security, my (Debian) co-developer Russ Allbery stated that "open source software [OSS] is coming face to face with a motivation crisis that has been building for a long time". His point is essentially that large language models (LLMs¹) are making the existing OSS community crisis worse. For him, it's the flood of code reviews, but he argues that varies according to people's desires, for others it's security issues and so on.

I think Russ is right, but I would argue there's something much bigger than our open communities going on here, and it's about the entire field of computing. This pressure is on all of us, regardless of whether we work on open source software or not.

How people use models

People using LLMs in their workflow have radically changed how programming works, even for people who claim to avoid vibe-coding. And I'm sorry to single out one poor maintainer here: it's not you, Brian, you're just one example among many. But this is typical use of those models nowadays:

Once it's done, I'll use /code-review and let Claude spawn sub-agents to do a full review of the new code. This usually finds some problems, even problems that the "main" Claude instance didn't find during its validation. I usually keep running /code-review again and again after finding and fixing issues, until there aren't any left.

Think about what that means for a minute. This is automation built to fire up dozens of agents crunching at a problem for minutes if not hours of GPU compute time, in parallel. This is essentially a couple of shelves in a datacenter rack, totally maxed out on power and cooling, abstracted behind a cute little /code-review command.

The author, here, is rightly concerned that "Anthropic could pull the rug out and require API pricing", which is perhaps a code word for "charging something closer to actual costs". Brian also pays lip service to environmental and societal costs but those are largely abstracted away, so let's keep that conversation aside here as well, as we have discussed it before anyways.

But clearly, this way of working has an (externalized) cost, to say the least.

Paying for non-free tools

For decades my work has been focused on free and open source software. I've long stopped using proprietary operating systems like Windows or Mac, and even before that switch, I was mostly using free software on those platforms, partly out of principle, but also because I was too poor. So the tools of my trade are free, and I build free tools with them.

It feels like we're going backwards: when I was in school, a millennia ago, my classmates didn't have access to a compiler and were wondering how they would scrape the money to buy a compiler like Borland's or Microsoft's. I had a compiler built into my operating system (FreeBSD at the time), so that wasn't a problem for me. For them, it was a significant expense, but at least those expenses (or more shady sourcing of programs) were a one-shot deal.

Fast forward 30 years, and software is rented: you pay monthly for Adobe's Photoshop and Microsoft's office suite just like you pay for Netflix, Disney+ or Spotify². And now you need to add dozens (if not hundreds of dollars) of monthly credits to access LLMs on top of that.

So, now we have to pay to get anything done? This is peak enshitification of our job: first they steal our work to train their models, and then they sell it back to us at a profit.

Attacking the engineers

AI is coming for our jobs, as engineers, if not everyone, according to the narrative. For a while now, our job market has deteriorated: less jobs, for less pay. Lots of skilled engineers looking for work and finding crap jobs then still looking while working.

This is not by accident.³ We engineers have a lot of power, it is not organized, but that's just a couple of unions away (easy!). Tech overlords know this, so they are attacking our profession, directly, by forcing us to train and use models that they can control.

Even in environments where programmers are not forced to use LLMs, the mere pressure of other people's LLM-generated work is huge. One can be forced to review LLM outputs, or just peer pressured you into producing more.

We're now supposed to accelerate delivery, because models can presumably do things so much better and faster. With supply chain security becoming such a large vector that we now have worms crawling around developers accounts on NPM, increasing the delivery cadence seems like a really bad idea.⁴

The LLM hype is part of the larger wave of cyberwar against workers, against water, against the Earth, against all the people. This is not a matter of individually "adapting to the reality" or personal choice, but a political, social, hard problem we need to address collectively.

Previously in this series: The Four Horsemen of the LLM Apocalypse.

19 Aug 2026 2:14pm GMT