DebConf is the annual Debian conference for Debian contributors and users. This was it’s 27th edition which was held in Santa Fe, Argentina, from Monday July 20th to Saturday July 25th, 2026
About Santa Fe
Santa Fe is the capital of the province of Santa Fe. It is located in the north-eastern region of Argentina, about 450km north of Buenos Aires.
Since July is a winter month in the southern hemisphere, the weather was relatively cold in Santa Fe (at least for someone living in the central-west region of Brazil).
While Santa Fe is not as touristic as other parts of Argentina, the food was great (parrilla, empanadas, tamales, humitas, etc) and the people were very welcoming.
The Venue
Debconf 26 was hosted in the Facultad de Ingeniería en Ciencias Hídricas (FICH), which is one of the faculties belonging to the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, one of the oldest public universities in Argentina. FICH is located in the eastern part of Santa Fe, near the suspension bridge and the eastern waterfront.
Canonical attendees
- Athos Ribeiro (Server)
Guilherme Puida (Server)while Guilherme was around, he attended the conference on during his vacations
Hallway discussions
The most interesting part of Debconf are the hallway discussions we have with fellow Debian Developers. Apart from all the GPG key signing that happened, we had short talks with the Debian Ruby team regarding the ongoing 3.4 transition and whether we should just give that one up and skip to 4.x already. At that time, we agreed that finishing the 3.4 transition to only then start the 4.x one is the proper way forward.
Sessions
These are some of the interesting sessions we attended during Debconf.
PHP BoF
This was the second recent PHP BoF organized by the Debian PHP team (the first one was in Brest, during Debconf 25).
Unfortunately, the only attendees this time were David Prevot and I. During the BoF we discussed the following topics:
- autodep8: It’s been a while since autodep8 support was introduced for PHP packages. However, we failed to onboard the team packages to use the new feature. Using autodep8 should reduce the burden of maintaining scripts to run upstream test suites for each single package. The team committed to start onboarding more packages throughout the next year. This should help us to find and cover more cases in our autodep8 scripts. Onboarding example: https://salsa.debian.org/php-team/pear/php-composer-semver/-/merge_requests/1/diffs
- Circular dependencies: since Debconf 25, the situation on PHP packages circular dependencies improved a lot. There is still space for improvement by further performing substitutions of more instances of requires of the type
/usr/share/php/stuffbyrequire_once __DIR__ . ‘../../stuff. - Team documentation: For the next year, we want to revamp the PHP team documentation to make it easier for newcomers to understand the team structure and be able to contribute. Currently, our documentation is spread across the following pages: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianPHPGroup https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianPHPGroup/Composer https://salsa.debian.org/php-team
- The idea is to create a single page for the team containing all the information needed for newcomers to start working on our packages, including directives on whether they can or cannot upload team packages (which still needs to be defined).
- pkg-php-tools/dh_phpcomposer maintenance: this package is the backbone of the team packaging, and has been neglected for a long time now. It needs improvements and an actual active maintainer. We could start working on bug triaging and on adding support for the composer or (
||) operator when calculating dependencies.
UEFI debug support protocol for U-boot, EDK2 and LK
Paul Liu discussed some strategies he uses at Linaro to debug EFI applications through JTAG. In particular, Paul showed how one can discover the load address of such applications so they can load their debug symbols in gdb to be able to debug their application.
Secure Boot: security, tooling and the future
During this introductory presentation, Steve McIntyre explained what UEFI and Secure Boot are, went through their history, and discussed its purpose on end user systems. He also discussed some of secure boot’s shortcomings, such as the issues with hibernation. Then, he proceeded to explain how Secure Boot key management works overall, including a discussion on the expired Microsoft UEFI CA key. Finally, Steve talked about how Secure Boot is done in the linux world through a discussion about the shim and all the governance around it.
Submit your first contribution to the Linux Kernel
While I did not attend this talk this year, this is not the first (nor the second) time Helen hosts this workshop. This is a very nice introduction to the Linux development and patch submission processes, just as described throughout Linux Newbies but in a very friendly structure and time boxed in a way that the participants will be able to finish the workshop by sending their first submission to Linux.
Golang team BoF
This BoF was mostly about discussing the status of the Debian Golang team packaging workflow transition to module aware builds by no longer relying on GO111MODULE=off for those builds and ensuring all -dev packages ship a go.mod file. As a follow-up, as of September, 2026, there is a new dh-go package in debian unstable ready for package maintainers to transition their packages. See https://lists.debian.org/debian-go/2026/09/msg00038.html for further reference.
Day trip
As usual, Wednesday was reserved for the conference day trip. I decided to skip the day trip this year and went for a short walk around the city center and through the San Martín street, which resembles an open-air mall and looks great with all its lights at night. Before heading back to the hotel, I stopped at a local coffee shop to get some alfajores Santafesinos, which I could only describe as a caramel cake filled with dulce de leche. While these are famous all over Argentina, the Santafesinos (i.e., from Santa Fe) were delightful.
Conference dinner
The conference dinner was held within the University premises. We had Debian branded Argentinian wine (Stable and LTS versions) and all sorts of Argentinian foods. I decided to stick with empanadas all night long! After the meal we had a tango presentation and some dancing.
Get involved
DebConf 27 will be held in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, Japan, from September 5 to 11. The important dates for the event, such as the CfP will be published at https://debconf27.debconf.org/schedule/important-dates/.