On Wednesday I got up way too early in order to go to Heathrow in time for my flight to Osaka. The flight went via Frankfurt and wasn't terribly spectacular. I was a bit disappointed in the flight entertainment system (only shared monitors in the middle of the plane, mostly showing movies I've seen before) but I had Hodges' biography of Alan Turing with me and slept for a while, so it wasn't a bit issue. Arriving Thursday morning, Yabuki-san, who had originally invited me to the Japan Debian Mini-Conf (JDMC), picked me up from the airport. Shortly afterwards I met up with Imai-san, who was so kind to go sightseeing with me in Kyoto. I wanted to go there because I heard that it's quite different to Tokyo, where I stayed for about 10 days for a conference three years ago (incidentally, that trip was in October too, so it was three years ago almost to the day).
Kyoto was surprisingly close to Osaka — it was faster to get there than to go from Kansai airport to the city center of Osaka. We first went to Nijo Castle, followed by some temples, including Kiyomizu-dera, one of the most celebrated temples of Japan. We had sushi and noodles for lunch, and in the afternoon we returned to Osaka so I could rest for a few hours before meeting up with the interpreter of the conference. This we did at a restaurant specialized in tofu. The food was surprisingly good given that I'm normally not a big fan of tofu at all.
The following morning, I had my keynote speech, talking about release management. I covered various insights learned from my research and then tried to apply some of them to Debian, asking the question whether something like time-based releases would make sense for the project. A big issue is obviously planning, and I think the new release team does a much better job at this than we did in the past, even if many improvements are still possible, such as better coordinated NMUs when major transitions take too long. All of the other talks where in Japanese, so I was either working on my laptop or walking around the city. The first day, Hatta-san and I went to Osaka Castle; Roland Mas, who briefly turned up for the JDMC, joined us as well. The second day I did some shopping before going to the conference where I participated in the key signing session.
On Sunday morning I had to leave again... it was a nice trip, even though much too short and influenced by jet lag. I think there could have been more people at the JDMC but on the other hand it's nice to see some efforts to attract new developers in Japan and this conference was certainly a good first step in that direction.