A few hours ago, I submitted the 50000th request in the Build Service. It's a shame that this request is nothing fancy, but at least it's not a submission I did during a massive push to Factory (it's common for me to push tens of packages at once — hey, GNOME is not so small ;-)). Interestingly, Dirk was pushing some KDE packages to Factory around that time too and got requests 49999 and 50001,

(Okay, so, technically, this is not the real 50000th request, since back in August 2009, there was a bug for a short period that caused around 40 requests to start again from 1, but it's a secret!)

For those not familiar with the development of openSUSE, we have a collaboration model in the build service where anyone can submit a change to any package, and the relevant maintainers can then review this request. So it's extremely easy for everyone to update a package to a new version or to add a patch to a package: if you want to do it, then don't ask and just do it! And I'm told we're friendly people, so it's not too hard to find help if needed. The GNOME team is using this feature extensively, and we love it :-)

Now, the sad thing is that I didn't win anything for this 50000th request. Ah, well, I'm sure I'll find a way to celebrate this unique achievement at the openSUSE Conference! And, blast from the past, all this reminded me of the 100000th GNOME bug contest that Luis organized: I did okay back then.

In less than one month, people from all around the world will gather for the openSUSE Conference 2010! It will be in Nuremberg (Germany), from October 20th to 23rd, and the program is full of promises. So don't wait and go straight to the registration form (it's obviously free)!

With the Collaborate accross borders theme, I certainly hope we'll get people from many projects coming: this event is a perfect place to have informal chats between upstream and downstream people, but also between people working on different distributions. We all have a lot in common, sharing many goals, and making sure that communication occurs between all of us is most important.

To build some momentum for the conference, Henne has started interviewing some speakers. There are two interviews so far, but I'm sure he'll keep publishing more until the very last day :-) You can go read my ramblings about GNOME 3, or get to learn about the automated testing work that Bernhard did. He truly did a fantastic job, and what matters most to me is that this is not openSUSE-specific and it could benefit other distributions!

Will you join us to make the openSUSE Conference rock even more? :-)