OpenBSD Journal

The conclusion of p2k6

Contributed by robert on from the worth-having dept.

The portathon ended on the 22nd of October and the last two hackers left on Monday. It was a really productive and fun event. Everyone started to work on their own plans like updating GNOME or porting OpenOffice to amd64 and macppc. Let's see a handful of things that happened:

In the process of building OpenOffice on amd64 we ran into a bug which is in gcc(1), but this bug has been fixed in newer versions of gcc(1). We have contacted the gcc developers and asked for help so we could backport the fix to our gcc(1), but they told us there is no way of knowing what fixed it. Okay, that was tough. I knew that there is a gcc4 port in our ports tree which is not working on amd64. Fortunately Marc Espie attended the event so I was able to force him to fix lang/gcc/4.2 on amd64. After a couple of hours we had a working gcc 4.2 with installable packages so I was able to restart the build with the new version. Later in the build we ran into a bug again and there were two people, Peter Valchev and Marc Espie who helped me almost immediately, without wasting time with exchaning e-mails and waiting for Peter to wake up in another time zone. And the build continues...

Nikolay Sturm worked on linux emulation and on cleanups. That is why we started to call him the port terminator. He managed to remove a great number of unused or unuseable ports. With the fedora_base package (that replaced redhat_base) we managed to start Google Earth and Skype but they still need more work so do not expect a working port in the near future. :-(

We also invited two new developers (Antoine Jacoutot and Matthias Kilian) so they were able to meet and work with the others in person.

Because we are made of flesh, we also need something to eat and drink, we went to places to have some hungarian food every night.

As a conclusion, I would like to say that we have discussed many many things that will ease our work and improve our packages in the future. I also would like to thank everyone who donated to the project, because without them we would not be able to have these hackathons.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By z0mbix (195.172.38.66) on

    I am very interested to find out how the work on porting a newer version of GNOME went. Any news?

    Cheers z0mbix

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (69.207.171.114) on

      > I am very interested to find out how the work on porting a newer version of GNOME went. Any news?
      >
      > Cheers z0mbix

      I don't have the answer to that question but the first thing that crosses my mind is to check http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/x11/gnome/

    2. By steven (213.118.189.124) on

      > I am very interested to find out how the work on porting a newer version of GNOME went. Any news?

      Alek has been working on updating gnome at p2k6. However, this involves many different ports, more than KDE for example. The first step is to update GTK and dependent libraries, which are required by newer gnome.

  2. By Chris (68.225.189.146) on

    "Because we are made of flesh, we also need something to eat and drink, we went to places to have some hungarian food every night."

    Oh, that looks yummy!

    http://www.budapest-tourist-guide.com/hungarian-cuisine.html

  3. By Marc Espie (213.41.185.88) espie@openbsd.org on

    Hacking on the gcc ports can be painful: big and slow.

    Having a very fast amd64 available helped a lot: I was able to run about 10 full rebuilds of the gcc port over a few days. Plus cross-check that I hadn't broken sparc64 nor i386 in the process.

    This is the kind of stuff I wouldn't be able to do at home: I intend to get an amd64 this year, though (but not if I have to pay for it. I don't need except for OpenBSD development).

    As I already related to ports@, there was also a lot of work on japanese stuff.

    Other things went over very fast thanks to the hackathon setup: working with kili on finally updating ghostcript, helping people with @pkgpath stuff, and working with ajacoutot on some details of pilot stuff.


    There's also a large amount of work which hasn't been committed because it is not code: getting feedback from people on the things that are still missing in the infrastructure, setting people straight with respect to shared libraries and update issues, talking things over with respect to further extension paths.

    In summary, this week of ports hackathon replaced probably two or three months of normal hacking, in terms of work done.

    It also gave us a lot of space to communicate, making the process much smoother and delightful. Instead of trying things out and figuring out later some issues, having instant feedback means we can go forward in ways that would be completely impossible without meeting physically.

    In case you're wondering, hackathons are not free: donations made to OpenBSD, and CD sales do pay the hotel expenses (and some of the drinks). All in all, this is money very well spent.

    Thanks to everyone who contributed. And thanks again to Robert for the organization.

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