Hackathon report - p2k16

Posted on 2016-08-11

Getting an account

Since end of March I have had an OpenBSD account which means that I can do some commits on my own, the login I use is danj. I was then invited to p2k16 which took place in Nantes, about 100kms from where I live (Rennes).

Planning

I read most of hackathons report (if not all) on undeadly, and people often says that they had plans. So I thought I was going to do the same. Finally I did only a few things that I planned and other things I didn't plan at all :)

Meeting people

Since 2013 I've been talking with jca@ (mainly about OpenBSD but not only), though I never had the chance to meet him. Finally at p2k16 I could finally meet him.

I've also been talking on irc with landry@ for quite a long time, I was eager to meet him as I really appreciate him because we laugh together.

I could also see again mpi@, who I didn't saw since my internship.

During the hackathon I could also talk with people that I had never talked to, before like espie@ or eric@. It was both funny and interesting as I learnt a couple of things while I was chatting with them.

Even teaching people

I was still heavily learning at lot of things, whatever I was doing, though I was looking forward to share my (little) knowledge. I could show some tricks to tsg@ who was porting some python ports and at the same time working on portgen to teach it to handle python ports. I was really happy/proud to be able to help him.

I even could teach eric@ how to use cvs again :D. He didn't touch cvs for a while and in the mean time, new tools were created to help us like portimport and he didn't know its existence so I showed him thus he could use it rather than importing his port (that I reviewed as it was a python port :3) manually.

The work

I begun the week with committing an update to legit and its chains of *_DEPS, it was quite a pain so I was happy to be over. After that, I updated a bunch of little ports. I reviewed a few ports for shadchin@. Python ports are usually easy (IMO) but the problem is that there are always tons of *_DEPS which quickly sums up.

I left a bit the python ports to update osm2pgsql. They switched their build system from autotools to cmake. Some people don't like autotools, other don't like cmake and many hate both but in my case I don't know them well so it doesn't make a lot of difference. At first I didn't succeed to make the test pass (but of course osm2pgsql was tested to be working), but after being home I worked on it again, and I was glad of my work.

One of my plan was to port py-tox as it's used by nearly all python software for the tests. jca@ told me to look into openbsd-wip and indeed it was already done by shadchin@, I bring it to ports@ and ok'ed it so he imported it.

Finally, I begin to work on poezio, a python3 xmpp client. I needed some directions as some of its *_DEPS were python3-only and currently the port infrastructure for python ports is mainly axed towards python2, and sthen@ kindly helped me.

The end

Of course, I was sad when it ended, seeing people leaving gradually. I was really happy of the whole week, meeting people I was quite fond of. The meals were goods, with lots of galettes and crepes (even though we were not in Brittany). Thanks to all who made it possible! Would definitely do again.