Hackathon report - p2k18

Posted on 2018-05-03

After two mostly boring flights, I was in Nantes on Sunday. I didn't do much because I wanted to get some rest after an exhausting week and tried to get my body into this new timezone. After a long night of sleep, I went to the hackroom. It was already well crowded for the first morning.

On Friday the week before, I asked my boss at 5 pm if I had to take days off. He said "no" as a way to support my work on Open Source—it had been the same for t2k17. I made a deal with myself that I would finish what I was working on for a customer instead of asking my coworker. So a large part of my Monday was finishing that stuff. Still, I updated a port I maintain, pqiv. I received a generous donation from Mischa Peters so I installed OpenBSD on it (thanks to jasper@ for carrying it!).

Installing OpenBSD was not that trivial because I didn't have any USB key and the wired NIC required an adapter which I didn't have and the wifi NIC required a firmware to work. Thanks to our marvelous organizer for providing me a USB key and stsp@ for lending me a USB NIC (which later krw@ used to debug a dhclient bug!). After that, I installed the packages I use, rsync'ed my home from my work laptop I was using until then like a lil' pig and felt immediately at home!

I really begin the ports hackathon on Tuesday when I committed an update for py-setuptools. I had already updated them 18 months ago. It was easy to do it because I already did all the work a few weeks ago. My plan was to commit it before the hackathon but the clang6 fallout decided otherwise. I needed this setuptools to port upt. upt is a "modular tool that helps people package software from PyPI/CPAN/etc. to OpenBSD/GNU Guix/etc". It's made by a very good friend of mine so I sent him a bunch of really nice diffs.

I imported spdx and spdx-lookup which are a database of licenses and a tool to query it. That's the tool upt is using to guess the license used. Then, I decided to call it a day. The morning was stressful, and rain was forecasted for the next few days. This pushed me to go see the city. I went to see Les Machines De L'Île. Sadly the Elephant was sick so I couldn't ride him. He was fine enough to spit water on kids though. What makes me even sadder is that I didn't photograph the billboard saying it was sick. It would have been such a cool error page for when PostgreSQL is down!

I also visited Le Chateau des Ducs de Bretagne and Le Jardin des Plantes which both were awesome with the nice blue sky I had. It was also funny to notice that the people of Nantes try to trick people, with putting "de Bretagne" in various names, into thinking that Nantes is in Bretagne while it is not. Yup, I'm pretty happy to have a static blog without any comments system so there won't be any hateful reactions visible here :-)

Once I got back to the hackroom, I review-n-committed a couple of diffs for python ports. I updated again pqiv as they released another bugfix release and did some reviews for the boar port from solene@.

I spent Wednesday only doing reviews for other devs—facette, influxdb for landry@, and several python ports for pvk@. At 5 pm I was fed up, so I went to the supermarket and bought some Belgian beers (Trappe Quadrupel and Westmalle mainly but also some Chimay). Once drunk I went to play ping-pong with other French hackers. A few hours—and less alcohol in my blood—later, I finally updated my main server to OpenBSD 6.3 which went fine.

I also looked at setting PORTS_PRIVSEP=Yes being one of the "new converts", but I had some problems (this commit message actually makes me laugh so much) so I eventually decided to rollback. Now, however, I know which permissions to set if I want to enable it again so that's cool!

Thursday was low-hanging-fruit day. One of the commits renamed a package and so I needed to add a quirks entry. I did all of it on my own and I was glad to see how much more comfortable I was after two years (I got my commit bit shortly before p2k16 which happened 2 years ago).

Until Friday, I didn't submit upt because I was waiting for Cyril to send an email about it. He finally sent it so I submitted it while replying to his email. I had already talked about it to landry@ because he wanted to port a dozen of python ports. I told him this tool could help him so he was eager to try it. I finally imported it after a couple of back and forth between landry@ and I.

Saturday was my last day as I was traveling on Sunday. I reviewed collectd/liboping for landry@, looked at the new Flask. During p2k16, I talked with eric@ about ports where he was listed as maintainer. This time I succeeded in convincing him that his time was better spent on OpenSMTPD so there was no need to for him to be listed as maintainer. My final commit for p2k18 was freeing him from the ports tree :-)

A while ago, I bought two pine64 but they were not that useful for my use cases—too slow and unreliable. For a few weeks, semarie was using one of them remotely to work on rust/arm64. But when it stopped working, I had to investigate which didn't please my laziness. I offered him to take one and give it to him. He gladly accepted and then it was quickly put to use!

It was very nice to see Nantes and my fellow OpenBSD hackers again. I could commit the diffs I had for a few weeks and reviewed some submissions that enhance what you can pkg_add on OpenBSD. Thanks to gilles@ for all the organization and to Epitech for hosting us again and to the OpenBSD Foundation for the fundings!