Posted on 2017-08-21

I also wrote a shorter and less personal report on undeadly, feel free to read it rather than this one if you don't want to know about other things than the hackathon.

August was a busy month events-wise. I had the visit of coworkers who work in France, because this year's Debconf took place here, in Montreal.

After a week of fun activities, I went to debconf with them. With my badge, people noticed I liked OpenBSD and during the 'Wine and Cheese' event, someone came to me to talk about OpenBSD. In fact he was sf@debian.org who is also sf@openbsd.org. I was very surprised to meet another OpenBSD developer at debconf!

I finally left debconf on Tuesday evening because I had to take the train on Wednesday morning with mpi@ to go to Toronto. In the train I was slacking on the Internet when I noticed mpi@ was already hacking with his $EDITOR. I felt guilty so I began to update graphics/pqiv. Fortunately, jca@ was already in the hackroom so he was available to help/review. It was cool to begin with that port because it's a very simple port and I had to learn about the new COMPILER variable, thus I could easily focus just on that.

I also took the opportunity of the train journey to ask mpi@ questions about networking stuff which leaded to more things I want to dig in.

Once I arrived in the hackroom, I committed a duplicity update I had in my tree for a long time. I also looked at a submission on ports@ which needed some help because of libressl vs openssl and once I received some ok I put it in the tree.

Over the last few weeks I've been looking at porting some OpenBGPD check for nagios-like monitoring system to improve my dayjob's monitoring system. I realized then that I didn't even check what we already had in the ports tree. We had a check that I quickly tested and it appeared to be broken. afresh1@, who is the check maintainer and upstream hadn't arrived yet, I asked other developers that I know they run BGPd in production what they use. I got to know about how they did their monitoring which was pretty interesting!

To look at something else than the ports tree, I began to look at updating xkeyboard-config which is one of the tool used by xenocara. I already did the last update but at the time I didn't notice we had some local patches so I wanted to do it more carefully this time. I had some troubles doing this update so I took care of writing some notes about how I did it so next time should be easier.

Finally afresh1@ arrived and I told him about the bgpd check problem and in fact he had fixed it two years ago but forgot to update the port. He quickly committed an update to close the case.

One thing I wanted to do during this hackathon was updating haproxy. A few months ago when they release the latest branch, I didn't succeed to update our port to it because of libressl vs openssl. It wasn't such a big deal because old-stable branch was still supported. After waiting 9 months, I just grabbed the patch Bernard Spil did for TrueOS and it just worked so I was really happy!

In addition of that, I updated the other ports I maintained and I finally reached a state where all the ports I maintained were up to date \o/

To sum up, I did everything I wanted during this hackaton, with more ease than I thought. I had the opportunity to have really interesting discussions with a lot of other developers (during our social event but not only). Thanks a lot to the University of Toronto for hosting us (in a very nice part of the city and krw@ for organizing!