OpenBSD Journal

p2k15 Hackathon Report: landry@ on mozilla and more

Contributed by tj on from the english-portfest dept.

Landry Breuil (landry@) writes in with our first report from the p2k15 ports hackathon:

This was a short hackathon for once, so I took the opportunity to visit london on the way couchsurfing for two days, then enjoyed a quiet train trip to exeter through the nice countryside of devon...

Had quite a bit of fun being the first one on-site at the university building, since the people at the desk weren't aware at all that an event was organized in their place - didnt know hackathons were such secret things :)

That said, once setup, it was a really cool place with a nice view of the city of exeter and the quiet surroundings. Spent most of my time working on mozilla (how surprising!), but this time managed to make some progress on WebRTC, which now finally allows me to share the microphone from the netbook to a webpage - and using sndio! This is not totally there yet, but "soon" we might be able to use shiny things like appear.in and talky.io on OpenBSD for interoperable audio/video chat only using web browsers to talk to other OSes...

Also did some planned updates to firefox, which required a newer sqlite but fortunately jturner@ already did the tedious work of updating our copy in-tree, so I could also start working on the beta for 38, which will be the next ESR release - so please test it!

As I already had commited the Xfce 4.12 update some weeks before the hackathon, it was time for some polishing and bugfixing, mostly tracking down an annoying xfsettingsd crash when upower wasn't running - turns out nowadays on linux systems, nobody tests the case when there's no systemwide D-BUS daemon running. Fortunately it was only missing some handling for error codepaths, so it was easy to fix. I imported some new icon themes and menu editor to give some shiny eye candy to desktop applications menus, and updates some of the puzzles games I use the most (games/gottcode/* , games/puzzles, games/minetest..) - way to kill the time and entertain your brain cells.

I resumed working a bit on an OpenBSD implementation for psutil, which is a python library providing access to system statistics/processes, used in quite some other projects (for example... mozilla build system) - it's not there yet, but i've made some good progress, most of the useful features are here and I'm trying to get that upstreamed first before having that in the ports tree.

Finally, I updated www/cgit too, after spending some time understanding why they were wrapping the write() function from libc - which in fact was to allow filters to be applied on the content sent back to the user - too bad this wouldnt work with the way we statically build cgit - after that, I put the finishing touch on the long-running hard work from Sébastien Marie, and imported lang/rust into our ports tree - kudos to him!

Last but not least, I tried to do my fair share of actually reviewing some of the pending submissions on ports@ - we receive waaaay too much, and it's not always easy to find time to properly test & give feedback on each of those, but that's something we *need* to do if we want new valuable contributors to stick on our mailing lists and continue sending diffs.. so even if it's a boring and tedious task, we have to do it :)

To sum it up, exeter was a really nice place, good beer & cider, insane english breakfasts, not-so-bad food & weather, beavers on the campus & peacocks in the streets... and trains departing always on time!

Many thanks to the henderson family for organizing this event!

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By brynet (Brynet) on http://brynet.biz.tm/

    I know someone who kept asking about rust, so indeed kudos to everyone who helped get that in to the tree.

    Nice write-up Landry!

  2. By Billy Larlad (137.229.105.109) on

    Thanks for all your good work! It's much appreciated every time I open Firefox. :D

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