Contributed by rueda on from the airport-crash-without-casualties dept.
Next up in our series of p2k18 reports is that from Klemens Nanni (kn@):
I was excited about Nantes, for p2k18 was my first time meeting the team in person. With no special plans or ideas in mind, I should hack away on updating ports and trying to fix whatever bug I could find…
Thankfully, the train strikes had been announced early, so flights were booked. My travel from germany was fairly quick and easy, but also made for some fun hacking while being at FRA airport already:
After online check-in, I'd receive a boarding pass in GIF format. I opened it on my laptop and the QR code would look just fine. However, while being at the gate ready to board any minute, graphics/sxiv (the image viewer I use) would segfault on the boarding-pass.gif! To my surprise, it took a few runs to notice that roughly every other opening would crash the program. I got through boarding eventually once I had the QR code on my screen again, but imagine the look on my face…
Some code reading afterwards at the venue and with help from Theo Buehler (tb@), we figured out that, simple as that, the GIF file was violating the specs and cause sxiv to access out of bounds memory when looking up values in the background color palette.
Given that, there was already plenty of fun involved before even meeting the mad men :-)
Due to the plane's late schedule, I arrived at the venue on tuesday morning, when everyone was hacking already. After a few words of introduction and the usual chatting, I just continued some old ports update diffs that had already been laying around in my tree for too long. As patches came by on ports@ and people in the room were talking about interesting stuff, I jumped from reviewing ports updates into unknown areas of the base tree as it was a perfect chance for me to catch up and learn something new.
Sitting across the table, Bob and Theo had been working on pledge related stuff which caught my attention most of the time. As it later turned out to be, this was a port + pledge hackathon, so I thought: How about adding pledge to packages?
My new port for security/hitch, a TLS proxy, was in the making anyway during the last few months, so I patched that before finally mailing ports@. The pledge parts are still being reworked, but the port itself is ready and awaits broader testing (*hint*).
net/isync, aka mbsync, was the next candidate. Hopefully, more will follow. Stay tuned on the mailing list or even better: send patches!
We had lots of french food of course, but I can't think of baguette and cheese anymore…
Overall, I'm thankful for Daniel (danj@) for inviting me a couple of months ago as well as Jeremy (jca@), Stuart (sthen@) and Landry (landry@): All four are doing a great job as mentors, it's been a great week in Nantes!
Thanks Klemens!
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