Droso

The FreeBSD Foundation generously sponsored my plane ticket for BSDCan this year. I wrote a few words about what I did at the conference, apart from the pub track of course, and some of you that weren’t there, might be interesting to see what actually happens at BSDCan when people are not listening to talks or out drinking beer, so here it is:

I held a short talk at the DevSummit on the state of the ports tree and
an update on the work portmgr is doing these days and some of the larger
issues we are facing (slides). I also held a BOF at the conference
itself on ports in general. Unfortunately, not many people turned up but
those who did got some pointers on how to start more actively contributing
to FreeBSD ports and we discussed some more general ports related subjects.

In addition to the official track, I held several informal meetings.
The upcoming release schedule for the next many releases was discussed
with the release engineering and security teams. Together with another
portmgr member, Mark Linimon, I met George Neville-Neil on behalf of the
core team to discuss a specific personnel issue that got escalated. I
also had lunch with the two other portmgr members attending, Mark
Linimon and Joe Marcus Clark for a general discussion on portmgr
issues. I cornered Ken Smith on how to start helping out on contacting
ftp administrators of outdated and/or incomplete mirrors, and cleaning
up the list of mirror sites. Additionally, I had some brainstorming
talks with Peter Losher of ISC, who runs the US half of ftp.freebsd.org
while I run the EU half, on optimizing mirror synchronization and
creating some statistics on downloads, which Mark Linimon was willing to
analyse if we could provide him the data.

All in all, a very productive conference, with lots of minor issues very
easily resolved over a glass of coffee/beer/milk, than over e-mail. A
lot of thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring the trip.