MacPorts Developer Meeting?

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 3:55 PM, Vincent Habchi wrote:
>> Until now up to 6 people replied that they *might* be able to show up
>> in Europe. If the number stays that small, we could still meet, but it
>> would be easier to just pick a location and go there without any big
>> one-year-in-advance reservations of the place.
>
> Hi !
>
> If it’s scheduled enough in advance, I might be able to haul my rump out of my Paris' office and join you for one day or two, as that’d be fun.

While most others say that it's too early to say ;)

> Do you have any blueprint yet?

Do you mean any idea about the programme and/or exact time & location?

Location: another "MacPorter" lives nearby and we are willing to
organize the event together, in "the middle of Europe". We could
choose between "close to the sea" and "in the mountains". I would
certainly like to avoid the cities and try to organize the event
somewhere in the nature (but still making sure that they would have a
decent internet connection). My preference is somewhere closer to the
mountains (I have a few particular places in mind).

Time: Somewhere between March and September, ideally end of August (at
the end of August one can still go swimming if we pick location next
to a lake, while it's not so awfully hot any more). We could pick the
dates together, but that only makes sense if enough people commit to
come soon enough. I would suggest something like Wednesday evening -
Sunday afternoon which would give us three full days (Thursday,
Friday, Saturday). Possibly a bit more, depending on what we want to
achieve and how problematic people find it to take free days at work.
End of august would also make perfect timing for students from GSOS to
present their work (but of course that depends from which part of the
globe they come).

Programme: (should be well prepared in advance, but it's too soon to
talk about details now)

Anyway, here's my idea about how it could be.

Morning: one or two talks about what developers did (maybe presenting
the new website, the new statistics collection website, etc.). After
the coffee break some "round tables" about topics chosen in advance.
It's hard to tell one year in advance what will be the burning issues
by then, but some examples include:
- is there any way we could set up some funding mechanisms; do we need that
- new website, new statistics website
- what to do with packaging Perl modules
- what could be done to make trac more efficient (in not forgetting
tickets after three days for example)
- what could be done to allow more committers
- ways to optimize the output from the buildbots
- what to do with C++11 software in pre-10.9; should we put extra
libraries to a special place
- should we set up buildbots for 10.6-10.8/libc++
- do we need "openmaintainer" or not (should "openmaintainer" be
opt-in or opt-out)
- way to retire defunct packages (which currently stay there broken forever)
- dealing with nomaintainer ports
- release cycles: ways to simplify making a release, should we release
more often, ...
- creating a top priority list to work on during the next few months
- ...
Lunch, possibly continue these discussions on fresh air after lunch.
Afternoon: hacking sessions behind computers, working on pre-defined
topics (discussed before the meeting). One example: I would like the
ports which fetch from git or svn to store the checkout in a
tar.gz/.bz2/.xz file, so that the next time there will be no need to
checkout everything again, just extract the archive. It's relatively
simple to do, but I don't have  enough tcl knowledge to do it, while
I'm sure that there would be enough developers capable of implementing
this at the meeting. The idea would be to sit together with such a
developer, implement a feature, commit it ...
Evening: beer and optional ticket closing sessions together with those
who were unable to attend.

The idea would be to organize the meeting with close to zero overhead
(no printing of "conference materials" or other junks; T-shirts only
if requested), just go to a nice "budget" hotel with internet
connection and a room for a meeting and have fun together.

Mojca