BSDCan Trip Report: Baptiste Daroussin

The next trip report is from Baptiste Daroussin:

Thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation I was able to attend BSDCan 2014.

I arrived in Ottawa on Tuesday evening and went directly to the Royal Oak where I met other FreeBSD developers.

On Wednesday, the DevSummit started with the FreeBSD future plans where I was mainly interested in pushing subjects like packaging base, dma(8) integration, improvements in kqueue, and status of the toolchain.

The afternoon was mainly spent meeting with many other developers to talk face to face on subjects which usually take a while to resolve via mail.

Thursday started with the ports and package session where I talked about the status of the package distribution: from building packages to distributing packages on the FreeBSD cluster. I gave a brief status about pkg(8). We talked about the pkg_tools decomission. We had a long and interesting discussion about the future of the ports tree. The other subjects we talked about were packaging-base, continuous integration of the ports tree, cross building packages, and the license framework.

Like the previous day, I spent the afternoon discussing pkg(8) with other developers, as well as phabricator, and discussing with clusteradm about different possibilities for distributed "extra" packages repositories.

On Friday and Saturday the main conference took place. There were plenty of different interesting talks I went to.

The main interesting one for me was " The architecture of the new solver in pkg" by Vsevolod Stakhov as it gave me more details about his wonderful work on pkg during GSoC 2013!

This conference has been really succesful for me. It was the first time we were able to get 4 pkg developers together: Vsevolod Stakhov (vsevolod@), Bryan Drewery (bdrewery@), Matthew Seaman (matthew@), and myself. I found it really productive to exchange ideas, share problems, and simply have discussion.

This conference also allows me to talk with clusteradm people, in particular Glen Barber (gjb), Peter Wemm (peter@), and Sean Bruno (sbruno@)

There was also the opportunity for 4 portmgrs, a future portmgr, and a former portmgr to have an informal meeting which was really great!