[talk] a Port Maintainer day conference in NYC

[George Rosamond]

Raul Cuza:
> On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 12:46 PM, George Rosamond
> <george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:
>> I'm forking this from my previous email, to open up the discussion and
>> generate some concrete ideas.
>>
>> I'll repeat the basis:
>>
>> after Brian C's OpenBSD porting meeting last night, it became clear that
>> there's a decent critical mass of port maintainers in the NYC area from
>> the BSD projects.
>>
>> This specifically means people who port third-party applications to one
>> BSD or another for inclusion in the respective ports and packages. It
>> might include people who build and maintain large Mozilla ports, or
>> simple shell-based utilities. There might even be those involved in the
>> actual port-building infrastructure, ie, the Make environment that the
>> ports systems dwell in.
>>
>> Assembling a bunch of them wouldn't be trivial, as we'd need space,
>> etc., but we could probably do this without a lot of extras past
>> NYCBSDCons require. Think no heavy sponsors, no catered food (except
>> maybe pizzas), no hotels.
>>
>> There's some important issues to establish first:
>>
>> * is the event aimed at current maintainers talking to other maintainers?
>>
>> * if above is true, what topics would actually have them speaking the
>> same tongue to make the event worthwhile?
>>
>> * would prospective maintainers be included on some level?
>>
>> * if above is true, would porting workshops (like last night) be part of
>> the agenda?
>>
>> Anyways, I hope this opens up some discussion on the topic, since this
>> will be the basis to determine whether this sort of event is feasible in
>> NYC.
>>
>> g
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>> 5822 F82D 665B 5C6A 915B FAD4 B014 1CEE 545A A6C6
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk mailing list
>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
> 
> At the risk of being asked to leave the ranch, I think learning to
> make Homebrew ports should be included. For all its faults, OS X is a
> BSD at its core.

Off the ranch!

I'd be -1 on that, personally.

Maybe a better approach would be to gear the event towards tutorials.

There is an instructor for each BSD port system, and two time slots.
Users sign up for the BSD port system they intend to use, and in the
first session it's an overview, then the second one is hands-on, with
possible port submissions.

Users would have to pick which BSD, and we could assess the number of
'helpers' at each session. If, say, 20 users sign up for LoopyBSD, the
2nd hands-on tutorial might require x people to be there.

Something like BCallah's doc sprint, without the DDOS effect?

Then we could have more general sessions preceding or following the two
BSD-specific time slots.

We could ultimately judge the results in (serious) ports submitted.

Still toying with the idea, but we're not going to even consider it
without more input.

g