I’ve been a FreeBSD ports committer since 2006. In 2007, my commit privileges were extended to the src tree. In 2008, Pav approached me to become part of the Ports Management Team.

I’ve had the chance to meet up with a few people (Ed Maste, Garrett Cooper, Tim Kientzle) and discuss the coordination of the work that is being done and will be done on package tools as part of Google Summer of Code. During the developer summit, Mark Linimon, Erwin Lansing and myself held a discussion about the current state of packages and how to improve the user experience. A few people offered suggestions and portmgr took good note of them. I did take some time to go through the problem reports assigned to portmgr. I also attended a chat about FreeBSD mirrors along with some members of core, admins and portmgr.

There were a lot of interesting talks during the conference and obviously choices had to be made on which ones I would go see. I really enjoyed Will Backman’s keynote. The talk about the PCBSD installer was very interesting and it looked like there could be a drop-in replacement for sysinstall in the very near future. Lawrance Stewart’s talk was a good summary of what tools to use when doing FreeBSD developement work.

BSDCan 2010 was a great time, I really enjoyed it and I feel it was time spent in a productive fashion. I would like to thank the following people: Dan Langille and his volunteers for the brilliant conference they put together, Sam Leffler / Philip Paeps / Gavin Atkinson / Jonathan Anderson for sharing a room with me, Jordan Hubbard for a memorable meal in the Works Burger in Glebe and Kevin Van Vechten for the invaluable insight on American Sports and the FreeBSD Foundation, once again, for sponsoring my trip.

Attending conferences makes the difference between being a contributor and being part of a community. It is the perfect opportunity to meet new people with similar interests, meet people you’ve been exchanging emails with (putting a face on a name) and make sure you stay updated with the works in progress.

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After I accepted a hat from portmgr, I started looking at pkg_install again. I’ve already done some cleaning which I mentioned previously but it now seems like i have a new part-time job.

I’m working on a config file support right now. I’ve done some more cleaning up (removing FreeBSD 5.x support, fixing pkg_info ftp://...). I’ll have a look at PRs later.

Code is living at http://git.xbsd.org/projects/pkg-install/. To check it out:

$ git clone git://git.xbsd.org/projects/pkg-install.git
$ cd pkg-install
$ git fetch origin cleanup:cleanup (if you want the cleanup branch)
$ git fetch origin config:config (if you want the config branch)

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If you’re reading Planet FreeBSD, you already know that I’ve been offered to join portmgr@ a few days ago. Since then I’ve done some cleanup in pkg_install related stuff: removed pkg_sign, sync’ed RELENG_7 and RELENG_6 with HEAD, removed old pkg_install-devel port, updated pkg_install port, added a distfile target to pkg_install in src/ to generate a new distfile for use with ports/, ...).

I was also browsing pkg_install code to look for ancient/unsupported/broken code. I’ve found that “@option extract-in-place” wasn’t used anywhere under ports/. If you’re too lazy to read pkg_create(1), basically it extracts the contents of a package straight into $PREFIX rather than to a staging area first. Pav ran an exp-build to see if defaulting to in-place extraction breaks anything and, obviously, it did. Thankfully I could reproduce quickly and I’ll investigate in the next few hours. I expect to find loads of gems like this one.

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