OpenBSD Hackathon Approaching

BsdFreakZoid writes "OpenBSD developers from all over the world get together once a year at their annual 'hackathon'. This year's hackathon is about to start with around 60 developers, taking place in Calgary, Alberta in Canada from May 21st through May 28th. KernelTrap has spoken with a number of OpenBSD developers about this year's and past hackathons. OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt is quoted saying, "a few hackathons ago we had a slogan of 'shut up and hack', this is because hackathons are not conferences. People don't come to chit-chat, but to do what projects do. Some other projects hold discussion meetings, I would call those talkathons. We don't discuss, we do." Past OpenBSD hackathons have seen the introduction of SMP support, support for the amd64 architecture, and many other significant advances. What big advance will come out of the 2005 hackathon is yet to be seen."

Comments

Donations

[almeida]

If you like OpenBSD or OpenSSH, now might be a good time to donate a little bit to the project. Donations help pay for stuff like this hackathon. Considering buying a CD, t-shirt, or just giving some cash. This can be done at the orders page. They also accept hardware donations.

Re:Donations

[myspys]

I tried donating some hardware (only some U160 SCSI disks, but nevertheless). I emailed the coordinator for my country at that time (Sweden), no reply.

And as far as I can remember (although, don't take my word for it!), I emailed Theo as well. No reply, although that's more understandable ;)

Re:No discussion?

[molnarcs]

Have your read the article? ;) That's one of the questions it answers very clearly:

I was curious to understand more about what happens at the OpenBSD hackathons, and if there is a goal or focus behind each one. Henning Brauer laughed and explained, "there is no focus for the hackathons. I mean, get real, you can't work on a single thing with over 50 (over 60 this time) developers." Peter Valchev added, "there is no specific focus for any of the events, everyone gets together and works on whatever they want to. Really it all works out by itself, because the developers know what's important to work on - it's not something they need to be told."

This is a really nice interview - and shows that openbsd is a nicely managed distribution... I mean there is a strong sense of community among their developers, and social events like these serve to enchance that sense. This was funny:

Bob Beck, who is responsible for making the barbecue happen, notes, "the barbeque has become sort of a tradition, We host it at Theo's house, normally with whatever meat I've managed to bag the previous hunting season. Normally it's moose and/or deer marinated kebabs with raisin rice pilaf. The recipe is recorded for posterity in any openbsd distribution in /usr/share/games/recipes, in hackathon proportions."

Re:Adaptec?

[molnarcs]

Where do you get that idea from? (I'm referring to Scott Long's opinion). For one thing, Scott Long is quick to put down trolls who try to foster the myth of some kind of politics taking place between the various BSDs.

There really are very few political forces that shape things between the BSD's, whereas the amount of cooperation is actually quite strong and pleasant. Hyping up the politics myth only does a disservice to everyone.

Why do you have to do exactly the thing ScottL speaks about there?

Calgary as hackathon venue

[WebCowboy]

Calgary? Isn't that the strip club capitol of Canada?

I can tell you as a native Calgarian that Calgary is far from being the strip club capitol of Canada. The reason probably has to do with the fact that active members of the OpenBSD community live here more than anything else--that and the fact Calgary is a very well-connected city (among the most-wired cities in North America and maybe the best in Canada along with maybe Ottawa and Vancouver).

A little OT but maybe interesting to some:

Although Calgary and Alberta is not nearly as red-neck/socially conservative as people outside the province often make it out to be, Calgary (and indeed all the prarie provinces) have quite a puritan heritage--for example, Alberta was led by a premier nicknamed "Bible Bill" Aberhart for many years, and in Calgary from prohibition well into the 60s men and women couldn't be in mixed company in any venue that served alcohol (in later days--1950's the city relaxed laws allowing establishments to serve alcohol to both genders in the same room during the Exhibition and Stampede).

Things have changed a lot since then, but Calgary still doesn't have that big an appetite for strip clubs considering the size of the city. If post-hacking peeler-shows is what they were after I think they would pick a venue somewhere in Quebec--it seems that province embraced more socially liberal attitudes than anywhere else in Canada, except for a few interesting exceptions (in terms of equality for women it was opposite--Alberta and the praries were ahead of the game there and Quebec was the last province in Canada with universal sufferage).

Maybe that is why Ottawa is known for it's Linux activity--it is both a high-tech city AND is closer to the stripper-action as it sits on the Ontario-Quebec border.

Re:big development for this year ...

[Nimrangul]

How is it trolling when the man went to an OpenBSD talk at BSDCan about their recent wireless work only to tell them all that what they were doing was illegal and immoral as far as he was concerned?

Reports say that despite being told that that was not how OpenBSD developers view the situation he was unwilling to shut up about it until he was eventually told off by the crowd, which wanted to ask actual questions of Reyk.

Not only that, but Paul-Henning has been comparing OpenBSD developers to terrorists. Hardly a troll, more of an astute observation of one of several disgruntled FreeBSD developers making asses of themselves. The man went there trolling.

Trolling Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

A link to one of your other trolling attempts???

Re:No discussion?

[Shanep]

openbsd is a nicely managed distribution

OpenBSD is not a "distribution" if you are using the term as it would be used with respect to Linux "distributions". Linux distro's package other peoples software and tailor it, whereas BSD developers "take ownership" of all the software that falls under their releases and maintain it all as a whole.

This might sound like a minor difference, however use a bunch of Linux distros and then use OpenBSD and you might, like I and many others have, notice the very clean and integrated system which results. Linux distros always seem rough around the edges by comparison. Even the likes of SuSE or Debian.

No offence intended however to the Linux camp. Their work is highly admirable and their acheivements impressive. I just notice this distinction as being due to the fundamental mindset of responsibility extending to all parts of BSD systems versus the responsibility of tailoring the packaging of distinct components.

OpenBSD, stands out to me by far, as the cleanest system. I don't feel I can use the word "integrated" with OpenBSD because the whole is so complete that it feels as if there was nothing to integrate to begin with. As if the system were created completely from the ground up with a lot of foresight to do things correctly.

Re:No discussion?

[Shanep]

(BTW. what do you mean by cleanliness?)

File structure efficiently laid out without extraneous crap. Man pages succinct and complete. Default configuration files with comments specific for OpenBSD. man "any filename" usually brings up a man page for that file.

I disagree. Debian especially is very focussed on quality, and each package having a very good ratio of maintainers.

I agree that Debian is focused on quality. I used it for years (Potato) while also using OpenBSD. Debian is certainly the cleanest of the Linux distros I have used. But I did not find it to be as clean as OpenBSD.

The free BSDs are almost as distro-like as something like Debian, in that they write and maintain a small core set of software, and then package, test, and include 3rd party (free) software with changes to config management and packaging to fit their system, and often a few of their own changes to the code.

I don't agree with this, with regard to OpenBSD. All the software installed with the default install, is permanently maintained by OpenBSD developers. Including such software as Apache. When improvements to Apache are made outside of OpenBSD, the OpenBSD developers review changes and back port them into the OpenBSD Apache if they are deemed worthy (I realise Debian back ports).

Contrast this to Linux distros which bolt Apache on as it is with config changes to suit their distro.

As far as 3rd party software goes, yes they have packages of 3rd party software which remains largely unchanged. However there is a point where they have to stop. They can't maintain and develop everything in-house. But as far as the OS goes, (kernel, libraries, file structure, man pages, installer, boot loader, Apache, OpenSSH, X, ftpd, ntpd, etc etc) they do and they do it all as a whole. A lot of work goes into the packages though and they usually ship with almost ALL of them working without any problems.

With this basic idea, there is no difference between Linux distros and BSDs.

All of the software installed in a default install of OpenBSD, is maintained by OpenBSD developers as a tightly knit group. There is a huge difference between that and Linux where developers of various software work together largely independantly of the other groups and then communicate when it comes time to tie it all together, but not necessarily cooperate. Consider that those various groups also don't always agree and go their own way with some fundamental aspects. I see Linux distros and BSD development as being very different and to me it shows when I use them.

Have you spent much time in various Linux distros and BSD's?

There is still a great deal of 3rd party code used in BSDs needed to even *build* the system, let alone have any functionality.

The point with BSD, is that when external code comes in, it is maintained from that point internally. That code does not keep getting imported each time it changes externally just because that happens. This avoids problems being crept in. It only gets imported if deemed worthy. New code does not very often get imported anyway and when it does, external changes are usually re-implemented rather than being imported as is. This is what I am refering to when I say, "take ownership".

What's more, most Debian people who package eg. the kernel are actually kernel developers as well who work on the upstream kernel. So it's not like a huge difference there.

I would not doubt this. However, in OpenBSD, the developers don't just maintain the kernel and libraries, they maintain all of the software that gets installed by default. They even maintain and modify gcc and X. As far as the kernel goes, it is specifically developed for OpenBSD as a whole, not a much larger community outside of OpenBSD. They can focus on their system as a whole when developing their kernel as a result of this. Not take into consideration every other user outside of their system. This all makes for an absolutely