The p2k17 hackathon has concluded, and we have our first report. Matthias Kilian ( kili@ ) wrote in:

Berlin is a strange place. Even if only 90 minutes east from my place (travelling via train), it seems to be in a completely different time zone. So i entered the hack room even later than during previous ports hackathons (after missing the first day completely).

Anyway: my personal rule after p2k16 was: don't look at ghostscript, because it will completely ruin the whole week. So I didn't look at it, but I looked at xpdf again (after some mails on ports@ during the last weeks). Paul and Marc asked me why not just commit it, so I did, with printing not working, which is good for the environment, but not so good for people who want to print a single page out of xpdf. I hope to find a way to get a patch Ingo sent to ports@ working properly.

Still not looking at ghostscript, I switched my ports tree to poppler-0.59 again, trying to find more fallout from the Object API breakage, this time with some patches applied to texlive (which just doesn't build against poppler>=0.58). The build result was promising (I got a texlive build with poppler-0.59), unfortunately, the patches I'm using aren't correct, and pdftex/pdflatex fail for math/R and math/octave (which I just noticed today). So nothing to commit now.

When not looking at ghostscript during a ports hackathon, some productive things may happen. For example, I finally managed to remove meta/haskell-platform (which once was a nice idea but today implies far too many dependencies), update a couple of haskell ports in my tree, and a new (not the newest) ghc will soon enter the repository. And maybe a lot of now unused hs-ports can be removed.

Even if I missed half of the hackathon (because of the above mentioned time zone shift in Berlin -- I almost always entered the hack room after 3 pm), I really enjoyed it. The absolute highlight was Stefan pulling all those ancient Linux distributions from the back rooms of IN Berlin, especially DLD ("Deutsche Linux Distribution", also known as "Reichs Linux Distribution" ;-)).

Many thanks to Stefan and Benno and to IN-Berlin.