Contributed by phessler on 2014-07-14 from the update packages faster than you can download them dept.

Yet another report from the recently completed g2k14 hackathon, this time from Marc Espie (espie@) who writes

As for the hackathon, I came in right after a big change (reordered packages), and I was mostly ready to fix things if necessary. To my surprise, it worked like a charm... If I broke something, nobody noticed a thing (and you guys are going to enjoy faster updates).

After much nagging, Vadim Zhukov finally committed a digikam-kde4. I did crash-test the build, and inundated him with bug-reports that he fixed quickly.

I worked on a few small things... noticed a lot and fixed a wee little bit of the usual ports tree breakage related to those fearless source hackers (mostly libressl, endian.h and mesa updates fallout).

I worked on a new mechanism to ensure package snapshots consistency. Quirks now reports its signature date (which is itself checked, so you can't tamper with it), so you can know whether the snap is recent or whether someone has been hampering it to come to your favorite mirror...

... and quirks itself contains a list of vulnerable packages, which will raise a red flag if you need them, and they're NOT on your favorite mirror.

All of this is just indicative for the user, as the snaps still take a long time to fan out... we have ideas to help with THAT specific problems, but after discussion with the interested parties, it won't be deployed before the next release is out, as it would be too disruptive.

I also tried to fix a problem with ports build requiring src to be present for pkglocatedb. Much to my surprise, theo agreed, and we went further than anticipated, so the snaps now ship with locate dbs for src AND X.

I spent a lot of time playing with that: pkg_check now uses it, and actually will check your full file system. It's a bit too verbose still, but getting there.

Accordingly, I spent some time killing some old code. It's not as sexy, but it's possibly the most important part of the process, ensuring we don't run stuff that's no longer needed/maintained...

I should also mention importing a stand-alone cpp to deal with calendar and xrdb, eventually, so that X will no longer require you to install comp.

As usual, seeing fellow developers face-to-face was a great help in getting some things to move forward.

Thanks to the foundation for paying for the event, and to Mitja for hosting us, doing such a perfect job that we barely noticed it.