Our next c2k15 report comes from Andrew Fresh (afresh1@). Andrew writes,

I started off the hackathon without a specific project in mind hoping something interesting would come up. In the mean time I thought I would work on running the GNU libtool tests with our libtool(1) in order to see if there were things I could fix or improve. I did get it to run, but their autowhatever tools to get it to go confused me too much and I ended up running `make test` in the port and stealing the test infrastructure from there. It turns out that was the wrong tack to find broken things in libtool. All the complaints were because our error messages don't look like their error messages or other similarly useless problems. If I end up back at this, I'll instead go find ports that use the other libtool and see if I can figure out why they use it.

I sat near schwarze@ and bmercer@ and it was awesome to see Ingo just coding away with purpose. On the other hand, bmercer@ had a bit of a harder time. He was trying to do several different things to improve armv7 and as one thing would frustrate him he would switch and do something else. I brought a chromebook that I was hoping we'd get a chance to try out but sadly didn't get that far which means I'll be bugging him online. I did enjoy being there when things weren't working so he could futilely try to explain the problem to me (I wasn't much help with kernel memory layouts). Fortunately others overheard and provided words of encouragement and some help which was one of my favorite parts of attending this hackathon.

I ended up picking up another project. stsp@ wants to improve our UTF-8 support and to that end we need to update src/share/locale/ctype/en_US.UTF-8.src. He asked if I could look into automating that and so I did. I spent a bit of time writing perl and a lot of time trying to make sense of documents put out by the Unicode Consortium. I have something mostly working but I need to figure out how to validate the output and then we should be able to move forward.

I drove to the Hackathon from Portland, Oregon with Lisa and Wayne. Because of this, and outside encouragement from bmercer@ I brought a couple of grinders, an electric kettle, a chemex, a french press and 14 pounds of coffee that was roasted in my neighborhood. I think it went well as there were questions about how I was going to bring this all to Europe in the future. We took four days to drive to Calgary via Montana, camping along the way and seeing some amazingly beautiful country. On the way home we took the Trans Canada Highway through the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver, stopping to camp for a night and see Canada's Glacier National Park which we are hoping to get back to.

Overall I had a great time, I really enjoyed the semi-formal presentation on the last day by people with bigger projects talking about what they've done and what they're doing in the future. I am immensely looking forward to the next hackathon I am able to attend.