So, Saturday was the grand Kongoni hackfest. We had about 5 people on-site and a bunch more online, and people were hacking code. It was quite an event, one of those extra hot Cape Town days with a bunch of people (interestingly – men and women in roughly equal amounts) sitting around a coffee table with their laptops and hacking on code files – it just worked, beautifully.
It took us approximately 4 hours in all to do all the work we had set out to do, it falls on me now to merge all the code changes into the real tree and get it all tested (not everybody was able to test their own work – and of course, I have to test the integration of the work as well).
Lots of beer and potato chips were consumed during the day, and near the end a significant amount of meat was braaid and hand-eaten while the other hand kept on modifying code.
In short – kongoni_current should be slackware64 and bluewhite64 upstream compatible fairly shortly. We may yet be unable to do a soft-upgrade from Nietzsche to Cicero however, because unfortunately there are a number of other more difficult problems to fix first (primarily with trying to keep the current system working once the library directories are changed so that we can get the upgrades in).
At this stage, kongoni_current will install right if you upgrade your system to bluewhite64-13 using slackpkg or portpkg (though I haven’t tested the latter), slackware64 support will still take some work. At this stage I am tempted to skip the soft-upgrade work for Cicero (it only affects 64-bit, 32-bit works already) and do it for a second alpha or beta version, so we can start getting something new out.
I may go so far as to release Cicero only for 32-bit in order to get the rest of the stuff tested – and do 64-bit one release later again, this is something I will be discussing with the developers over the next few days and more will follow.
For now just- a big thank you to everyone who participated, I took some pictures which I will be processing tonight and the best few will join a news story on the kongoni site about the event.
All in all, there was also a consensus among those present that we should do it again – more hackfesting to come, of course as people get more proficient, the tasks can get ever more complex. Next one will be announced soon and planning commenced – and I know exactly what we ought to do with it…
-
Aragon
-
Failsafe