This is a community event where FreeBSD committers help people to understand what are ports and how to package new software to submit it as a new port.
The Ports System used in FreeBSD is dead simple. It should be easy for any open source software publisher to submit their code to FreeBSD. But they just don't know how simple it is, so we are gonna show 'em.
The event can be prepared to last from a couple hours to a whole day. It's all a question of participants and organizers convenience. But less than one hour could be too short.
Best is to find a venue with good Internet connectivity and a local network where we can put a test server. You need chairs and table, because people typically bring their own laptops.
It's optimal if some FreeBSD committers can be involved in the Camp, so they can explain the process of submission, detail the reviewing, show how they test, up to the point they commit your submission into the ports tree.
For practice purpose it will be convenient to prepare a computer in advance, installed with a functional and recent FreeBSD, with Poudriere already installed and configured, and images already downloaded.
Optimally the participants should be able to ssh to the Test Server (running Poudriere) and either test their builds locally if they are very simple, or launch the tests in Poudriere.
The point is that the participants don't need to install anything, they will have access to a FreeBSD environment using ssh on the local network.
This can be an IRC channel created on the spot, or whatever other group instant messaging the organizers feel comfortable with. The point is to have a place where people can share URLs easily.
The local FreeBSD server should be all prepared including the user accounts of the participants. To do so, probably it can be convenient to use github for registering participants, and grab ssh public keys from there, but any other method can be setup by the organizers.
The user accounts also can be created on the fly without much trouble at the beginning of each camp.
There should be at the beginning some introduction talk about what are ports and how to prepare them, how to make a shar and how to submit them, then how to update a port with a diff file. Then a list of possible candidates for porting could be presented to the audience, sorted by categories and difficulties level. This introduction is at the discretion of the presenter.
It can be good to have also quick presentation of bugzilla, freshports, portscout, phabricator, the porter's handbook, and other useful material.
Then everybody can try to create or update ports of their choice, all together in a close proximity with other people following the same path and not far from people that know the path very well.
When a port is ready, tested and uploaded, a committer can then show how the submission process is followed up and what leads to the port being committed in the ports tree.
Free of charge as FreeBSD!
A portscamp should be a great occasion to have great fun, learning useful stuff and meeting other people from various horizons.
We are in progress of setting up the first sessions:
- find committers interested to participate (we already have araujo@, lwhsu@, sunpoet@, kevlo@ at least)
- setup a date at the Taipei Hackerspace https://taipeihack.org/ (done: we will have january 15th evening)
- spread the word and find free software publishers that would be interested to participate and learn
- think about ideas to help finishing the translation of the Porter's handbook in chinese (discussion in progress on #2)
- prepare IRC channel #portscamp-tw on efnet? get a bot for factoids?
- setup a way for people to register to the first Portscamp (by mail? on a form? on facebook event? on meetup.com? on kktix?) (done: http://freebsd.kktix.cc/events/portscamp001)
- PortsCamp TW #001
- FreeBSD ports system slideshare from NCTU