Hell Oh Entropy!

The FAD (Fedora Activity Day) was announced over a month ago with an intention to get some real work done during an event. I really only had a chance to participate in 1/4th of the FAD (1/2 day on Saturday), since I had to fly to Bangalore on Saturday evening to spend the weekend (or whatever was left of it) with family. But that was enough to get whatever I wanted out of the event.

Being pretty much a newcomer into the Fedora community, there wasn't much that I could think of to directly contribute but I wanted to do something. I really only maintain 1 package, which also does not have much traffic, so I wasn't exactly brimming with ideas. Rahul helped me there by asking me to do an Autotools workshop. I was also looking forward to meeting some of the guys I had met at FOSS.in last year; Susmit, Hiemanshu and Sayamindu. I could not meet Hiemanshu (did he come at all?), but it was good to meet Susmit and Sayamindu after quite a long time.

We started the day with my autotools workshop; I hope at least someone found it useful. I demonstrated the process of autotoolizing a simple C program using the same example I used during my Fedora classroom session earlier this month: linkc. The main reason I keep choosing this program is that I am too lazy to find or write anything on my own. The other reason is that the program helps to cover quite a few things at one go -- it is small, it has an external dependency, a subdirectory and some distributable files. So all those things win over the fact that the app just doesn't work as advertised. Oh well...

Once the only "session" of the day was over, everyone announced their aims for the two days while Sankarshan distributed some swag (t-shirts, stickers and buttons). After that it was pretty much everyone working on their own stuff. Me too.

Only a couple of days before FAD, Ray van Dolson added me as a co-maintainer for libyahoo2 in Fedora so that we could share the workload of doing releases/bug fixes. After discussion with him, I decided to do a libyahoo2 release into rawhide during the event. So I finally had something that I could do, which was much closer to Fedora.

I knew that the release would break freehoo, a console messenger for yahoo since libyahoo2 1.0.0 broke all backward compatibility, so I set about fixing that. The result was a bug report with a patch to fix freehoo to build with the latest libyahoo2. Finally, I also changed ayttm to dynamically link against libyahoo2 instead of cloning the code base all the time. There was absolutely no incentive in maintaining two code bases for it, so it finally had to go.

By the time the ayttm change was done, it was time to leave. But before that, Kushal asked me to take a look at libraw to see if I could pitch in with something there. So I will be looking at autotoolizing it and packaging it for Fedora. I was supposed to do it today, but all of my day was spent in playing catch-up with work at my day job. Maybe I'll have more time tomorrow for it.