MacPorts Meeting 2016

A MacPorts meeting would be an excellent opportunity to meet fellow port developers face-to-face, to brainstorm ideas together, agree about priorities of future development, decrease the number of open tickets, put your heads together and finally code (or force someone to code) those hacks that you never had time to or knew how to implement.

This should also be an excellent opportunity for anyone who would like to learn more about development of packages/port for the Mac. Or maybe you are a devoted user or a developer of some software package that doesn't have a package on Mac yet and you would like some help?

We need your input (and your presence at the meeting) to put together a wonderful program, packed with a mixture of interesting talks, round-table discussions, brainstorming sessions, hacking sessions late in the night next to a fireplace of a tile stove ... possibly while your kids have a snowball fight just outside of the house.

For some inspiration you could check ​a similar Randa meeting organized by the KDE group with ​a fundraiser to help developers attend the meeting.

Date and place

The first MacPorts Meeting will take place in ​Gozd Martuljek near Kranjska Gora, Slovenia (​map, ​homepage) from 13th to 17th March.

Saturday, 12th March	(Potential early arrivals?)
Sunday, 13th March	Arrivals, Get to know each other, Intro to port development, Spontaneous hacking sessions
Monday, 14th March
Tuesday, 15th March
Wednesday, 16th March
Thursday, 17th March	Visit qualifications of the ​Ski Jumping World Cup in Planica, Departures

(Most people voted for 4 nights, but there is still an option to start the meeting on Saturday if there is demand for a longer meeting.)

Organizers

• Mojca Miklavec (mojca)
• Aljaž Srebrnič (g5pw)

Confirmed participants

• Rainer Müller (raimue, PortMgr)
• Clemens Lang (cal)
• Peter Danecek (petr)
• Jackson Isaac (ijackson)
• Dagobert Michelsen (​OpenCSW packaga manager for Solaris)
• ...

Registration, fees & payments

	price	deadline
Super-early bird	220 EUR	31st December 2015
Early bird	250 EUR	31st January 2016
Late bird	280 EUR

The fees should cover everything except for your travel costs, extra drinks (or other activities like skiing if you choose to do that). Food, accommodation, tea, coffee breaks, use of the room where the conference will take place, ... are included.

If you opt for a single bedroom, you'll get a double room with a single occupancy in the main building. Please add an additional 20 EUR/night to the overall fee. You might also be able to sleep in a tree house instead of the normal room for no extra charge (hoping that the construction works on the house will be completed by the time of the conference).

Registration link: ​https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bZSY0bHtJPvYNq1gjm8QhkA7EhoBjVqKr_l7RQfGjlQ/viewform

Thanks to the ​ConTeXt Group for letting us us borrow their bank account, we'll collect the registration fees on that group's ​account number.

You can choose to pay the complete fee now or transfer 100 EUR now and the rest later (by the time of your arrival). Unless you live outside of Europe, please use the BIC/IBAN rather than the (more expensive) PayPal.

Proposed activities

• Workshops
  • motivation & team building
  • intro to port file development
  • a tour around base / intro to base hacking
  • setup of a buildbot
  • ... (fill in) ...
• Talks
  • New website (Ryan)
  • Port wrapper (Aljaž)
  • Build reproducibility (Clemens)
  • Upgrading Dependency Engine - My GSoC experience with MacPorts (Jackson)
  • ... (fill in) ...
• Discussions
  • establishing a formal entity or joining one
  • infrastructure: website, statistics, potential trac improvements, ...
  • improvements/changes in binary archives (support for libc++ on old systems, xz, ...)
  • packaging Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua
  • packaging Qt 4 and 5
  • simplify OS upgrades
  • ... (fill in) ...
• Hacking sessions
  • work on closing a list of tickets (prepared in advance, before the meeting starts)
  • enabling libc++ for < 10.9
  • archiving git/gh/svn
  • switching to xz for compression
  • ... (fill in) ...

Extra-curriculum activities

The location offers an option for a nice family vacation. You can choose to arrive earlier or depart later and we can take care of the room reservation (please ask for details over the email).

Either before/after the meeting or during the breaks there are options for:

• swimming (there is a swimming pool in a walking distance)
• skiing in Kranjska gora
• cross-country skiing (hopefully in the close vicinity if the weather will still permit)
• visiting ​FIS Ski jumping World Cup in Planica (17th-20th March) or just visiting the place and walking up the stairs to the top
• visiting ​FIS Ski Cup – Pokal Vitranc in Kranjska Gora (5th-6th March)
• walking
• a number of really nice sightseeing places that might require a car or a lift (Bled, Bohinj, ...)

Getting there

We will try to help you with the last mile arrangements and (even if we cannot promise that to everyone) we will try our best to try to pick up some of the participants with our personal cars when possible.

By plane

You can use ​http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ to find the cheapest flight and ​https://www.adria.si/ for search of direct flights to Slovenia. The easiest way to reach the location would be a flight to one of the following airports:

• Ljubljana Jože Pučnik/Brnik (LJU)
• Trieste (TRS, Italy)
• Venezia (multiple airports, Italy)
• Klagenfurt (KLU, Austria)
• Graz, Salzburg (Austria), ...

From the airport you can then either take a train/bus or a mini van ​GoOpti where you can get an inexpensive ride if you book at the right time (two or three months in advance or last minute with some luck).

By train / bus

There is a bus station just in front of the hotel. If you come by train, you can switch from the train to the bus in Ljubljana or Jesenice. If you fly to Ljubljana, there is a very short ride to get to that bus.

Here's a ​bus schedule (check for Jesenice ŽP - Gozd Martuljek Sp.Rute)

The best way to search for train connection is probably the German ​bahn.de. If you don't find any suitable connections to Ljubljana or Jesenice, try with Gorizia or Villach and contact us.

And of course you can always check for ​GoOpti's offers as well.

Car pooling

Check ​prevoz.org for car pooling options.