Note: The below contents are still in the draft stage, and may change with more planning

Welcome to the Nexenta Hackathon, an online developer event to collaborate and make Nexenta even better.

Contents

  1. What is Hackathon ?
  2. Roles in the Hackathon
  3. Bounties
  4. Getting Involved

What is Hackathon ?

A hackathon, a hacker neologism, is an event when programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming. These events are typically between several days and a week in length. A hackathon refers not simply to one time hacks, but to a specific time when many people come together to hack on what they want to, how they want to - with little to no restrictions on direction or goal of the programming.

Roles in the Hackathon

Repository Onlooker: This role would be to constantly monitor the repository and incoming packages, and identify packages blocking the AutoBuilders way, or packages which are high priority. He keeps track of package assignments, and in general delegate packages to participants requesting a package to build.

Requirements:

  • Familiar with Nexenta/Ubuntu repository, and how packages are added.
  • Familiar with the autobuilder at builder.tajinc.org

Package porting: This role is responsible for manual porting of packages that the AutoBuilder was unable to build. Manually building packages will lead to the Autobuilder also building other packages that depended on it.

Requirement:

  • Familiar with compiling FOSS applications, and Debian build tools
  • An added advantage would be experience in porting Linux code to Opensolaris/Nexenta.

Resources:

We also have a build machine for use by the community. Ask for our community login, and use the devzone to develop/build.

Articles: This role has been created to make Nexenta better documented. Below are a list of topics that we're often asked about on our support channels. Step by step instructions for the below will help greatly in helping the users of Nexenta, and increasing it's install base. Pick a topic from below and write an article.

There are no strict rules on how the article is written, but it should ideally have the following sections

  • Introduction : What does the article talk about, and a test scenario.
  • Preparation : Is there something that needs to be done before following the instructions
  • Step by step commands
    • -the commands are shown along with the output if possible -A small paragraph/line explaining what each command does.
  • Screenshots, if the topic calls for it.
  • Conclusion : Links to resources used/referred to in the article. Whom to contact for further help?

Depending on the type of article written, it may be something that belongs in the documentation section of Nexenta.org, or if more general, on one of popular online news publication sites like OSnews. This will introduce a whole new audience to the technology/topic.

Suggested topics (some of these also carry a small bounty)

  • Installing Nexenta under XEN.
  • Setting up LAMP on NCP2
  • Setting up X and a WM on NCP2
    • - For Gnome - For Enlightenment - other
  • Installing NCP to a partition and not the whole disk (this required dropping to the console if I recall correctly)

Distributionists: This role is responsible for creating spinoff distributions of NCP. Nexenta has an easy to use distribution builder. You'll need to create an iso for a specific audience. Once done, your iso can be hosted on nexenta.org if needed. You will also be linked from nexenta.org.

And its not just fame that comes your way. Theres a bounty for every distribution built with Nexenta Core Platform.

Suggested distributions:

  • NCP with a particular desktop
    • Gnome
    • Enlightenment
    • 9wm
    • other..
  • A DSL/milax equivalent of Nexenta.
  • A targeted appliance for a platform

Stabilizers: With many packages being built, testing them is a daunting task. To make NCP one of the best tested and stable platforms out there, we require our packages to be tested, and all bugs reported. Install packages that you're familiar with, and test them to ensure they work fully on NCP. If you run into a bug, please file it on our bug tracker.

Patch Manager: There are a lot of patches generated during Hackathons, and not all of them are sent upstream. It would be ideal if we had a setup where the patches were sent upstream to Ubuntu/Debian. This role requires someone experienced in patch/bug management in the Ubuntu/Debian community (preferable a developer from these projects)

Bounties

This Nexenta hackathon will also feature bounties for some of the tasks with higher priority in the community. These are listed on the Bounties page.

All your documentation can be published in this website. We'll also work with you to publish it on Unix/Linux news sites to reach out to a bigger audience. We can also host your distribution on nexenta.org.

Getting Involved

The hackathon is largely co-ordinated on IRC, in the channel #nexenta. You can join this channel using your favorite IRC client on the freenode server. Or you can use the web interface by clicking here. #nexenta is a lively place, and we'll try to help you out with issues you face.

For things involving more detailed analysis/discussions, use the gnusol-devel mailing list. The nexenta-changes mailing list is a largely automated list where all new incoming packages are announced. You can join these and other lists from the Community page.

Previous hackathon sessions: