Meeting Notes - Gerold Rupprecht

[Gerold Rupprecht]

Dear GNUsteppers,

Alpenstep 07 was held this weekend, with the first arrivals on Friday evening.

Senguin Gürkan and his girlfriend Katia were the first to arrive at Les 
Marecottes, travelling by train from Zurich. Unfortunately he was looking 
rather pale and was not feeling well. He did make it up for breakfast on 
Saturday, but he decided to head home afterwards. We hope he is feeling better 
by now and that he makes it for next time.

Senguin had helped alot on the prepratory work, giving his advice and helped 
making contacts. Thanks and look forward to your help for next time.

Riccardo and myself also had brought network switches, so we were able to do a 
reasonable job in getting everyone hooked up to the internet. I have made 
myself a note to bring a long ethernet cable to tap directly into the hotel 
router next time so we have more speed and better quality of service next time.

Nicolas Roard and Quentin Mathé came first to Geneva and helped me with the 
packing into the minibus late afternoon. We were on the road around 17:20 and 
arrived diplomatically late for supper at the hotel.

I had brought up two PCs dual boot with Windows 2000 and Debian Etch. Quentin 
spent some time with me, where I showed him the difficulties I was having to 
get started with GNUstep using the latest snapshots. 

Debian Etch has much stricter security for running scripts that use sudo than 
under Ubuntu or NetBSD and so the script to install GNUstep and Étoile was 
failing. We were able to clean up most of the mystery and Quentin will try to 
either finish modifying the script or create a C-tool to do the job properly.

I believe getting new developers for GNUstep requires a checkout configure and 
compile within twenty minutes to a working system and we should have this for 
Debian. Less stringent distributions such as Ubuntu will most likely "just 
work". This will also help for NetBSD (my speculation).

The Live CD from Gürkan Sengün is also very important, and I hope we can pick 
up from its current state soon as this will be important for FOSDEM.

Fred Kiefer and Riccardo Mottola joined me for a Saturday morning walk to check 
out the Hotel Balance restaurant. Good thing we did, as they were hosting a 
fasting workshop. We decided for the Italian restaurant we had walked by 
earlier, with home-made pasta on the terrasse, and superb view. I do not know 
who ordered the weather, but it was great.

The conversation centered around GNUstep in german, english and french. My son 
Axel is only starting to learn german. He disappeared after a while, but was 
happy to head off to the swimming pool with his brother and Manon, my better 
half.

Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf arrived in Martigny just after 11 am. in Martigny where 
I picked him up just before he paid for the train ticket to Les Marecottes. He 
had not slept too well travelling on the overnight train from Berlin and was 
happy to relax on the ride up. He had a bit of a headache, but seemed to be 
better after an aspirin that he got from Ms. Corinne Barman, our fantastic 
hotelkeeper.

Lars has been a supporter of GNUstep for quite some time, and has been helping 
to man the table at FOSDEM in years past. Lars hung out for the discussions and 
presentations but was the first one to bed on Saturday night. Lars, we hope you 
made it to work OK this morning and it was not too rough!

Saturday afternoon, after dessert, coffee and short walk back to our hotel we 
got down to serious work. We set up our computers on the biggest table in the 
room, and the water and fruit juices on one of the round tables behind our work 
area.

Fred and Nicolas were comparing notes for the problems they had found in 
certain graphic views. They compared application actions between Apple OSX and 
linux (Ubuntu ?) and then started digging each of them into the code. A few 
corrections later, added 32 bit image support and a recompile and we had 
support for transparent windows being demonstrated.

Niklaus Schaller arrived from Zurich by car, with his baggage lost in transit. 
Lunch seemed to pick up his spirits and he demonstrated his OpenMoku cell phone 
PDA with touch screen. Manon asked for a demo the next morning after I had told 
her about it.

He then described Simple Web Kit and what he and Riccardo Mottola had been 
working on. They were able to fix a few problems and then did a demo of 
Riccardo's Vespucci web browser which now can display live web pages, as well 
as change text scaling etc. They then investigated the problem with the 
scrollbar view not appearing as expected. I think they were pretty happy with 
the results of the workshop.

Fred Kiefer was consulting for almost everyone, but also gave us an update on 
GNUstep graphics and the problems he was working on. He explained some of the 
complexities he was facing (graphic, back ends), and that there are still 
numerous (55 ?) open bugs. He would welcome more help in squashing these open 
bugs as otherwise application developers will begin making workarounds at the 
application level (which is not a good thing).

Riccardo explained to us what he was doing with GAP (GNUstep Applications 
Project). Riccardo was quite pleased that a number of stubborn problems were 
able to be corrected. He appeared to thoroughly enjoy himself. He took a few 
moments away from the keyboard to exercise his Rolleiflex (a real film camera), 
so I hope we will have some good photos from Riccardo up as well. Check out 
Ricardo's blog with his notes from Alpenstep at:

http://multixden.blogspot.com/

Dinner was served at 19:00 at the hotel (in the room next door, so convenient). 
We had rump steak, so Fred went heavier on the veggies and some cheese... I 
warned everyone that dessert was included with the meal but they should leave 
some place for GNUstep cake. The dessert was a mixture of cooked fruits with a 
special carmel sauce, that was good enough I was tempted to have a second 
helping...

I held off, and went with Ms. Barman to fetch the cake which was in the walkin 
refrigerator in their kitchen (spotless). As we were two persons less, the 
slices remaining were oversize! I made sure Ms. Barman and the two employees 
serving us each got a piece. They have to know their suppliers - it was great!

My boys after eating all they could headed out to play in the playground at the 
opposite side of the hotel. They came back to say good night to us all as we 
continued to talk GNUstep, myStep, Étoilé, graphics, backends etc.

We headed off to our rooms around 1.30 in the morning. Quentin and Nicolas were 
night owls and continued into the wee hours, so were the last up for breakfast.

Breakfast was a big buffet, with fresh local breads, muesli, fruits, eggs, 
cheese, sliced meats, confitures etc., all you could eat. They are used to 
serving the hiking / skiing crowd.

We continued in our room to hack, discuss until around 13:00 when we decided we 
wanted a simple lunch, so we tried out the pizzas down by the swimming pool. 
Everyone wanted to keep working on GNUstep, so the bathing suits stayed in the 
bag this time. I heard comments from several they wanted to stay longer...

At lunch Fred gave us a presentation (I let him summarise).


We also touched on the subject of FOSDEM.
                                  ======
The consensus was that a hacking session before FOSDEM should be organised. For 
most participants this would mean taking one or two days off work, so this 
should be planned far enough in advance so the most developers can attend. 
Something similar to Alpenstep, where we are all at the same hotel.

For the logistics, I would like to know how many would want to attend. This is 
the first step to choosing a venue. Suggestions for the venue are welcome.

Would a joint working session with the Debian persons be of interest? Our 
projects overlap, and Debian had their FOSDEM table almost next to ours. 

For persons such as Sengün who is working on both projects, this might be most 
appreciated. I hope Axel Beckert is also interested.

Adam can you open a page on the wiki for me? Working together the way we did 
for Alpenstep seems to have been a good arrangement. A title with the phrase 
"FOSDEM 2008" in it would be appreciated.

I will see about contacting the FOSDEM organisers as well for suggestions.
 
The general feeling is we will probably be between 10 to 14 participants. We 
will probably want one or two smaller rooms  in close proximity where we are 
staying.

The developer working session would be just before FOSDEM.

We need feedback if this should be a one day or two day hacking session (start 
Thursday or Friday).

Price wise, we want to keep the prices accessible. We want something a bit 
better than the youth hostel, but sharing rooms was acceptable. We were four to 
a room here in Les Marecottes, and it seems to have worked out fine.

Brussels offers alot of different eating places, so it seems eating out with 
just breakfast would be what we are aiming for.

Internet connections are of course essential, preferrably with a backup.

                                  ======

After lunch we arranged to eat the rest of the cake.
 
Niklaus Schaller was the first to leave us with a long road trip ahead of him, 
passing through Stuttgart to return to Munich. Niklaus turned down the last 
piece of GNUstep cake before leaving us, but I think it was difficult for him. 

At around 16:30 we were taking down the network and packing everything up. I 
really appreciated everyone's help cleaning up, packing the equipment and books 
to the minibus (at least it was downhill this time).

We said goodbye to Fred Kiefer, who was staying on for another day. Manon and 
my boys had left earlier, so we took Lars all the way to Lausanne to the train 
station (I think we got their in time). Nicolas continued sorting through his 
pictures and Quentin was busy on his notebook.

After Lausanne we had some time, so we took the route through the vineyards for 
part of the way, and then drove through Nyon along the lakeside back to Geneva. 
We left Nicolas at the security check at the airport after registering for his 
flight. As he got his photos up on flicker 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79878597@N00/

we know you got back home safely.

A big thanks to Quentin Mathé who helped me unload the minibus back in Geneva. 

Manon and the boys were already at the table eating. We joined them  and then I 
took Quentin to the border where he had left his car.

I hope everyone got home safely. It has been a pleasure to meet and work with 
you.

And what about Alpenstep 08? 

Do we try for the same place and dates for next year? I am willing to take on 
the organising as for this time. Adam, do we make a new wiki page?

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Sincerely,

Gerold
-- 
Gerold Rupprecht
10 rue Louis-Curval
CH-1206 Geneva
Switzerland

Tel./Fax        (41) 022 347 73 96

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