http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140719134058

Contributed by [jj](http://www.inet6.se) on Sat Jul 19 08:54:02 2014 (GMT)
from the master of puppets dept.

> This hackathon started out for me with my usual routine of fixing some bugs in Puppet, add more facts to Facter and dig into pkg-config.

> So started out in fixing an issue in Puppet where multi-flavored packages couldn't be updated and along the way I added support for the structured 'partitions' fact in Facter.
>
> A few weeks ago Stuart Henderson (sthen@) found several issues in pkg-config when it had to compare OpenSSL-like versions (1.0.1g > 1.0.1e). After I added the regress tests the issue was quickly fixed, a hackathon isn't complete for me without fixing at least one pkg-config issue..
>
> Most of the hackathon I've spent tidying the bootloaders MD parts and make certain functions MI which can be shared between bootloaders. This started out as a distraction from my work on the OpenBSD/octeon bootloader.
>
> Last year in Toronto I committed a collection of stubs for the bootloader, but I quickly ran into a misbehaving bootprompt. Both Paul Irofti (pirofti@) and myself couldn't quite figure out what was going on with the UART until Miod Vallat (miod@) helped to debug the issue; with that the bootprompt works reliably. We still cannot load a kernel yet, but most other parts (timeout, boot_info/boot_desc passing, root device decoding) are implemented. Next step would be to add support for loading a kernel off an internal CF card. One thing that Miod said about writing a bootloader quite stuck with me, it was along the lines of: "There's no beauty prize at the end and you only know what needs to be done when you're finished."
>
> Thanks again to Mitja for the great organization and setup.