Went to AUUG2005 last week. It was quite interesting for a couple of reasons: I got to meet some of the other OpenBSD and OpenSSH folk (none of whom I had met before), I got to meet some folk from other projects and saw some interesting presentations.

On the OpenBSD side, djm presented a paper on Secure Portability and Reyk Floeter presented a paper on OpenBSD's wireless support and hostapd. Among the other presentations, Brian Cantrill's on Dtrace in Solaris, Steve Landers' on crypto APIs in TCL and Peter Gutmann's on Sustainable Open Source Development were particularly interesting.

Over a few drinks after djm's presentation, Peter was talking about some kind of knowledge base containing what had been learned during the porting process, with us, the MySQL folks and possibly others. It sounded like a good idea at the time, and, somewhat surprisingly, still did the following day.

Stuart Smith from MySQL has now set up the PortaWiki to start the process off. I've just spent an hour or so writing articles for it from where the existing content fired random neurons.

Ultimately, I'd like to see the same content indexed by both function and platform. This would cover the 2 common cases in my experience: "I'm porting to platform FooBar, what are the gotchas?" and "I'm thinking of using the fobar() function, where is that going to bite me?" Hopefully this will turn into a valuable resource.