Over the weekend the NetSurf developers met to make a concentrated effort on improving the browser. This time we were kindly hosted by Codethink in their Manchester office in a pleasant environment with plenty of refreshments.

Five developers managed to attend in person from around the UK: Michael Drake, John-Mark Bell, Daniel Silverstone, Rob Kendrick and Vincent Sanders. We also had Chris Young providing some bug fixes remotely.

We started the weekend by discussing all the thorny core issues that had been put on the agenda and ensuring the outcomes were properly noted. We also held the society AGM which was minuted by Daniel.

The emphasis of this weekend was very much on planning and doing the disruptive changes we had been putting off until we were all together.

John-Mark and myself managed to change the core build system as used by all the libraries to using standard triplets to identify systems and use the gnu autoconf style of naming for parameters (i.e. HOST, BUILD and CC being used correctly).

This was accompanied by improvements and configuration changes to the CI system to accommodate the new usage.

Several issues from the bug tracker were addressed and we put ourselves in a stronger position to address numerous other usability problems in the future.

We managed to pack a great deal into the 20 hours of work on Saturday and Sunday although because we were concentrating much more on planning and infrastructure rather than a release the metrics of commits and files changed were lower than at previous events.

More feedback on the water heating. Rafael Villar Burke wrote:

"Most regulations already mandate that. This requirement conflicts with how performant are low temperature heating systems, as most solar ones... so, to be safe, they're less efficient."

Joe Buck commented:

"If you have small children, and set your hot water heater at 60C, expect to take them to the hospital with second-degree burns on a regular basis."

Even if it was 60C at a tap, it will still take 6 seconds to burn, according to Burn Safety: Hot Water Temperature, but I was talking about storage tanks, not a water heater. Sorry if that was unclear. After running around the house floors and walls to get to a tap from the storage tanks, it's never going to be at 60C unless your pipes are super-insulated or your water flow is very fast (unlikely, as most tank-fed systems won't have much head).