A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Reminder: NYCBUG‘s next event is in two days. It’s “The Design of Unix Shell” with Stephen Bourne. You should go; it’s a chance to talk directly with the author of foundational software.
Update: apparently the slides for this talk have been ready for 48 years or so.
NYCBUG‘s next event, on 2026/05/13, is “The Design of Unix Shell” with Stephen Bourne. If you aren’t familiar with that name, you are probably using his software or something derived from it right now.
No theme, just fun.
nvi2, which is what you get in DragonFly when you type “vi”, has been updated to version 2.2.2. The nvi2 README gives a little history of how many years this has been around. Close to 50? A family tree would be interesting.
Related: turning on vim mode in Obsidian gets you this entertaining dialog:
Shouldn’t it be “vi mode”? Oh hey, look, an esoteric definition argument, just what you came to the Internet for.
I’m on the road as I type this – though I’ll be back by the time it’s posted – and so the links are without much comment.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: What’s the best comic I’ve ever read? Lynda Barry is a master of the form. (via)
Links are all over the map, but I mostly cleared my tab backlog.
A good checklist for build-your-own-desktop-env. (via)
This special episode of BSD Now has an interview with Warren Toomey. I just happened to sign up for the TUHS mailing list and let me tell you, there’s some history being reported there by the people that lived it.
This is pretty esoteric, but all of DragonFly’s syscalls can be found in the links Aaron LI provided in this post. There’s code in there that dates back to Berkley UNIX.
There’s no pun in the title; this week’s BSD Now really links to a browser implementation of UNIX-ish resources. Is it POSIX? Not quite. Is it UNIX? No. Is it Linux? Probably using that as a reference, so it’s a copy of a copy. Still, interesting. There’s other articles too; don’t be distracted by my digression.
The UNIX compliance link is worth reading all the way through; it is a chunk of history I did not know at all.
Relatively quiet this week for BSD items, but it’s a holiday week in the US.
UNIX history for the mini-theme this week.
Your unrelated animation of the week: Cyriak Animator Pro.
More BUG meetings are happening, which is great.
There’s some opinions mixed in this week!
Accidental theme of UNIX-ish history this week.
Your unrelated music of the week: The Most Noble Adventures of Erebor’s Finest Son, In His Quest To Butcher Orcs And Save The World. “Metal, minus those boring verses, choruses and solos, thus leaving only the most metal of song components; riffs and slams.” It’s bebop in metal form, and if you understand that joke you are a music nerd and it’s wonderful. (via)
POSIX is a sort of standard for UNIX maintained by the IEEE. Most UNIX-ish systems implement it to some extent, though I am not sure to what degree. There’s an open source version of the standard, and Aaron LI made nanosleep match up.
It’s the week of Very Long and Excited Page Titles that Give Me Long Link Lines.
I always thought IRC was pretty decentralized, but I didn’t realize talk(1) was designed to work machine-to-machine. That means in theory that if you have a talk(1) binary on your machine, you could chat directly to anyone else with the same binary, even on a different platform. Since 4.3BSD! Anyway, I only realized this because of this recent bugfix thanks to Dan Cross.