Matthew Dillon is planning for a January release for 1.4; while a good number of bugs have been found and squashed, there’s still a problem with network interface removal that needs to be fixed before release. However, a second release candidate will be assembled tonight.
Better hope I’m talking about dump(8), eh? YONETANI Tomokazu found a problem in the way dump files were created after some changes were made in 1.3 development; the problem’s been fixed, but be warned: dumps from that time period won’t be compatible.
I have a lot of little items mostly about the 1.4 transistion, so I’m just going to dump them all out:
* There’s a 1.4 cvsup file that will track the 1.4 release. This will be in the 1.2 release too, as soon as I figure out how, or someone tells me how to commit to a tag.
* the ‘.sh’ suffix requirement for rc scripts is dropped from 1.4 onward; this may happen to 1.4 too. This is needed for some pkgsrc scripts that do not end in .sh.
* cvsup is going to be replaced , one way or another.
* DragonFly will never be binary-compatible with FreeBSD 5+.
* Please, won’t somebody fix rcorder?
dragonflybsd.org will be down temporarily; I’m pasting Matthew Dillon’s mailing list message below as it’s silly to link to a message about downtime on the site that’s going down:
There was a lot of lightning last night and then a small explosion outside that sounded like the transformer on the telephone poll. Then the lights starts to flicker continuously and the UPS started clicking in and out and… well, I decided to shut everything down overnight :-)
There will probably be some more downtime tonight. I have a UPS monitor but I never hooked up the client/server feature that shuts down all related machines automatically if power isn’t restored in 20 minutes. I am going to get that working properly tonight.
Oh hell. Power just failed again. I’m gonna probably have to shut things down again soon :-(
A contributor over at the #NetBSD Community Blog called me out on my errors. I corrected my goof on CGD, but I need someone to explain what the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip is. I know one’s a “work in progress”, but that doesn’t answer what the relationship is between the two, or how pacakges may move between them. I’m calling you smarty-pants out on the rug now – I want you to answer what 30 seconds of web surfing has not!
“Ed” posted a quote about STM – Software Transactional Memory – where memory usage in a multiprocessor situation is treated in a similar fashion to the way transactions are used in a database. Matthew Dillon wrote a lengthy response describing how DragonFly matches or improves on that system.
You may need to update your $PATH for pkgsrc when moving to 1.4, as the upgrade doesn’t necessarily change it for you. Fresh installs will be fine, however.
UnixReview.com has the “2004-2005 Annual SAGE Salary Survey” available on their site; skim it and look for your salary range.
The first release canidate for 1.4 is available now. A changelist will be available after Christmas Day, with the official release following.
‘Tis the season for new releases, as NetBSD 3.0 is out.
How’s Joerg Sonneberger’s bulk builds of pkgsrc for DragonFly going? It’s like this. The relevant stats for those too impatient to read: 4,269 packages built out of 5,742 (75% success rate).
The BSD Installer is at version 2.0; this is not yet (I think) the version included with DragonFly BSD. The web page isn’t updated yet, but it’s downloadable. Note that the download is just the installer, without an operating system to install.
1.5 is now going to be the Experimental version of DragonFly BSD (or HEAD for people used to FreeBSD); see the commit.
If you have an account on leaf.dragonflybsd.org, the pkgsrc-wip code is available at /archive/NetBSD-pkgsrc/wip or /usr/pkgsrc/wip. (softlink)
pkgsrc-wip, as I understand it – see comments, is the current version of pkgsrc. pkgsrc is normally released with new versions on a quarterly basis; following pkgsrc-wip gets the Work In Progress version. Less stable, more up to date.
As the final changes for the 1.4 release go in, Matthew Dillon describes the release plans as such:
I’ll be rolling the release branch thursday evening and start playing around with version numbers and release tags and such!
The official release will not occur until a day or two after Christmas.
OnLAMP has an interview with Roland Dowdeswell, author of CGD (“Crypto-Graphic Disk”) for NetBSD. CGD is an interesting disk driver that encrypts (and decrypts) disk data.
Joseph Garcia has added a commit history to his DragonFly BSD wiki page. It’s a nice summation of major code changes.
If you’re running the experimental branch of DragonFly code and you (re)built your system in the last 12 hours, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a quick fix for a typo that was present during that time.
Also, Simon has set up bridging between network cards, and posted instructions on how to set it up.
Among other things, UnixReview.com has a review of “Routing TCP/IP, Volume I, Second Edition”, and an interesting article called “Forensic Tools in Court“.