The iPad is BSD-based, which is neat.  I like the notion of covering more BSD devices and products here on the Digest. But: do you like even the vague concept of open source?  The iPad is expressly designed to limit your choices, especially with media consumption and the programs you run.  It's sort of like owning a TV circa 1975 - you get what large media groups and the network (Apple) want you to see. I don't want to come across as someone who's complaining because it's different - I'm complaining because it's not different. There's other people arguing the same idea, with even more reasonsThis is one of the most specific.  Plus, there's the natural progression...
(reproduced from my email to users@/kernel@) The application period for Google Summer of Code 2010 starts in about a week. We were able to enter in 2008 and 2009, so I'm optimistic that we will get in for 2010 too. Saying "I'm willing to mentor" doesn't force you to commit yet; you don't have to work with a student on a project you don't find interesting. However, mentoring is a multi-week commitment to support a student who may or may not have the best planning skills - please be ready to help. I need to know soon how many potential mentors we have since we have to ask for a given number of slots from Google as part of the application process.  If you are interested in mentoring, speak up here or by email, please. If there's a particular project on the GSoC 2010 page that looks interesting, put your name by it. http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/gsoc2010/
Joerg Sonnenberger announced new behavior in pkgsrc: Performing "bmake install" in pkgsrc with a package that supports DESTDIR will build a binary package and then install from that package.  This means a package will be successfully build before the installation process is started, and I assume is to assist further work down the road. Details: The old behavior was to build and install directly, which "bmake stage-install" can reproduce.  DESTDIR support means that the software can be installed as non-root.
Michael Neumann has fixed the ability to stream Hammer data between 32 and 64 bit systems.  However, this is a change to 64-bit systems that requires them to match; make sure that you are not mixing 64-bit systems built before and after this commit on the 21st. I can't find the commit message in the mail archive, so I'll quote it here: (more…)
As part of a report on the status of swapcache and tmpfs, Matthew Dillon noted that a side effect of using a SSD for swapcache means that disk activity stays efficient, and the wear meter on the SSD is reduced much more slowly than for regular disk use.
Constantine A. Murenin has committed support for aps(4).  This supports various sensors for disk and mouse activity, and even acceleration sensors.
The next release, 2.6, is scheduled for mid-March.  Please make sure things are running well, as there's a lot of new features already ready for this release.
This one's a few days old, but I'm still trying to catch up with all the events lately: swapcache now has two flags to control whether just meta-data or all data is cached for any given set of directories; caching everything is only worthwhile if the swapcache device can keep up with the resulting traffic. This requires a rebuild of world, if you're running 2.5 bleeding edge.
Naoya Sugioka's tmpfs port is now ready to go.  It's still considered experimental, but it's worth trying.  tmpfs(5) is different because it keeps data in RAM once, and pages out only when needed.  This best-case scenario is an improvement to mount_mfs(8) and md(4), its predecessors. It's running now on pkgbox64 and already seems to be speeding up the bulk build process.
The Google Summer of Code ideas page for DragonFly is growing faster than I expected.  If you have an idea (or, even better, want to take on a project assuming we make it into SoC), take a look.
Since I have several machines repeatedly building all of pkgsrc now, I want to monitor RAM, disk I/O, CPU, and the like, and keep historical records.  I've seen this done with cacti and snmp, and sort of done with nagios. There must be easier/prettier choices out there.  Any suggestions?
I've been working toward continuous builds of pkgsrc, so that there's always up-to-date pkgsrc binaries available.  I've been posting notes about it too, which I will hopefully be able to automate soon.  For example, Firefox 3.5.8, the most recent version, is already available.