Two pkgsrc work directory tips

Two tips for working with pkgsrc, derived in part from this mailing list post on users@ (follow the thread) and from my own experience.  If you put WRKOBJDIR=/usr/obj/pkgsrc into /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf :

  1. You can clean up any leftover package building files by deleting the files in that directory and leave your pkgsrc files untouched.
  2. You can have a read-only /usr/pkgsrc, which means it can be shared over NFS (or SMB?) between multiple machines, DragonFly or otherwise.
Lazy Reading for 2011/12/04

Another week, another linkpile.

  • Here’s some old software.  I’ve got something older sitting on my shelf here, though.
  • A patch to DragonFly, taken from OpenBSD, submitted by Loganaden Velvindron and committed by Venkatesh Srinivas.  The patch isn’t that exciting, but it makes me feel cool to namedrop non-Americanized names.  If only I could pronounce them!
  • Speaking of which, there isn’t always a lot of comments on this Digest (which is good; a long series of comments on the Internet tend to be the result of trolling or inanity.), but the recent strlen() story led to some juicy details.
  • Man, I wish this NoteSlate device existed.  There’s the BoogieBoard, but it’s not quite the same.

I’ll make up for my relatively low number of links by asking a question:   Where do you go for your end of year gift giving?  Where do you wish people would go to buy you gifts?  I’m looking for suggestions for a gift guide.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Gun Show.  This one and that one are my favorites.

Parallelized buildworld now possible

Buildworlds are now much faster, because they can run themselves in parallel.  Invoke it using the -j option to make.  Matthew Dillon saw a 25% reduction in time when using ‘make -j 12 buildworld’ on a 4-core system.  You may need to manually update xinstall and mkdir:

        cd /usr/src/usr.bin/xinstall
        make clean; make obj; make all install
        cd /usr/src/bin/mkdir
        make clean; make obj; make all install

It’ll also use more memory than a non-parallel build, but heck, that’s cheap these days.