A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
I’m back home and getting back into things, so here’s thing one: Michael W. Lucas was interviewed at BSDCan 2012 for 16 minutes about his recent and upcoming books.
Lucas also recently talked about a problem with port installation on FreeBSD. What he says there I think applies to pkgsrc as well.
(I haven’t even read my email yet, gee whiz.)
I may be on the road as you read this, so I’m trying to pre-pack this Lazy Reading entry. I also pre-apologize for any lack of posts from me.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack. UK readers may already be familiar with this artist.
Sascha Wildner’s been working on his own DragonFly live images, in DVD or USB form. It uses XFCE along with a number of other packages listed in his post. They are .xz compressed, so they are nice and small for download, but make sure you have something that knows that format.
Not all flavors of Atom CPU support frequency scaling, as Sven Gaerner found out. This means more heat and more power usage. There’s further details scattered through the thread, but Sascha Wildner found what seems to be the definitive answer of which variants do and do not.
Mihai Carabas has posted his weekly results, showing a 5% improvement in pgbench resultswhen using his scheduler. Vishesh Yadav is working on IN_MOVED_TO/IN_MOVED_FROM flags (part of inotify, I assume). Ivan Sichmann Freitas I haven’t heard from yet. (Ivan, where are you?)
Pierre Abbat noticed that bc(1)‘s usage of GNU readline something that wasn’t GNU readline made it harder to use; Sascha Wildner changed it to use libedit. Pierre’s other complaint, that BSD man page output stays on-screen when completed, is a positive feature. Linux systems that clear man page output enrage me, because I expect to be able to take advantage of my scroll buffer.
Juraj Sipos wrote me to describe MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a live DragonFly image that has additional software preinstalled, and can easily be set to understand Sanskrit. It’s available in DVD and USB versions.
Remember my crazy theory from two weeks ago? Haha! It doesn’t actually prove my idea because it’s a one-time charge, but I feel vindicated.
Thanks to David Christensen of Broadcom, Sepherosa Ziehau was able to add BCM5718 and BCM57785 support in the new bnx(4) driver.
According to Aleksej Saushev, pkgsrc is going to start defaulting to Postgres 9.1 instead of Postgres 8.4 by default, in just a few weeks. That means an upgrade in the next quarterly release, so keep that in mind.
John Marino sent a nice email to users@ about the improvements in build success for pkgsrc since May – and I can’t find it in the mailarchive. I’ll paste a summary after the break.
I hope it’s week 8. Anyway here’s the reports from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
It’s a short week this week, but that’s OK. The last few weeks have been a deluge of links.
Your unrelated link of the week: Crane Recursion. (via)
At least for DragonFly, every current participant in Google Summer of Code passed the midterm evaluation. Yay!
I don’t, but I know there are people that do. That’s why I’m pointing out this discussion where it appears that TeXLive 2012 won’t support NetBSD, which may mean no DragonFly either. There’s the not-yet-packaged alternative kertex. TeXLive is in pkgsrc, so I don’t know if that means the package will be discontinued or just altered.
(Please correct me where I go wrong here; I’m not very familiar with this, but it sounds like a drastic enough change that it should be mentioned.)
Update: as several people pointed out, it’s just prebuilt binary versions that aren’t being provided upstream. The packages will all still be present in pkgsrc. So, no functional change for most everyone.
… because versions 3.0 and 3.3 will be leaving pkgsrc soon-ish. You’d probably want to update anyway, but this is just in case you haven’t been upgrading too vigorously.
NYCBUG has a presentation tomorrow night titled “Bring a Box, Rock Your tmux(1)“, with Matthew Story. If you’re near the area, it’s worth seeing.
(posted for the benefit of the people who keep telling me “stop using screen and switch to tmux.”)
John Marino has added a ‘gcc47’ compiler ccvar, so you can build world and kernel with it. ‘It’ is actually gcc-aux, since it seems to work better than the basic (“vanilla”?) gcc47. You also get Ada support, though that wasn’t the driving reason to pick it. This is brand new so don’t try it unless you’re ready to discover issues.
Is there any other BSD able to use gcc 4.7 for world/kernel? Even 4.6? Most of the attention has been on clang.