The DragonFly Git repository of pkgsrc now has the 2013Q1 branch. You can switch to it by editing your /usr/Makefile (look for existing references to either pkgsrc master or pkgsrc-2012Q3) and using the normal commands.
If you have a mfi(4) device – in other words, a LSI MegaRAID SAS driver – you can now see/import/clear/etc. foreign configurations, thanks to this commit from Sascha Wildner, tested by Francois Tigeot, and originally from FreeBSD.
For the confused, ‘foreign’ means any disk hooked to a RAID controller that isn’t part of a configuration the RAID device already knows about. A replacement disk, or more worryingly, a good disk gone bad/unrecognizable. (I’ve had both.)
If you have an ath(4), wpi(4) or iwi(4) wireless network link, and you’re running DragonFly-master, please update. Sepherosa Ziehau has pushed Johannes Hoffman’s wlan_serialize branch, which means bringing up wlan0 is a bit easier – and less crashy.
It needs to be tested for wpi(4) and iwi(4), however, so if you have success or failure with those devices, please say so in reply.
(new post category starting now: “Please test”)
DragonFly 3.4 is branched – as a release candidate, with the current target for 3.4.0 release as the weekend of April 13-14. See the tagging commit note for a list of all the commit messages.
Note that in previous releases, we tagged “x.y.0” on branch, and “x.y.1” on release. I’m now tagging “x.y.0rc” for the release candidate at branch time, and we’ll tag with a more normal (to my ears) “x.y.0” for the release.
If you build a 3.4.0rc image right now, you’ll get an older quarterly release of pkgsrc. That’ll be changed tomorrow as the DragonFly pkgsrc git source is updated and I change where 3.4’s /usr/Makefile points.
The 2013Q1 branch of pkgsrc has been announced. Along with the normal quarterly material, there’s several notes: preliminary Cygwin support is present, ruby 1.8 will be retired in favor of 1.9 after this release, and the pkgsrc.org web page now has a very nice new look and logo.
I plan to branch DragonFly 3.4 very soon, and that version will have 2013Q1 as default.
Update: The 2013Q1 branch should be available by tomorrow on DragonFly’s git; the repository needs to update and convert from NetBSD’s CVS and that takes a little time. I’ll post when it’s ready.
I hope you like reading; there’s some very meaty links this week. Go get a cup of tea and settle in. You drink tea, don’t you? You ought to.
- Reading about KDE’s repository near-meltdown makes me think we need more checks for DragonFly. We have the advantage of Hammer, of course, which would help in the same way that the linked article names ZFS as a ‘fix’. (via multiple places)
- We know that Apple will reject apps it disagrees with. Google also will do so. Has there ever been a program rejected from pkgsrc or (FreeBSD/OpenBSD) ports on content grounds? Not that I know of – anyone remember differently? I’d argue that’s a favorable point for the BSD packaging systems, though it may just be that no application has tested those boundaries yet.
- Portscanning all IPv4 addresses on the planet. Possibly the largest distributed effort ever? The detail in the maps and returned services is especially interesting. (via)
- Scale Fail, a Youtube video of a 2011 talk about screwing up your services. Mostly about the humor, but the underlying points are valid. (via #dragonflybsd IRC)
- There’s still improvement possible to fsck, apparently based on this. That’s UFS2 fsck.
- What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? A very thorough explanation of verbs, marks, and registers. Holy cow, I wish I had known about ‘: … v’ before. It’s long, but worth it. (via)
- Matthew Garret’s description of Secure Boot vs. Restricted Boot with UEFI, (via a coworker who went to Libreplanet 2013). I’m still not sure what DragonFly will need to do about this.
- I missed mentioning this earlier: 20 years of NetBSD. We’re coming up on 10 soon.
- Dragonfly drones. Unrelated except for name.
- That guy who starts to froth madly every time BSD is mentioned on Phoronix is still there (see comments).
- Mainframe computer supercut. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter asked people for their lists of webcomics that could go in a ‘Hall of Fame’. The resulting list is a lot of really, really good material. Go use up a few hours reading.
I saw this Hacker News post and figured I should emphasize: pkgsrc is still going to be available in the 3.4 release of DragonFly; we’re not suddenly switching to dports. I don’t want anyone to think they’re going to have to rip out all their packages and go to a new, untried system, all at once.
If you were thinking, “Hey, I’d like to try an early version of DragonFly 3.4 before it’s released”, I’ll just point you at the recent daily snapshots of 3.3. These are close enough to a release candidate, I think.
The next release of DragonFly will be 3.4, and it’s probably going to be mid-April.
EuroBSDCon 2013 is being held in Malta at the end of September, and the Call for Papers has just gone out. BSDCan 2013, which is the tenth BSDCan (!) and happening in May, just opened up registration. Same for PGCon.
OpenGrok is a source browser that I have not used extensively, but many people say is a great tool. The same people say it’s difficult to run. Zafer Aydogan just posted that DragonFly’s source is available now from his perfectly-functional OpenGrok installation.
(I’ll put it in the links sidebar here, too.)
Michael W. Lucas posted about his results selling an early edition of his recent DNSSEC book through Leanpub. He lays out all the numbers in detail, the sort of thing I love to see. The idea of self-publishing and open source go hand in hand, but the idea of that selling is often talked about in speculative terms rather than concrete. He’s now opening his own direct sales store, which hopefully means more direct BSD material.
It’s still snowing in my area, which is unusual. And great!
- An IBM Selectric being gutted, in stop motion.
- Apple is Losing the War – Of Words. I’m not interested in it for Apple, but rather the casual reference to the huge quantity of astroturfing going on, all the time, from major tech companies.
- Following up on my earlier tweetspam post: World’s Best Spam. Remember, recommendations from others is the most effective persuasion method to get people to buy, so there’s a big economic incentive to create positive recommendations. (via)
- Related: The Economics of Spam. (via)
- se, a modernized, screen-oriented ed. (via)
- Where the symbols “+” and “-” came from. (via)
- A Partial History of Headphones.
- Geometric shapes in Latex. I’m sure someone will find this useful. (via)
- “The Kung Fu Killing Machine DragonFly” See the second cover. I have this actual series in paper form; it’s great. (via)
- That Afrodisiac comic from the previous link is available from the publisher; there’s a PDF preview.
- Continuing – the best blaxplotation homage ever is Black Dynamite.
- I never promised I’d stay on topic here.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: French cartoonist Boulet knocks it out of the park again.
NetBSD is using/will be using? ‘npf’, a new version of pf similarly-named-but completely-different firewall from pf. Hubert Feyrer put together a bunch of links talking about it. I link this because DragonFly is using a version of pf equivalent to what OpenBSD 4.8, and there’s been some discussion of what to do next; it appears FreeBSD and NetBSD are forking off separately from OpenBSD’s version.
Update: npf and pf share 2 letters in the name and nothing else, as Joerg told me – corrected.
Hey, look, DragonFly BSD showing in tweetspam! Don’t bother following the tweeted links; they don’t have anything useful. It’s entertaining to see the structure and coding of these bots; they’re no horse_ebooks, of course.
There’s an as-yet-undiagnosed problem with the @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists; you won’t see any mail from them right now. I don’t have an ETA for a fix because I don’t know the underlying cause yet…
Update: Fixed; I think – dragonflybsd.org DNS server was not responding, and it had a ripple effect.
I’ve put in an application for DragonFly to be a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization for the 6th year in a row – we have mentors lined up, so we’ll know by the Friday after next. See my post on kernel@ for pretty much what I just said.
If you are a BSD Magazine subscriber (meaning you provided your email to download a free issue), you can get a 20% discount on a security e-book from Craig Wright. As the promtional email said, ‘Write to editors@bsdmag.org with “BSD ebook” in the title of message to get the special code’. I have no idea of the contents; just the existence of the sale.
OpenBSD has a new identd daemon. Is identd used for anything other than verification when connecting to an IRC network? I’ve never seen it in another context.
Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD. I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point. Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old. The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.
Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use? I don’t know the answer.