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.
- Coming Home to Vim. More tips than you can get through in one reading, I think. (via)
- This is a time saver: Vim completion. (via same place)
- You might be a Unix geek. (again)
- Hey, this is a good idea: OpenBSD commits on Twitter.
- I miss cassettes.
- “BSD is a Microsoft plot” is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a while.
- I like this Kickstarter for a USB LED indicator, and not just because it includes the man page reference in the project name. (via)
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.
Here’s the regular status updates for Mihai Carabas (scheduler) and Vishesh Yadav (inotify). I don’t have the update from Ivan Sichmann Freitas yet. Here’s Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
I think there’s a chance we’re about to see Microsoft start to slip downhill, in a way that may only be apparent a year from now if it continues. The company’s been a big moneymaker for years, but news items like the recent writedowns and my personal experience that they’re outsourcing license compliance checking makes me think that the rise of tablets and smartphones is cutting into their Windows/Office revenues like nothing ever has before.
It’s a guess, and it’s not likely that I’m right. If I am, it’s a seismic shift. Enough armchair theory! Here’s the links:
- Some details on the creation of the Bitrig project. It’s mostly the drama side of the story, rather than the practical details. (via) The project appears to be backed by a commercial company, which is helpful.
- “Get out of my way, window manager!” I don’t know if it’s any good, or evenif it works on DragonFly, but I like the name. (via)
- Dru Lavigne, the driving force behind a lot of good BSD things, gets interviewed. (via)
- Try Git in your browser.
- Building the British countryside generator. Come for the concept, stay for the explanation of Voroni diagrams.
- BSD 4.4 and IPv6, possibly mashed together. It’s kind of like making an all-electric Studebaker Land Cruiser, but worth it, in and of itself.
- DragonFly developer Alex Hornung has a blog, and I didn’t realize it. There’s some interesting stories on crappy multimeters and keyboard repair. Andsoftware.
- Hey, ADOM, which ceased development in 2002, is up as an Indiegogo project. It’s a very sophisticated roguelike, and it runs on DragonFly.
- Can someone help this guy with his NFS question? Maybe it’ll get answered before this gets posted, if I’m lucky.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: The Whole Story. A comics collection, sort of like the ‘humble indie bundles’ for games, where if you pay a bit more, you get even more comics.
If you want to put something towards DragonFly, and you don’t have time or hardware, cash is now an option. (It’s not tax-deductible.)
Nuno Antunes is still working on that netgraph upgrade. Among other changes, ng_tty has been added. What’s it do? Something with ppp, I think.
July’s BSD Magazine has, among other things, an article from Michael W. Lucas along with a 30% off coupon for his Absolute FreeBSD book. There’s also an interview of Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo. Apparently DuckDuckGo uses FreeBSD? That’s good news.
From a thread on users@, I bring you Visible Capacitor Failures. If the problems pictured are new to you… trust me, you will see them up close someday.
Someone trying DragonFly couldn’t get it to start, and appeared to have a confused disk. It looks like the system BIOS were at fault, and Matt Dillon has an explanation of this minefield. (Including some comments on 4k physical disk sectors.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added MSI-X support to igb(4), the Intel PRO/1000 gigabit network card. What does that mean? The commit message mentions a default transmit rate of 1.48Mpps small packets, which is good?
The usual weekly updates from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. Mihai has some interesting bugs found this past week by running his code on Matt Dillon’s 48-core system.
New company Gainframe is offering up OpenBSD dmesg/pcidump/usbdevs output for every system they build. I was originally going to link to this in a Lazy Reading entry, but then I realized it’s also a new company specializing in BSD-compatible hardware. Read the interview; I met Michael Dexter at the last NYCBSDCon and he is a decent guy.
We need more of this sort of specifically targeted work. Sites that rely on crowd-sourced contribution are good, but it’s not necessarily comprehensive, and you need a very large crowd for it to work.