This month’s issue of BSD Magazine is titled “The Wonders of Blender”, but there’s a lot more articles in there with other topics. There’s a two-page spread of DragonFly news that may look familiar to readers of this site…
The GIF format, or rather the LZW format it uses, is no longer patent-encumbered. (GIF patent worries led to the creation of the PNG format, if I’m not mistaken) Matthias Drochner has changed pkgsrc to use giflib instead of libungif.
According to Wikipedia, the patent expired more than 5 years ago, so this isn’t really news other than some packages need to be rebuilt. Still, memories of the general Internet Outrage from a decade ago are interesting compared to the events of today.
Venkatesh Srinivas performed the fefe.de ‘scalability’ benchmarks, which have been mentioned here before. He performed it on different hardware and only with DragonFly, so it’s not really for comparison but rather for analysis. However: graphs!
Matthew Dillon added some system tunables to match these microbenchmarks, and then changed the values. The benchmarks looked better, but according to him you wouldn’t want to run a system normally with those values.
Did you know that Euraeka, a news search site, runs on DragonFly? I did not. Now we both do!
There’s two recent changes for pkgsrc and DragonFly:
- DragonFly-current (2.9) now pulls the most recent pkgsrc quarterly release (2010Q4) by default, instead of pkgsrc-current. This means more packages will be working with the default setup, plus pkg_radd and other tools will be pulling the same ‘generation’ of software.
- The DragonFly/git version of pkgsrc can now be created as a shallow clone. This means less file history, but also means a much faster download.
Dan Langille has announced the BSDCan 2011 schedule/list of events in several places. There’s some fun stuff in there, like discussion of Sendmail from the guy who (originally) wrote it. There’s a talk about Roff (it’s that old?)from Kristaps Dzonsons, whose mdocml also happens to just have been committed by Sascha Wilder to DragonFly’s contrib.
NYCBSDCon 2010 was crazy fun. I hope I can make it to BSDCan…
- The Cognitive Style of Unix (via) – I find this argument absolutely correct based on all my computer experience.
- Hacker News is apparently getting more of a general news bent, rather than the actual hacker news it started with. (via) That seems to be an easy trend for many tech sites that start out focused on a topic (Let’s cover this area of interest!) and eventually diffuse (Let’s cover all our reader’s areas of interest!). It may be because that seems to bring greater subscriber numbers? Slashdot would be a good example of this generalization.
- Note to self: Try to not do that with the Digest.
- This page has a lot more good places to visit, but I’ll just link directly cause I don’t have any more commentary to associate with it.
- Did you know there’s open source software for managing conferences? Not conference calls, but full-on have-speakers-with-papers-and-attendees-with-a-schedule conferences? It’s called Pentabarf, and it’s used for BSDCan, among other things. I find the name funny, and it has funny origins.
- Well, if I’m going to have a Discordian link, I should have a BSD-related Subgenius link. By the way: I can perform weddings. You know, just in case that comes up.
- You know you’re important when the IETF needs to come up with a plan to deal with your retirement. (via) This is why it’s neat. Go, look, because this is one of those parts of the Internet that will not exist this way again, ever.
- This article at The Register about how open source isn’t making it very far in app stores is more aggressive than exploratory, as Register articles usually are, but there are some good points: phone app stores are able to charge money because of the ease of the delivery system, which apparently trumps ‘free’. It’s also more purpose-built; pkgsrc I bet would work on an Android phone, but there’s not many applications you could interact with, easily.
Jaime Fournier ran a Ruby benchmark against the various BSDs. (noted via IRC and here) DragonFly came out scoring very well. However! I don’t really know what these benchmarks are testing, since I haven’t used Ruby or these tests before. Jaime seems to be planning more tests.
Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010 is online, in video form. I got to see this as it happened, and it was a excellent talk. Mr. Lucas is able to put some reasonable arguments together as to the why of things, since he’s been published multiple times, plus his sense of humor keeps it moving.
Hey, wait – there’s more from the conference on BSD TV! How did I miss this? Hopefully even more will show up; the facility was perfect for recording.
Joe Talbott has some changes for both Intel and non-Intel wifi NICs; please try out his branch and report the results.
Sascha Wildner has changed the default compiler to gcc 4.4. See his commit notes for some details. To my knowledge, we’re the only BSD using this recent a version.
A full buildworld/buildkernel is probably the best strategy. I’ll be rebuilding all the pkgsrc packages for 2.9 using gcc 4.4… This will take at least a week.
I forgot to mention it when I did this opening night, but: DragonFly’s application to Google Summer of Code 2011 is in. We find out if we’re accepted on the 18th.
If you’re curious, I have a bulk build on DragonFly 2.9/x86_64/pkgsrc-current finished. Work on the programs that don’t build is always welcome. It’s pretty good for bleeding-edge, though!
“Co-Creation” is the theme of this month’s Open Source Business Resource, and appropriately enough, it has two editors. This issue has perhaps the most umlauts ever.
… is to make its patches unnecessary, by getting the changes needed for any program to compile on DragonFly built right into the program. (Often called “pushing patches upstream”) That usually means creating a patch and then tracking down the program authors to get them to include those changes in the next release of a project. That tracking down can be a majority of the work. In that case: thanks, Rumko!
Update: Also, thanks, Matthias Rampke! He did the same thing for pcc.
It’s not even released yet, but John Marino and Sascha Wildner have been laying the foundation for using gcc 4.6 in DragonFly. gcc 4.6 looks to have some new things in it; more Objective-C support and Go, too, based on my quick perusal of the gcc website.
“Arjun S R” wrote to the kernel@ mailing list asking about the Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly that he found interesting. Samuel Greear has a response so detailed it includes links to a similar project proposed last year. It also works as a good model for how much thought needs to go in before you start.
Update: there’s more, plus some pertinent advice!
Matthias Scheler is looking for Postfix testers. If you run it, he has a patch to version 2.8.1 he’d like you to try.
Also, the final list of GTK1-using packages that are not actively updated has been determined. These packages are leaving pkgsrc next week unless there’s any last-minute intercessions.
I’ve linked to it before, but it’s expanded since: the Google Summer of Code projects page on dragonflybsd.org has a whole lot of ideas listed. Please add to it, especially if there’s a project you’d like to be doing. (Here’s more thoughts, for example.)
Stéphanie Ouillon expressed interest in the virtio drivers as a Google Summer of Code project for DragonFly; Aggelos Economopoulos followed up with an explanation of the various work that’s been done, and further resources. I chimed in with my usual warning.