Libtool is a very flexible but relatively slow tool used for a lot of software; it can impose a signicant time penalty during compilation. This post to debian-devel@debian.org names a new tool, dolt, which works as a drop-in replacement for libtool can significantly reduce build time. It’s not (yet) supported on DragonFly. The name comes from “do ltcompile”. (from Hasso on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Murray Stokely mentioned the new ‘gold‘ linker for GCC in a blog post. It’s going into binutils, and apparently would provide a nice speedup for linking C++ code. This won’t help so much with (most of) a buildworld on DragonFly, but it would definitely help for KDE or other large third-party applications. (via) No, I don’t know why it’s called ‘gold’.
A new one of these crops up every months or so: a reference list of common Unix commands. (Via)
Also, found with random Google search: BSD and Linux Filesystem Attributes.
This article, “Rethinking the interface to CPAN“, over at Perl Buzz, describes something there needs to be more of in the open source community. CPAN, for those who don’t know, is a way to automatically add various libraries to a Perl installation, similar to BSD ports/pkgsrc or Ruby’s gems.
This is the message from the article: provide a solution to a real problem. I bring this up because a reoccurring frustration people have with pkgsrc is how to upgrade packages. Now, there’s no lack of ways to upgrade, but none of these solutions are a match for what people want: an upgrade method that works without frequent side effects or extra work. This is why portupgrade is very popular for FreeBSD, or apt-get for Debian; it generally works as expected. We need more of the thought process that leads to those solutions, in open source.
I’m not bring this up just to pick on pkgsrc; we need this sort of thinking for the DragonFly BSD website, too. It (and the other BSD websites) take the role of a library shelf, with information only available by sifting through it until you find what you want.
Compare that to the Firefox website: most people are going to visit there to download Firefox. A smaller contingent will already have it and want to upgrade it. There’s a very clear visual path for 90% of the visitors to the site. Now, go to any of the BSD operating system sites, and say “How do I install a working desktop system, with X and a window manager and so on?” It’s going to take some digging.
A different way of looking at the open source projects involved in Google’s Summer of Code project this year: grouped by category. It’s interesting to see groupings like ‘Games’ or ‘Bioinformatics’.
BSDTalk 146 is out, with James Cornell interviewed in a 20-minute podcast. The host, Will Backman, asks “What are your favorite BSD-related websites?”, and “Where can you buy BSD on disk?” Leave a comment on his site if you’ve got an answer.
Matthew Dillon had another patch for his fairq code, adding changed prompted by Max Laier’s suggestion of WFQ, along with other ideas. There is one outstanding issue, however. The code causes an ABI change, so take extra steps if you aren’t doing a full buildworld/buildkernel.
Peter Avalos has kindly updated OpenSSH to the newest release, 5.0p1. This version has one security fix – the major version number bump is only because the previous release was 4.9.
Hasso Tepper has committed a large update to DRM, the operating system-specific part of the X Direct Rendering Infrastructure, using a snapshot from January. The code it’s replacing is much older, as I recall.
Nirmal Thacker happened to post his Google Summer of Code proposal (pdf) for an Anticipatory I/O scheduler to the kernel@ mailing list, along with a request for feedback. We have 27 other proposals at this point.
Matthew Dillon, upon finding there wasn’t a way to queue traffic ‘fairly’ with pf/altq, wrote a ‘fair queue’ patch. Give it a try if you are using pf on DragonFly as a router.
Cristi Magherusan has contributed a patch (which was quickly committed) adding est(4) support for the Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU.
Matthew Dillon asks, “How can pf be used to create a fair-queue algorithm similar to Cisco’s?” Answer if you know it; there’s been a few guesses.
The newest BSDTalk has an interview with Adam Wright of No Starch Press, who published among other things the excellent “Absolute FreeBSD” and a lot of books about Legos.
dragonflybsd.org is on a DSL line temporarily as the network connection is shifted; however, there’s a colocated server being added soon, and pkgbox has been upgraded to newer hardware.
pkgsrc.se, which has always been a nice way to browse through available pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip applications, is working on a new test site. Details on the changes are listed in Hubert Feyrer’s post that first alerted me to this change.
Jeff Blank has a patch for people using both Postfix and IPv6 on DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon has turned net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive on by default, due in part to problems seen during the most recent pkgsrc bulk build I’ve been doing on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org.
Student proposals for the Google Summer of Code are now due on April 7th, instead of today. This means more time to refine proposals, or create a new one. Get to it! We have 28 applications at this point.
And look: Google’s newest product to launch on April 1st: Google Gulp.
Abstracts for paper presentations at EuroBSDCon 2008 are due June 1st. The EuroBSDCon site doesn’t have the Call For Papers on it, so I’ll link to the mail.
I like this note from the family page: “Derivative work such as Gentoo are considered welcome though their creativity is restrictively licensed.” (Emphasis added)