Joerg Sonnenberger found a slight problem with linking to gettext, which only can happen when building a pkgsrc package from source; binary users are unaffected. Details and a link to a workaround are in his message.
shiningsilence.com moved from ports to pkgsrc, and rebuilding everything took some work – the website was down for a short while while removing/restoring apache, and search/comments have been broken on the site while moving from /usr/local/bin/perl to /usr/pkg/bin/perl. Everything seems OK now…
This lengthy blog post details the use of NTP and time in general on Un*xy systems. (Seen on the #NetBSD Blog via hubertf)
Also seen on #NetBSD Blog: play hack over ssh!
The vnodes discussion has morphed into a conversation about kernel memory, and how it is allocated.
O-Reilly’s OnLAMP.com has a new FreeBSD Basics article up titled “Building Binary PC-BSD Packages“, which talks about the slick-sounding PC-BSD package superset of the FreeBSD port system.
In a conversation about having lots of RAM, Matthew Dillon described the relationship of vnodes to memory, and how you rarely want to change it.
UnixAdmin.com has an article up about building a widget for systems admin (Normally Mac-specific, but maybe not much longer), solutions to phishing attacks, and a guide on the venerable but useful tools iostat, vmstat, and netstat.
If you, like me, track the RELEASE versions of DragonFly, you’ll be moving from version 1.2 to 1.4 in one jump. There’s a few extra upgrade steps to accomodate the drastic underlying changes between 1.2 and 1.4, and I’ve documented them in the src/UPDATING file.
Csaba Henk has contributed code to make nullfs. It’s not complete yet, but it’s close.
Several people more educated than I have chimed in with comments that describe the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip. Read the comments to be enlightened.
Matthew Dillon added a note that describes the release creation process.
DragonFly BSD 1.4 Release Candidate 2 is out. I think there are no outstanding issues to hold up release at this point…
Matthew Dillon is planning for a January release for 1.4; while a good number of bugs have been found and squashed, there’s still a problem with network interface removal that needs to be fixed before release. However, a second release candidate will be assembled tonight.
Better hope I’m talking about dump(8), eh? YONETANI Tomokazu found a problem in the way dump files were created after some changes were made in 1.3 development; the problem’s been fixed, but be warned: dumps from that time period won’t be compatible.
I have a lot of little items mostly about the 1.4 transistion, so I’m just going to dump them all out:
* There’s a 1.4 cvsup file that will track the 1.4 release. This will be in the 1.2 release too, as soon as I figure out how, or someone tells me how to commit to a tag.
* the ‘.sh’ suffix requirement for rc scripts is dropped from 1.4 onward; this may happen to 1.4 too. This is needed for some pkgsrc scripts that do not end in .sh.
* cvsup is going to be replaced , one way or another.
* DragonFly will never be binary-compatible with FreeBSD 5+.
* Please, won’t somebody fix rcorder?
dragonflybsd.org will be down temporarily; I’m pasting Matthew Dillon’s mailing list message below as it’s silly to link to a message about downtime on the site that’s going down:
There was a lot of lightning last night and then a small explosion outside that sounded like the transformer on the telephone poll. Then the lights starts to flicker continuously and the UPS started clicking in and out and… well, I decided to shut everything down overnight :-)
There will probably be some more downtime tonight. I have a UPS monitor but I never hooked up the client/server feature that shuts down all related machines automatically if power isn’t restored in 20 minutes. I am going to get that working properly tonight.
Oh hell. Power just failed again. I’m gonna probably have to shut things down again soon :-(
A contributor over at the #NetBSD Community Blog called me out on my errors. I corrected my goof on CGD, but I need someone to explain what the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip is. I know one’s a “work in progress”, but that doesn’t answer what the relationship is between the two, or how pacakges may move between them. I’m calling you smarty-pants out on the rug now – I want you to answer what 30 seconds of web surfing has not!
“Ed” posted a quote about STM – Software Transactional Memory – where memory usage in a multiprocessor situation is treated in a similar fashion to the way transactions are used in a database. Matthew Dillon wrote a lengthy response describing how DragonFly matches or improves on that system.