It gets better, later

Joerg Sonnenberger has added an infrastructure for contrib/. Previously, in FreeBSD, 3rd-party software in the base installation would be modified from its original state to work with FreeBSD 4 (and hence DragonFly). These modifications are then repeated with each new version of the third-party software. (gcc 2.95 -> gcc 3.x, for instance.) The “new and improved” method keeps the original source for the 3rd-party software and keeps all DragonFly-specific changes in separate patch files. This is harder to set up, but better in the long run. This methodology has already been used for certain software like gcc and binutils.

Up and down

For those of you who multiboot or like carving their disk to bits, Matt Dillon has doubled the possible partitions (8 -> 16) and decreased the number of slices possible. (32 -> 16) You will need to rebuild world and kernel, and install the new boot code with disklabel -B in order to take advantage of this.

Better history

Aaron Malone submitted (and Hiten Pandya committed) a whole lot of man page changes to account for changes from FreeBSD to DragonFly in system name but not history. Specifically, the HISTORY sections. It’s not glamorous, but it’s good to do it.

Packaging thoughts

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has posted his initial thoughts about a packaging system; discussion about is on the dragonfly.kernel mailing list/newsgroup. Simon wants to move fast – 1-2 weeks for suggestions, then some weeks for implementation planning, and then jump in!

Permamixer

If you now set mixer_enable="YES" in rc.conf, your mixer settings will get saved, thanks to ibotty’s idea and Joerg Sonnenberger’s commit.

(I’m writing this without trying it, but that’s how I read it…)

dfports report

Joerg Sonnenberger has done some major cleanup to dfports. A cvsup would be a good idea.

A quote from him follows:

“Hi all, next time you update your dfports tree, you must update
/usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mk and /usr/share/mk/bsd.dfport.mk too. This should fix a lot of the problems various people mentioned in the past weeks. You should also check the dependencies e.g. of GTK+, if you haven’t rebuild your ports after January 25th. Otherwise the dependencies recorded are supposedly broken.”

ACPI added

Matt Dillon has brought in the December 2003 release of ACPI (acpica-unix-20031203) from Intel. The old code is still what’s on by default, as the new code builds but does not yet work.