3 things for pkgsrc

From my email to users@:

  • I almost have pkgsrc-2010Q1 builds done for every architecture, so I’ll point the default load location for pkg_radd to them within the next 24 hours.
  • Are you still using a DragonFly system older than 2.4 and downloading binaries?  If so, tell me.
  • A project: enhancing pkg_search and pkg_radd to be able to tell when a package is missing because of license restrictions.  Anyone want to try it?
Summer of Code projects final

We’ve got 3 projects for Google Summer of Code 2010:

  • “Device Mapper based Logical Volume Management”, by Alexander Hornung and mentored by Chuck Tuffli.
  • “Porting kernel mode-setting, GEM and KMS, to DragonFlyBSD” by David Shao, mentored by Matthew Dillon
  • “Coalesce + MPSAFE kevent, select, poll and wakeup” by Samuel Greear, mentored by Joe Talbott

We had a good number of excellent proposals, but only 3 slots from Google.  There were only 12 spare slots by the end of the proposal period, too, meaning less than 1 spare per 10 organizations.  I’d encourage people that applied and didn’t get in to still try the work; there were some neat proposals!

Visit the GSoC site for more details.

What does DESTDIR mean?

I’ve made reference to DESTDIR for pkgsrc several times, with only an informal understanding of what it means.  From what I’ve learned, and what Joerg Sonnenberger’s told me, DESTDIR support means that packages can be built from pkgsrc without needing to be root.  This means local packages can be built on an ordinary user account using pkgsrc.

This also means that pkgsrc can build packages before each upgrade, and only upgrade if a binary package can be built for each item involved.  This means minimal downtime and no failures during upgrades, the biggest bugaboo for using pkgsrc that I’ve encountered.