Eric Jacobs said “I’d like to work with LWKT“. Matthew Dillon said, “How about userland VFS?” , and Eric said “Sure!“. Then, Matthew Dillon went into unsummarizable details.
The DragonFly ISO images (the recent builds) now include system source – not enough to rebuild the whole system, but enough to patch and rebuild the kernel in situations where the source can’t be downloaded. Like, say, network cards that require manual tweaking to support.
Yury Tarasievich was able to get Java 1.5 working, and he mailed out details of the process. Along the same lines, ‘walt’ was able to get Java 1.4 working from the ‘wip’ branch of pkgsrc, which only requires some minor elbow grease.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has been using Roundup as a bug tracker for DragonFly for some time now; it works well, and Matthew Dillon plans to make it official. Tickets are created from traffic on submit@ and bugs@, and it works quite well im my experience.
A question about open source led several people to point out that there are a number of histories of BSD available – Steve Mynott pointed at excerpts from Kirk McKusick‘s O’Reilly book. Sascha Wildner also included GrokLaw’s excellent and long history, and McKusick’s BSDTalk interview (.mp3). Local ‘expert on old things’ Bill Hacker added that BSD-style sharing of code was happening before Linux, GNU, or even Richard Stallman had been born.
‘walt’ is looking for other people interested in using ‘csup‘, the written-in-C replacement for the written-in-Modula3 cvsup, used to update source code. For now, there are premade cvsup binaries for DragonFly, though a working csup in the base system would be nice.
This week, UnixReview.com has two book reviews: “Perl Best Practices“, and “Advanced Host Intrusion Prevention with CSA“. I have the Perl Best Practices book myself, and it’s excellent.
Mid-month, says Matthew.
A short thread about ACLs or Capabilities for another layer of security starts here – read through for some explanation. Work like this, though interesting, has to wait until the userland vfs/clustering work is done.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has shifted the ‘Preview’ tag to add in a recent bugfix. This issue just interfered with some packages compiling in pkgsrc, so this is not an urgent update.
Emiel Kollof, who at one point had managed to get the NVIDIA binary video driver working for FreeBSD, doesn’t think it’s going to happen again.
UnixReview has a review of the ActiveState Tcl Dev Kit version 3.2, and a book review of “Software Security: Building Security In“.
Steve Mynott posted an interesting link: ZFS-on-FUSE. It appears to be a not-yet-complete implementation of ZFS on top of the FUSE (userspace filesystems)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert would like to get rid of ipfw, slowly. This means it wouldn’t be gone until release 1.7.  While pf doesn’t have all needed functionality to work as a replacement, Gary Allan pointed out that ipfw2 is a suitable replacement as it has similar features but is less of a mess. (And look – he’s on it!)
‘walt’ has 3 pkgsrc packages set up to work on DragonFly – gnome-multimedia, nautilus-cd-burner, and sane-backends – he’d like folks to test.
Attilio Rao would like to make some improvements to the DragonFly kernel. Follow the link and resulting discussion between him and Matthew Dillon for details, because it’s far enough into the internals of the system that it’s like another language.
Matthew Dillon wrote about some of the remaining hurdles for ZFS.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted a short list of how he was able to make openvpn work. Your mileage may vary.
UnixReview.com has a larger-than-normal number of new articles: book reviews of “The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 4: Generating All Trees“, “The Definitive Guide to SQLite“, and “Eric Sink on the Business of Software“, a game review of SolarWolf, a Regular Expressions article on dictionary skills, and a note on Disaster Recovery.