Config(8) changes

Chris Pressey posted his thoughts on config(8). His summary on his plans are thus: “Basically: config(8) shouldn’t let you configure a kernel that won’t build. It should detect that it won’t build, tell you why, and stop immediately without wasting your time with a make session that is doomed to failure.

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.

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!

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.”

Living dangerously

Peter Kadau answered a question from Jonathon McKitrick about getting rid of your boot manager, if you just have DragonFly:

boot0cfg -o noupdate -s 1 -t 0 -B ad0

Matt Dillon followed up on the topic mentioning that the ‘Dangerously Dedicated’ mode from the old FreeBSD installer is probably no longer worthwhile, and may even cause problems.

ATAng just in case

Matt Dillon posted that if the recent ATAng integration keeps your IDE controller from working (though the opposite is more common), do:

#define NO_ATANG in /usr/src/sys/dev/disk/ata/ata-all.h

Propolice at least

Tomaz Borstnar noted that propolice support is still there for GCC2 (the only compiler at the time it was added) but not yet for GCC3. Matt Dillon followed up saying that other ‘gcc3isms’ have to be cleaned up first, though integration shouldn’t be hard.

Spamfilters on

Spam filters have been turned on for the various DragonFly lists: (Taken from Matt Dillon’s post explaining this)


  • Matches against certain really annoying viruses
  • With a MIME Content-Type header of text/html
  • With a MIME Content-Type header of multipart/alternative
  • Without a working reverse DNS lookup
  • Without a FQDN formatted HELO line
  • With an invalid envelope sender. The spam filter does a realtime
    connect back to the SMTP server associated with the envelope sender
    and attempts to RCPT to it. If this fails the mail will be rejected.