I’m working on building new images, but: DragonFly 3.0.3 has been tagged. If you’re running 3.0, you can update and get some of the recent bug fixes.
3.2 is the next major release of DragonFly, which will be relatively soon by the every-6-months release schedule. John Marino’s put together another catch-all bug report for that release.
Sascha Wildner’s been working on his own DragonFly live images, in DVD or USB form. It uses XFCE along with a number of other packages listed in his post. They are .xz compressed, so they are nice and small for download, but make sure you have something that knows that format.
Mihai Carabas has posted his weekly results, showing a 5% improvement in pgbench resultswhen using his scheduler. Vishesh Yadav is working on IN_MOVED_TO/IN_MOVED_FROM flags (part of inotify, I assume). Ivan Sichmann Freitas I haven’t heard from yet. (Ivan, where are you?)
Juraj Sipos wrote me to describe MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a live DragonFly image that has additional software preinstalled, and can easily be set to understand Sanskrit. It’s available in DVD and USB versions.
Here’s the regular status updates for Mihai Carabas (scheduler) and Vishesh Yadav (inotify). I don’t have the update from Ivan Sichmann Freitas yet. Here’s Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
If you want to put something towards DragonFly, and you don’t have time or hardware, cash is now an option. (It’s not tax-deductible.)
The usual weekly updates from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. Mihai has some interesting bugs found this past week by running his code on Matt Dillon’s 48-core system.
The release announcement for pkgsrc-2012Q2 is out. New in this quarterly release: statistics about clang and pkgsrc. A surprisingly large number of packages build just fine with clang instead of gcc.
Attention students and mentors: the Summer of Code midterms open up on July 9th. This means students fill out an evaluation, and mentors also fill out an evaluation. Don’t forget, because completed evals from mentor and student both are necessary for a project to continue being funded.
More benchmarks, in this case a comparison of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and DragonFly. I’m not even sure how to derive meaning from it.
It’s almost an all-Vim week.
- Unix as IDE, a 6 part completed series. (via)
- VimOrganizer, Emac’s Org-mode for Vim. (via)
- The Vim Clutch. This is hilarious. (via) Also see “Chindogu“, though this might be too useful.
- Those who know UNIX are doomed to reinvent it. (via same place)
- Falsehoods programmers believe about time. Taken from the same thing about names. (via) Also, when someone says, “Oh, I can just look for email addresses using a regular expression”, you’re stepping over a similar cliff.
- Welcome image in your terminal. (via) Will this work in an xterm? rxvt? I don’t know…
- CanI make this Lazy Reading post more nerdy? Yes! Arbitrage and Equilibrium in the Team Fortress 2 Economy. I already enjoy economics writing, and this one is about virtual economies and games. The only thing I know of close to this is the economist that works on EVE Online.
Your unrelated link of the week: Muppet Bohemian Rhapsody. Related: What kind of Muppet are you?
If you have an Intel processor with multiple cores and hyperthreading support, you can compile a new kernel and try out Mihia Carabas’s GSoC work already; he’s created a test using the OpenSSL test case to time scheduling performance vs. number of threads.
I know I already posted that this was on the way, but this time, the quarterly pkgsrc freeze is starting with a detailed announcement. 2 weeks until the next release, if everything goes well.
If you’re using some PHP application that requires the old behavior of PHP 5.2, you will need to specify that version of PHP – pkgsrc is moving to version 5.4 5.3 as default, with version 5.4 available. (thanks, Takahiro Kambe for the update.)
The freeze for pkgsrc-2012Q2 starts on the 16th of June, as recently announced. Freezes are usually 2 weeks, so that means 2012Q2 should be tagged at the end of June.
Pkgsrc already runs on a large number of different platforms, but that’s not what I’m talking about. In this case, Joyent, which uses pkgsrc internally, has a suggested change that makes binaries usable on both 32 and 64 bit systems. I don’t know if this will go into pkgsrc proper, but it’s interesting to see.
Apparently a lot of modular-xorg packages in pkgsrc received updates. I think I found some of the changes, but probably not all, so I don’t have a good way to sum up the actual effect.
Update: see the end of this cvsweb pkgsrc CHANGES-2012 page for all the changed parts.
There’s a number of packages out there that assume you are using the GNU versions of ls, wc, and so on. However, you aren’t when using a BSD system. Pkgsrc has historically dealt with this when GNU tools are needed for a package by prefixing them with a ‘g’. ‘ls’ becomes ‘gls’, and so on. Aleksey Cheusov proposed a fix to keep these utilities under their original names, which I think will go into the next quarterly pkgsrc release.