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.
Pkgsrc packages that have source files that can’t be redistributed, and go missing for the length of an entire quarterly release, will get removed. They are effectively broken at that point anyway.
That policy is now formally in place; I don’t think there was a clear prescription before.
Venkatesh Srinivas, currently on his colossal bike ride, introduced a different way of creating a tmpfs. This was test code, and Johannes Hofmann benchmarked it (see same page). It’s interesting cause there are numbers, and nice to see one person jumping in to test someone else’s results/idea.
I think I’ve mentioned building DragonFly with clang before, but not pkgsrc. There’s two variables to set, plus some special handling for libf2c. Thomas Klausner has details. This is not tested on DragonFly.
There were some benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 some time ago on Phoronix. (You may recall it being mentioned here previously.) The disk numbers always seemed weird to me, so I repeated that part of the test, and here’s my writeup.
Takahiro Kambe is bringing PHP 5.4 into pkgsrc, probably as lang/php54. Follow the whole thread for a discussion of version numbering. As a side effect of this, PHP 5.2 will leave pkgsrc by the next quarterly pkgsrc release. If you’re using that older flavor, you’ll want to upgrade.
TUI mode is available now for kgdb on DragonFly, thanks to John Marino. It’s apparently a Text User Interface for debugging core files. I haven’t used it, so I’m relying on the testimony of others.
Here’s a post by yours truly, on how to move to pkgsrc-2012Q1 though building from source. This is for anyone sick of waiting for me to finish the binary build of pkgsrc.
Matthew Dillon posted a followup on that fix for clustering I noted yesterday. It describes the exact problems better than I could, though the result is the same: you should update if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly.