Shallow src users, a note

If you follow the upgrade instructions in my 5.8 update post, there is one ‘gotcha’.   If your copy of /usr/src was downloaded using “make src-create-shallow”, you will not have any git history – or any branches other than 5.6.

The easy, cheesy way to fix it is to remove /usr/src, then type “make src-create” in /usr, and proceed from there.  There’s probably a way to edit in the other branches, but I haven’t tried it yet.  I’m counseling the brute force method for now.

DragonFly 5.8 released!

DragonFly 5.8.0 has been released.  This version brings dsynth, with matching optimizations to fit dsynth running many parallel builds of ports.

My users@ post has the usual details on upgrading, as do the release notes.

Note that you will get some noise in dmesg until you remove opie from where it’s mentioned in /etc/pam.d/ files.  It’s cosmetic unless you use opie, and you probably don’t.  I mention it because I noticed it.  Check /usr/src/UPDATING after pulling in the 5.8 source to see details of this and other changes.

dragonflybsd.org line height

I for some reason set line height properties in the style sheet for dragonflybsd.org years ago, and it made scroll bars appear around all <pre> text.  It’s taken me years, but I finally removed it.  Anyone notice other effects than the lack of those odd scrollbars?

How many levels of plug-in can you find?

It’s probably going to be quiet for at least a few days because of the Christmas holiday, though I’ll of course have the normal weekend features up.

In the meantime, here’s something to ponder: this post about tmux and plugins for it led me to thinking about plugins in general.  The pkg system is sort of a plugin scheme for BSDs, much like apt for Debian, yum, etc.  Each language has its own libraries to load and plugins to manage past that, like Perl’s CPAN.  Nowadays, applications have their own plugins.  For instance, a system with WordPress installed with PHP installed with PHP plugins required with WordPress plugins that also require given PHP libraries.  WordPress manages keeping itself and its plugins up to date, but not the underlying PHP installation.   You can get something similar with Perl along with the Perl-specific package updates, through cpanm.  Or, npm, which seems to be its own world of constant flux.

How many levels could this go?  Like running multiple emulators within each other, how many levels of plugin could you achieve?  There’s probably a series of levels proceeding from tedious to barely maintainable to ridiculous.