Category: Goings-on

One of the big wins for BSD has been the packaging system.  It’s very easy to use ports or pkgsrc to download all the dependencies for a given application automatically, and even Linux tools like yum or apt-get handle this nowadays.

Ruby, Perl, Python, and etc. have the disadvantage that if you write a interpreted script that uses libraries not in the standard distribution of that language, users of that script need to perform additional software installation, assuming they have access to do so, just to run that script.  This is a major disadvantage compared to “compiled” software.  To overcome this, additional steps that turn the script and needed libraries into a single executable are required.

‘_why the lucky stiff’ has a solution that matches: Shoes, a Ruby GUI toolkit, goes and gets any needed libraries as part of its startup process. Why didn’t someone think of this 10 years ago so that it could be commonplace?

Dru Lavigne has news of the OSS Census now supporting BSD systems for counting; it’s good to participate and provide evidence of the number of BSD users out there.

She also has one of her infrequent but useful link posts up; check it and find more to read.

Google’s reporting that Unicode is finally becoming more popular than ASCII. This news is probably of most interest to non-English speakers, but it’s a good thing. How is DragonFly’s Unicode support – can someone comment? (Via)

I posted a little about this before, but here’s more prompted by several people mentioning it: a seekdir() bug found and fixed by Marc Balmer is apparently present in all BSDs, going back at least 25 years. 25 years! That’s older than some of you reading this post. His blog post delivers a very nice summary. (Thanks, Undeadly, Richard, Nega)

This Perl Buzz post talks about improving the perception and use of Perl, one of my favorite languages. I link to it in part because it’s well written, but also to suggest something: read the article, and substitute “BSD” everywhere you read “Perl”. The same suggestions apply.

The prime motivator for this digest was providing more of an atmosphere for DragonFly, and to some extent for the idea of BSD itself. Lots of people aspire to be a BSD developer/committer, when really what we need is someone having a conversation that involves BSD.

zsh is one of those things that people always describe as a best version of something, like cvs vs. git or vi vs. vim (or BSD vs. Linux?). Philip Paeps has a lengthy blog writeup of his experience trying zsh. (via)

There’s a new BSD forum site, called DaemonForums. Looking at the comments, it appears to be a replacement for the now-unmaintained BSDForums.(Via)

Samuel J. Greear did an informal comparison of zip, gzip, bzip2, and 7zip, comparing compression ratio and compression time. 7zip looks pretty good, though testing it on some more varied file types and sizes would be in order.

Martin Schütte is updating syslog (there’s an IETF standard for it, which I did not know) for one of NetBSD’s Google Summer of Code projects; he very kindly posted links to it on the DragonFly users@ list in the hopes that it could benefit DragonFly’s syslogd too.

Marc Balmer of OpenBSD posted about a cross-BSD bug in seekdir()/readdir(); a fix is forthcoming.

This week’s 16-minute BSDTalk episode has Jeremy White of CodeWeavers, the company that releases the Wine-based CrossOver products. They’re now experimenting with BSD versions of their software – specifically, for FreeBSD/PC-BSD.

Wine is coming up on a 1.0 release, which may or may not be coincidental. I recall there was some issues with getting Wine to work on DragonFly; can someone confirm or deny that?

Robert Luciani asked a question I’ve wondered about before: how do you limit bandwidth using pf? Matthew Dillon had some ideas.

Robert Luciani, one of the Summer of Code students for DragonFly, did some initial testing of the libc_r and libthread_xu libraries, with some graphable results. Unfortunately, there’s some degree of error, but that’s OK – I just like having tests performed and images created.

‘Sdavtaker’ posted news of a slight DragonFly presence at FLISOL08. Not huge, but interesting since it’s very oriented towards easy Linux installs. I didn’t know the event existed, possibly because it does not appear to have a central website.

Update: Damien posted a descriptive link – in Spanish.

The latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource online magazine is out. This issue focuses on Communications. (via)

Murray Stokely has an interesting post up on his blog noting a bunch of interesting BSD-themed tutorials on (mostly) Youtube. His sentiments – and I agree – are that there should be more BSD instruction in video form, not just the various texts we have today. (via)

BSD systems have always been well-documented compared to the open source … well, ‘standard’ isn’t the right word. Branching past text-based media is a good idea, though I suspect part of the barrier is common Flash support.

I’ve been traveling the past few days, so I’m going to do a linkdump to catch up:

OpenBSD has an interesting mergemaster replacement, sysmerge. I’ve never seen a final answer on if DragonFly needs some sort of merging tool or not.

Nominations for the 2008 Open Source Awards are now possible. (Via)

ScummC is a tool for creating ScummVM adventures, another one of those things that people of a certain age look on fondly. (via)

The first issue of BSD Magazine is out, and Dru Lavigne has a list of the contents.

OSNews.com has an article highlighting some interesting projects among the various Google Summer of code proposals. First on the list? DragonFly’s LiveCD project. (via Matthias Schmidt on IRC)

We have 7 accepted projects in the Google Summer of Code; the full list is available at the Google site, with links to each proposal.

We’re now in the Community Bonding Period; time for us to get to know each other.  Please welcome your new student codevelopers; we should be hearing a lot from them over the next few months.

Aggelos Economopoulos has volunteered himself and his diploma project for getting the DragonFly network stack out from under the Big Giant Lock. This benefits everyone. He plans to post a preliminary roadmap soon.