Dmitri Nikulin wrote a long post on users@ about how he was worried that DragonFly would lose importance given that FreeBSD 7 has improved performance relative to FreeBSD 5/6. Responses include a number of anecdotes on how agreeable the DragonFly community can be, plus my note that DragonFly validation does not require FreeBSD to suck. Matthew Dillon noted his concerns as project leader, and the difficulty of explaining how significant the changes from FreeBSD-4 are in DragonFly.
EuroBSDCon 2008 will be Oct. 18-19th at the University of Strasbourg, France.
NYCBSDCon 2008 will be October 11-12th at Columbia University.
BSDCan 2008 will be May 16-17th, in Ottawa, Canada.
AsiaBSDCon 2008 will be the 27-30th of March, at the Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan
EuroBSDCon’s dates were recently announced, which is what caused this post. Has anyone noticed that not so many years ago, BSD conventions were just informal gatherings held at Linux-centric events? An interesting change.
BSDTalk 142 has an interview with Ken Smith, lead release engineer for FreeBSD. I haven’t listeded to the interview yet, but I daresay it covers the recent 7.0 release.
It’s always entertaining to see where release announcements appear. I like this one from _why, as it’s way better than the usual announcement reprint. Plus, it’s the first art/code blog I’ve ever seen.
Dru Lavigne posted that the latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is available; this issue being about “open data”.
The 1.12 release is out now, and should be available on any of the mirrors. I’m blockquoting the announcement:
This release is primarily a maintainance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel.
The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year.
Of the current big-ticket item work, the new HAMMER filesystem is almost to the alpha stage of development and is expected to be production ready by the mid-year 2.0 release.
If you’re a student, start thinking about potential Summer of Code projects, as Google’s starting their 2008 edition.
BSDTalk 141 has Kris Moore from PC-BSD talking about their recent release 4 of PC-BSD’s packaging system, PBI.
Looking at the general information page from Google and this OnLAMP article, it appears that Google’s new phone operating system, Android, is based both on Linux (the kernel) and OpenBSD/NetBSD (libc). I wonder how much of the GNU tools are on there.
I also wonder what moved them to that decision. Part of the Android FAQ section points at this article about the Apache License (a BSD-style license) being preferable.
Matthew Dillon’s latest HAMMER update covers the last 3 items needed, and it’s almost-but-not-quite testing time.
Microsoft has made announcements about interoperability with open source and their products. Lots of analysis of this is happening, though I like chromatic’s summary best.
‘walt’ passed along a note about his success using grub2 to boot DragonFly.
Ohloh.net keeps statistics for a variety of open-source projects, including DragonFly. It tells a story mostly based on source code analysis. Which committer for DragonFly has the least commits? Me! Of course, it’s my news articles from this blog that show up on the project page, so it’s missing out on what I’ve heard called the “atmosphere” around open source projects. Hubert Feyrer seems to think the same way.
Puget Sound Technologies is holding a training class for BSDA (as in BSD Associate) certification down in Texas in late April. The teacher, Jeremy C. Reed, has contributed to DragonFly, among other things. (Via BSDNews)
The most recent FreeBSD progress report is out; among other things, it talks about work on multi-IPv4/IPv6 jails, TCP cleanup, and TCP reassembly optimization.  Interestingly, I think there’s related work in DragonFly – the DragonFly jail changes were about a year ago, and Jeff Hsu’s work on the DragonFly network stack seems similar.
I doubt there’s many people on the planet with the brainpower and time for this, but it would be interesting to have a large-scare compare/contrast of the different BSD styles for solving problems in code.
Dru Lavigne’s latest blog post has a pile of good links in it; I’m just going to point at it and tell you to make with the clicking.
As Hasso Tepper describes in a kernel@ post, the recent FreeBSD IPSEC issue affected DragonFly too, but was fixed in a previous release.
InformIT has an article about alternative compilers, including some that have had mention on the DragonFly lists, like TenDRA and pcc. (via Hubert Feyrer)
For those who want a quick reference: regular expression cheat sheets. Of course, it’s not such a quick reference if there’s 11 sheets. (Found via rootprompt.org)
On a side note: I consider Mastering Regular Expressions one of those books that delivers what the title promised.