A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Matthew Dillon is moving the FreeBSD-based pkg binaries out of the regular location to make room for the pkgsrc version, which will be in the next release. That next release, by the way, is coming before the end of the year.
On a related note, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has proposed moving to rsync instead of cvsup to get updated code; cvsup works well but requires a lot of resources to build.
Matthew Dillon has committed a number of bug fixes back to Preview, and will bring them into 1.2 Release this weekend.
leaf.dragonflybsd.org will be out again, 9-10 PDT tonight.
dragonflybsd.org may be down at times this weekend, as Matthew Dillon is adding/moving a whole lot of hardware.
Update: There’s downtime tonight, starting 9 PM PDT. If you have data on leaf:/unused3, it’ll be gone.
The next release of DragonFly (1.4) will include pkgsrc, as Matthew Dillon described in a recent post. For those of us with 1.2 systems, some work is being done to create binary packages now, to ease the transition. The Wiki has some documentation on using pkgsrc.
Chris Pressey found out the hard way that installing DragonFly and then FreeBSD can lead to DragonFly being wiped out by the FreeBSD installer.
There’s a whole lot of changes in the development branch (HEAD) of DragonFly. These are good changes, especially if you are a multiprocessor user, but HEAD users will shortly need to recompile everything – kernel, world, and ports/pkgsrc! Matthew Dillon lays it out in a recent post.
If you are running bleeding edge DragonFly code (HEAD), you will need to have COMPAT_DF12 in your kernel config file, unless you’re using the GENERIC kernel. This is because of the stat(2) work Joerg Sonnenberger plans to commit.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted two alerts: the first is that pam.d now replaces pam.conf, and that he’s mangling the ABI in HEAD (bleeding edge code) over the next few days in preparation for moving what’s in HEAD to PREVIEW (moderately stable code).
shiningsilence.com is moving tomorrow from one physical location to a new one – it’s just a few miles, but it means an outage. The domain will probably go down tonight when I package up hardware, and should hopefully return over the next few days as my new link is installed and DNS updates.
Hiten Pandya has warned that his recent changes will require a full buildworld/buildkernel. This affects you only if you are running bleeding edge code, of course.
Joerg Sonnenberger is changing errno to a thread-local variable this weekend, which means for those running the latest DragonFly code (i.e. from CVS, not 1.2.1), you will need to rebuild everything. That includes ports, and drastic changes like this will happen again.
And here’s the note.
Matthew Dillon sent out a large warning. Here’s a summation:
* The Preview tag has been slipped.
* All bug fixes made since 1.2.0 was released will be added to that release branch.
* Unless you want to deal with major breakage, stick with the 1.2.0 Release or the -WORKING code; the CURRENT code will have severe modifications going on, including libc revisions.
* Upgrading from FreeBSD-4.x will break! Updating to DragonFly 1.2.0 and then to a more recent version of DragonFly will be the only way.
Are you using the most recent DragonFly code from CVS? Matthew Dillon warns that the new red/black tree work may be causing file system problems. If this worries you, you should be running with a less dangerous tag in your cvsup file. (See his post for details.)
Matthew Dillon warned that a number of new, destabilizing technologies are going to be entering the bleeding edge DragonFly code, otherwise known as HEAD. Unless you enjoy trouble, the PREVIEW-tagged code (formerly known as STABLE) is a better target.
Correct tags to use in your CVSup files are named on the Download page.
The CVS tag for the next release, “DragonFly_RELEASE_1_2” has been placed, which means commits are OK again.
There is a prerelease version of 1.2 on gobsd.com via HTTP or FTP, and also at pfsense.com via HTTP. Here’s the MD5:
MD5 (dfly-20050406-pre1.2.iso.gz) = 9b382c84e629b391bd4ce38c7ca724bd
If you can bear waiting, I would advise waiting for the official release later this week, just in case something is found in the next day or two.
Matthew Dillon announced the Stable tag will be slipped Sunday, with release engineering following until the next release, later this week! The only commits at this point should be bugfixes.
Stable has slipped.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, this means that the current “bleeding edge” code has been moved to “Stable” status, as there’s no outstanding problems with it. If you’re using the “DragonFly_Stable” tag in your CVSup file, you’ll have some new things to download.