For reasons unknown to me, there’s enough functional change between PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 that it affected a lot of PHP-based programs. For that reason, PHP 5 in pkgsrc defaults to the 5.2 version. However, it’s going to be 5.3 for the next stable quarterly release of pkgsrc. In theory, all PHP5-dependent programs are ready to handle that now. Note that PHP 5.3 is already in pkgsrc; it just wasn’t the default. If you were using the php53 package, it may require some manual fiddling at your next upgrade of pkgsrc packages.
Some ISA devices have been removed from DragonFly. That probably affects approximately 0% of everyone, cause they’re old devices, but a few of them are were in the GENERIC kernel configs, so you’ll get an error for an unrecognized option when you next rebuild your kernel using a GENERIC-based config, based on an older version of GENERIC. The description of which drivers went is quite sensibly placed in UPDATING.
At some point, you may want to generate binary programs that are unstripped of debugging information. You may want to generate them with pkgsrc. Here’s a little note on what options will make that happen.
The ‘freeze’ period (when bugfixes are the only addition) for pkgsrc will start on September 18th, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q3, scheduled for the 25th. Think of it as an early Christmas present.
John Marino, who already has commit access for DragonFly, now also has commit access for pkgsrc. What does this mean? It means if you have a pkgsrc problem, submit it through NetBSD’s Problem Report system as normal, and maybe let him know about it too. He’s already made some DragonFly-specific fixes.
I posted some ideas about changing how DragonFly does releases. In short, I’d like to see a long term release, and otherwise point people at a rolling release; e.g. that day’s build. There are other people that think the same way about speeding up releases of other software. (Thanks, Samuel Greear for that last link)
Happy birthday to my younger daughter, Claire, who is 9 today. That’s a much better anniversary to celebrate today.
- A musing about the waveform and how it’s the most iconic representation of music. It’s also a holdover from analog days, if you think about it. (via)
- There seems to be a new kinda-improper activity from GoDaddy found every 6 months or so. Find yourself a new registrar, if you haven’t already.
- Here’s how you know DragonFly is actually getting somewhere: exploits show up.
- Not directly BSD related, but it’s from Colin Percival, writing as “FreeBSD Security Officer”. With the recent Diginotar news, he points out what’s the best secure certificate to forge.
- Introduction to Arduino, a comic guide. (via)
- “A jpeg is worth 1000kb“, talking about ZORK and other text adventures. Look for the twisty column of familiar phrases, all alike. The Interactive Fiction genre of game is still going surprisingly strong, so many years later.
- That article about ZORK links to this excellent, excellent exploration of the original Colossal Cave game, which led to Adventure and so many other games. Oh yeah, the author was building ARPANet at the time, too.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Chainsawsuit.
Noticed through a saved Google search: DragonFly BSD support as part of Puppet. This was thanks to the work of a ‘jaydg’. Thanks, person whose name I probably should know!
The recent OpenBSD 5.0 pre-release announcement on undeadly notes that ALTQ is being replaced by new priority settings. This should make it to DragonFly at some point, since pf in DragonFly has been catching up to the current version of pf in OpenBSD, thanks to the efforts of Jan Lentfer…
The Call for Papers for the 28th Chaos Communications Congress is out, as Matthias Rampke noted. Each year, there seems to be at least a few DragonFly people there…
BSD Magazine’s September issue is out. This time, I have an article in it about data recovery with Hammer:
We’ve all experienced instant regret. That’s the feeling that comes within a second of executing a command like “rm -rf * .txt” (note the space) or of cutting the wrong cluster of wires at the end of a long conduit. Not that I am quoting from experience, or anything like that, no…
Sascha Wildner has updated ndis(4), the wrapper that makes Windows network drivers usable on DragonFly, with an extensive description of what’s changed.
It’s almost the end of summer here, or at least the traditional end of summer in North America. About time, too! I don’t like the heat. Anyway, as people trickle back to school, some more interesting doodads should show up for these weekly Lazy Reading posts…
- Yet another git cheatsheet, this time for KDE. (Via TGEN on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- What’s wrong with sort and how to fix it. I will enthusiastically link to any article that mentions letters like þ. (There’s others that this stupid blogging software just eats when I write out the HTML entities.)
- Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wonder if I could run some really old software. Like 4.1c BSD?” Well, today’s your lucky day.
- Creating new Linux base and infrastructure ports on FreeBSD. Interesting to see just how complex it can be.
- Distributed computing at Google. (PDF, via) I like the description of the error/failure rates and how they escalate as an architecture scales up.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Jack Kirby art on what would have been his 94th birthday. I have trouble communicating how dramatic and influential his art has been.
Sascha Wildner updated time zone files again. It’s a regular thing, but I wanted to draw attention to this little change:
Samoa moves from east to west of the international date line (changes from UTC-11 to UTC+13). It will skip December 30, 2011.
2011/12/30 in Samoa will never exist or have existed, which is entirely odd.
Brills Peng has written up a nice description of his scheduler work for Google Summer of Code, with details on what it does, and how to try it out. Best of all, he plans to keep working on it!
Another batch of code has arrived from Google Summer of Code student work. In this case, it’s code from Adam Hoka’s “Implementing a mirror target for device mapper” project, committed by Alex Hornung. I think there’s potentially more to come.
Ferruccio Zamuner is doing a lightning talk about DragonFly at the sixth annual Italian Perl Workshop, September 9th in Turin, Italy. I mentioned this back in May, but now there’s a concrete date, and it’s about a week and a half away.
If DragonFly/x86_64 fails to install on your system, but DragonFly/i386 works, try again. Sepherosa Ziehau has a fix for the keyboard controller that may make x86_64 systems boot DragonFly when previously they did not.
The next release of pkgin, the binary package installer for pkgsrc, is imminent. I link to the note about this because the new features list sounds good, including a significant speedup.