Posts

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pkgsrc housekeeping

Two recent pkgsrc changes that won’t directly affect how your packages are installed, but are still worth knowing about:

  • Thomas Klausner made some adjustments to license handling for pkgsrc.  It’s possible to prevent packages with or without certain licenses from installing, even as a dependency.  His post contains details of the by-default accepted licenses.
  • Joerg Sonnenberger has removed most instances of NO_CHECKSUM.  This will help people with poor network connections, and (I would imagine) will be better for security, too.
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Network issues

My apologies, folks – the site is going up and down, along with my network connection.  It’s probably because of Time Warner (my network provider) trying and failing to correctly implement bandwidth measuring tools for their upcoming volume cap.   (I keep getting passed a private IP.)

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A Summer of Code reminder: subscribe

If you’re a student with a Summer of Code application, make sure to subscribe to it. Doing this will ensure you are automatically notified of any mentor requests for more information.

There’s also some recent stats published by Google on the applications so far; DragonFly is one of the surveyed orgs it mentions, and the results are the same – less applications, better quality.

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Summer of Code proposals in

The due date for the Summer of Code proposals is past, and DragonFly has 18 proposals.    The consensus from other SoC organizations is the same: less applicants everywhere this year, but the proposal quality is up.

Potential mentors can now discuss the proposals and ask for more detail from the students, until April 15th.

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Student applications due very soon

19:00 UTC today is the deadline for all student applications for Google’s Summer of Code program.  You can revise applications up to April 15th based on feedback, but the initial proposal has to be in the system as of tonight.  That’s 5 hours from now, if I have my time calculations correct.

DragonFly has 15 applications at this point, and general application quality looks to be better this year than last.

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OSBR, roguelikes

I’m going to mesh together two unrelated items in this post:

The April OSBR is out, with this issue being a focus on Open APIs.

The newest @Play column covers winners of the 7DRL, or “7 Day Roguelike” contest, where contestants build a new roguelike game in a week.  There are some real oddities, like Decimation.  I’m not sure how many of these will build on DragonFly, darnit.

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Help the Macys

This story popped up last year, focusing on Kip Macy’s legal issues.  Kip is a BSD developer, contributing to FreeBSD and having worked on checkpoint support in DragonFly.  Another side of his story has come to light.  He and his wife could use the support, but there is (that I know of) no immediate way to help.

It would be nice if there was some common news source for BSD topics, instead of being an also-ran for Linux; this is an example of where an online community can support its own members, instead of that negative story that has been out for months.

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Messylaneous, 03/23/2009