DragonFly BSD Digest

The discussion over Git vs. Mercurial continues; Jeffrey Hsu has even volunteered himself to maintain and synchronize the two repositories.  He also pointed out that there is precedent for this already: the git-using Linux kernel work has a Mercurial mirror.

Via Google, I found this Linux blog where the author installs DragonFly vith the new LiveCD; his install stops probably because of network issues, but it’s worth looking at just because you get to see a screenshot of the very pretty desktop wallpaper used on the LiveCD.

Matthew Dillon’s posted the results of the Git vs. Mercurial voting, which worked out to an even tie.  (Darnit, I didn’t think to vote!)  He’s posted a followup, proposing to make both available.

Also, discussion of Git vs. Mercurial for DragonFly spread to comp.version-control.git, which led to a very technical and surprisingly even-handed (for the Internet) discussion of the virtues of each program.  (via Hasso Tepper in EFNet #dragonflybsd)

Thomas Nikolajsen just noticed (I missed it) that Matthew Dillon’s Hammer slides from NYCBSDCon 2008 are now available on the Hammer page.

“Voting” is closed on the source control system question; the immediate result is that people could use both Git and Mercurial read-only repositories, since both systems have a lot of users.

Dru Lavigne went to the Free Software and Open Source Symposium in Toronto; she has writeups from every session she attended:

• CSIA and Copyright Policy
• Komodo: Making Proprietary Products Open Source
• Teaching Open Source: Community’s Perspective
• Teaching Open Source: Next Steps
• Enabling Healthy Open Source Communities
• The Convergence of Open Access and Open Source
• Creative Commons and Creative Copyright Licensing
• Innovation in Open Source Development
• Subverting Proprietary Economics
• Community Building and the Architecture of Participation

Part 2 (Sunday) of Will Backman’s NYCBSDCon2008 summary is now up.  (Part 1, if you missed it.)

Daniel Phillips has posted again about his Tux3 work, with some more conversation.  He and Matthew Dillon have been comparing filesystem notes, since they are working on (separate) filesystem projects – see previous posts for details.

Sascha Wildner’s added a periodic(8) script to run ‘hammer cleanup’, a much-desired (by me) feature for Hammer filesystems. See the hammer(8) man page for details.

MeetBSD is happening at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, November 15th and 16th. It sounds like quite a party!

Matthew Dillon’s collecting opinions on what source control system DragonFly should move to; the two ‘finalists’ are Git and Mercurial, though other suggestions are welcome. There’s already a lot of people that have spoken up; I count 11 for git and 8 for mercurial so far.

I love these.

• A new issue of the OSBR: “Building Community“. (via)
• Android is out as Open Source (Apache license), seen many places.
• The latest @Play column about roguelikes: “Much About Monstania“
• Interesting to me: another “Perl on Rails“.
• Heise has an article about Linux’s ext4 and its segue into btrfs, which has been mentioned here before in contrast to Hammer.  (via)
• While talking about the howling void, there’s a post there about Git vs. Subversion.  Matthew Dillon is in there asking about opinions on Git vs. Mercurial, for use with DragonFly.
• The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System*, an oldie but goodie.

I think I stumbled on this while looking at NYCBSDCon sponsors: Reconnoiter is a network monitoring application that is designed to monitor very large networks.  It was started on OpenBSD, and works on a number of operating systems.  Interesting for multiple reasons.

EuroBSDCon 2008 just concluded in Strasbourg, France. Audio (pick Formation: EuroBSDCon) and pictures from the talks are now available; check out Constantine Murenin;s talk on the OpenBSD sensors framework, as DragonFly shares that code. (via Hasso Tepper on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

Matthew Dillon’s added support for kqueue in Hammer; as part of that, he’s added a new ‘monitor‘ utility.  If you’re curious about what kqueue is, look at the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Mac OS X versions. Edit: and of course, the DragonFly version.

The OpenBSD Journal has a number of interesting news items, so I’m just going to list the links and titles of each.  All worth reading.

• Cross-site request forgery via ftpd(8) – don’t know if this is present in DragonFly or not
• OpenGL has been relicensed
• Will Backman’s Day 1 summary for NYCBSDCon
• Ian Darwin talks about getting OpenBSD on a ‘netbook’ – I still want one of these little laptops, even though I don’t need it.

Hasso Tepper, who has been committing a number of laptop-related fixes lately, has added a page to the DragonFly wiki with some tips on how to reduce power usage and heat on your DragonFly laptop.