The 1.12.2 release is out; check the download page and the errata page for details on the changes that went into this minor release.
Jeremy C. Reed, on the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list, has proposed a ‘upstream’ pkgsrc hackathon. This would be specifically to construct patches to submit to the vendors of given pkgsrc packages, so that the changes would no longer have to be maintained in pkgsrc. This is a good idea; please jump in if you want to help with DragonFly-specific changes, or if you have access to some of those upstream vendors.
We have 7 accepted projects in the Google Summer of Code; the full list is available at the Google site, with links to each proposal.
We’re now in the Community Bonding Period; time for us to get to know each other. Please welcome your new student codevelopers; we should be hearing a lot from them over the next few months.
I have a collection of small things I’ve been meaning to link; here they all are in a post.
Waxy.org has the details about the never-published sequel to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game (original playable as Java or as Flash), taken from a backup drive circa 1989; readers of a certain age will appreciate the historic Infocom details, and the page includes (for those with Java) a somewhat playable version of the sequel, Milliways. Waxy also had a link to a history of Interactive Fiction, for those who aren’t as familiar, or if you want to know why Infocom is important. It’s not hard to draw a line from these early games to the LucasArts adventure games and other later variations, like my personal favorite.
Seeing this CPAN search trick for the search bar in FireFox reminds me of something linked to by Hubert Feyrer some time ago: a pkgsrc.se search plugin, so that instead of trawling your /usr/pkgsrc via the command line, you can search through the just-as-fast-but-prettier pkgsrc.se pages for package details.
This undeadly.org article highlights an interesting tool called pkg_mgr; it’s designed to work with OpenBSD ports, but it’d be nice (and I assume not too difficult) to have it work with pkgsrc.
Someday, are we going to be nostalgic for the old default-font no-image open source software web pages? Everyone seems to be getting into making it pretty.
Dru Lavigne’s latest blog post has even more links to click; I’ll draw attention to two of them: the prescient 1967 article “The National Data Center and Personal Privacy“, and OpenSourceHowTo.org.
I’ve added the various BSD-related links from an earlier story over on the sidebar to this site. If you have more suggestions for BSD-related site, please tell me at justin@shiningsilence.com, or in the comments.
Aggelos Economopoulos has volunteered himself and his diploma project for getting the DragonFly network stack out from under the Big Giant Lock. This benefits everyone. He plans to post a preliminary roadmap soon.
Peter Avalos committed two OpenSSH fixes (CVE-2008-1483 and CVE-2008-1657); there’s enough of these little changes that 1.12.2 is going to be released tomorrow.
Apparently, with a simple plugin, it’s possible to telnet to your FireFox browser and issue Javascript commands. (Via) Is FireFox becoming the Emacs Operating System of this century?
Peter Avalos has updated bzip2 to version 1.0.5, which fixes the Denial of Service issue described in CVE-2008-1372.
BSDTalk 147 is out, with an 16-minute interview of Alexander Motin.
I’ve put a page on the DragonFly wiki describing my procedure for building all the packages in pkgsrc using Joerg Sonnenberger’s tool ‘pbulk‘. Suggestions are welcome.
Matthew Dillon posted a HEADS UP: that the vm_page structure has changed. This will probably not affect you unless you are working in the kernel. He didn’t specify in the message, but it’s probably a good idea to do a full buildworld/buildkernel if you’re running bleeding edge code.
Matthew Dillon commited significant changes to pf in DragonFly; his commit message describes the differences and advantages.
(Yes, I’m running behind on news. Yes, there’s a lot. We’re drinking from the firehose these days.)
BSDTalk 146 had Will Backman asking for links to other BSD-oriented sites. I linked to the interview before, but the comments now have a nice list of BSD sites. I list them all after the jump:
Continue reading “More BSD places to visit”
Matthias Schmidt has set up (in CVS) a page for new items for the 2.0 release of DragonFly. If you’re committing something big to DragonFly, write it down there. Consistent use will give us a pre-prepared list for the actual release, which will probably be late summer.
Matthew Dillon’s recent parallelization of cpdup brought up some interesting features: it can do third-party transfers, copying data from one remote machine to another, and while not faster than rsync, it’s relatively easy to use. Vincent Stemen followed up with a mention of his ‘rbu’ (Remote Back Up) product, that serves as a wrapper around rsync and simplifies the backup process.
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted some work he’s done to reduce serializer contention in an effort to improve network forwarding throughput. His detailed technical explanation also includes some benchmarks; he found a way to improve speeds but finds that there’s still a penalty from multiprocessing support.
The USENIX Annual technical Conference is happening June 22-27 in Boston, Massachusetts, and registration for it has opened. Theres a whole lot of events happening, including a separate poster session, so read the link for details. (via)
The most recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2008Q1, is out. I’m working on building it on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org right now. I’ve been running into a wierd problem with lang/python21, though.
I’m not technically qualified to answer the question Josh Triplett asked in comments on my ‘dolt’ article:
If you want to fix that, feel free to send me a patch, or just tell me that DragonFly uses the same -fPIC -DPIC that Linux and FreeBSD use.
Tell him at/send patch to josh@freedesktop.org, and if you do, thank you for helping.