Something that is a very good idea: When running 1.10 or later, it will be possible to cd to /usr and update DragonFly source or pkgsrc files using only a make command.
If no problems are found, this release candidate will turn into the release, this weekend.
The latest BSDTalk is with William Hurley, who is the impressively titled Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy at BMC Software.
Clean out your /var/cache/fontconfig the next time you upgrade the fontconfig package.
Thomas E. Spanjaard has a kernel module that reads temperatures from recent Intel CPUs; read his post for details on how to get it working. It’s not yet in the source tree.
The 1.10 release looks likely to be this weekend, due to a number of bug squashings, and Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert reports a successful build of pkgsrc binary packages for 1.10 is complete.
Dieter Baron wrote up a list of possible pkgsrc improvements on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list; it’s a list of goals that have been talked about in fragments other places. Much discussion ensued, with Joerg Sonnenberger pointing out that some of these goals are near completion.
Joseph Garcia wrote up an entry on the users@ mailing list about how to get Sendmail working as a relay agent using authentication, and what that requires from pkgsrc.
The latest BSDTalk has M. Warner Losh talking about embedded FreeBSD.
During a discussion of disk activity while doing a bulk build of pkgsrc, Roman Divacky posted a link to the Anticipatory Disk Scheduler, which should be portable to DragonFly. Whether it would help or not is another question.
I just found Etoile (screenshots linked) today; it’s apparently a GNUStep-based desktop. This would be of interest to people who like the Windowmaker (or even Mac OS X) interface No version in pkgsrc yet, so I don’t know if it compiles…
The release will be ‘soon‘. There’s still some bugs to work out, the most notable of which is that vinum has some serious issues that have been revealed by updating the disk code.
It’s (call for) papers season, as SCALE 6 has issued a call for papers, too.
Adrian Nida happened to mention that his employer is looking to hire, down in South Carolina, USA. It’s not DragonFly work, but mostly Redhat.
Matthew Dillon is planning for a release on Monday, so that he can squash two remaining bugs. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has already started a bulk build of pkgsrc so that 1.10 binaries will be available.
This release will come with a pre-built virtual kernel, too.
If you wanted to tackle something difficult, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has suggestions around multiprocessor development and also what is essentially a devfs. (Follow the threads for more information.)
1.10 has been branched in CVS, with release coming soon. From the followup post, while the development branch will be 1.11, the next release will be 2.0, so this is the end of 1.x.
Is it that time already? The Call for Papers for the USENIX 2008 Technical Conference is online, with the papers due by January 7th, 2008, for the June 2008 event.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list the idea that there should be a bare minimum level defined to call a hardware/software system supported under pkgsrc. Much discussion ensued. (Happily, DragonFly is quite well supported by any criterion.)
Because of some bugs that were just fixed, Matthew Dillon is waiting one more week before releasing 1.10.