Source now included

The DragonFly ISO images (the recent builds) now include system source – not enough to rebuild the whole system, but enough to patch and rebuild the kernel in situations where the source can’t be downloaded.  Like, say, network cards that require manual tweaking to support.

Original open source

A question about open source led several people to point out that there are a number of histories of BSD available – Steve Mynott pointed at excerpts from Kirk McKusick‘s O’Reilly book. Sascha Wildner also included GrokLaw’s excellent and long history, and McKusick’s BSDTalk interview (.mp3). Local ‘expert on old things’ Bill Hacker added that BSD-style sharing of code was happening before Linux, GNU, or even Richard Stallman had been born.

pkgsrc 2006Q2 binaries available

To continue today’s all-pkgsrc day, Joerg Sonnenberger has the binaries for the 2006Q2 release of pkgsrc, built for DragonFly, available at:

ftp://packages.stura.uni-rostock.de/pkgsrc-stable/DragonFly/RELEASE/i386

(See message here) For those who don’t know it, the quarterly releases of pkgsrc are ‘known good’ releases, where all dependencies are up to date for that time, and only security updates are made to those releases. In other words, it’s like a ‘stable’ branch of pkgsrc.

Set PKG_PATH to the above URL + “/All” to be able to automatically install from that binary collection with pkg_add. If you want to upgrade, the quickest way to do so may be this strategy I thought up.

Note that packages that have known security problems at release time are not found in /All, but rather in /vulnerable. This includes Firefox!

pkgsrc updates

The 2006Q2 version of pkgsrc is out, with a good number of updates. The announcement contains, among other things, the total packages in pkgsrc (6,110), supported platforms (12), and several mentions of how many more packages are compiling now on DragonFly thanks to Joerg Sonnenberger.