Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has been using Roundup as a bug tracker for DragonFly for some time now; it works well, and Matthew Dillon plans to make it official. Tickets are created from traffic on submit@ and bugs@, and it works quite well im my experience.
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.
‘walt’ is looking for other people interested in using ‘csup‘, the written-in-C replacement for the written-in-Modula3 cvsup, used to update source code. For now, there are premade cvsup binaries for DragonFly, though a working csup in the base system would be nice.
This week, UnixReview.com has two book reviews: “Perl Best Practices“, and “Advanced Host Intrusion Prevention with CSA“. I have the Perl Best Practices book myself, and it’s excellent.
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!
Joerg Sonnenberger has a Google Summer of Code project, improving pkgsrc’s pkg_install. He recently posted to tech-pkg@netbsd.org with a summary of progress.
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.
Mid-month, says Matthew.
estd (Enhanced Speed Step Daemon), a program for controlling the speed (and therefore heat generation and power usage) of a Pentium M, now supports DragonFly.
A short thread about ACLs or Capabilities for another layer of security starts here – read through for some explanation. Work like this, though interesting, has to wait until the userland vfs/clustering work is done.
leaf.dragonflybsd.org’s drive was killed by a power outage. Matthew Dillon worked on restoring it yesterday, and it’s mostly back. If you had an account there, please check in and make sure your files are at least somewhat intact.
As a side effect, incremental backups are now possible with cpdup.
Bill Marquette has ported the lnc driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly (link forthcoming), which is in itself a port of the le driver from NetBSD. Pathces are available to try it yourself, or it should be added to DragonFly soon.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has shifted the ‘Preview’ tag to add in a recent bugfix. This issue just interfered with some packages compiling in pkgsrc, so this is not an urgent update.
the 15th International Conference on Computing (also known as CIC 2006) is coming to Mexico City, Mexico, in November, and they’re looking for proposal papers.
Emiel Kollof, who at one point had managed to get the NVIDIA binary video driver working for FreeBSD, doesn’t think it’s going to happen again.
‘Timofonic’ spotted this post by an NVIDIA employee describing the changes needed for better performance/support of NVIDIA chipsets in FreeBSD. This could apply to DragonFly., though I daresay these issues would already be fixed (or at least worked on) if it wasn’t a closed-source driver.
Of course, while I’m at it, I may as well wish for a pony and a million bucks, as there’s probably business reasons for the closed-source driver that are more compelling than the opinion of Some Guy with Blogging Software Installed.
The last 24 hours have brought some interesting improvements: Scott Ullrich committed new code for bridging, YONETANI Tomokazu committed his est (Enhanced Speedstep) support, which was converted from NetBSD, and Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has
success building world for the AMD64 architecture. (Kernel is not supported, so fully native AMD64 DragonFly isn’t possible – yet.) Unlike the other two items, Simon’s code has not yet been committed, as it’s the newest of these three items.
UnixReview has a review of the ActiveState Tcl Dev Kit version 3.2, and a book review of “Software Security: Building Security In“.
Steve Mynott posted an interesting link: ZFS-on-FUSE. It appears to be a not-yet-complete implementation of ZFS on top of the FUSE (userspace filesystems)