DragonFly BSD Digest

If you have an account on leaf.dragonflybsd.org, the pkgsrc-wip code is available at /archive/NetBSD-pkgsrc/wip or /usr/pkgsrc/wip. (softlink)

pkgsrc-wip, as I understand it – see comments, is the current version of pkgsrc. pkgsrc is normally released with new versions on a quarterly basis; following pkgsrc-wip gets the Work In Progress version. Less stable, more up to date.

As the final changes for the 1.4 release go in, Matthew Dillon describes the release plans as such:

I’ll be rolling the release branch thursday evening and start playing around with version numbers and release tags and such!

The official release will not occur until a day or two after Christmas.

Joseph Garcia has added a commit history to his DragonFly BSD wiki page. It’s a nice summation of major code changes.

Among other things, UnixReview.com has a review of “Routing TCP/IP, Volume I, Second Edition”, and an interesting article called “Forensic Tools in Court“.

Matthew Dillon has placed the slides from his recent presentation at BayLISA on the DragonFlyBSD website; his post describes some details about the content there.

Going by Jennifer Davis’s comment, video of the event should be on video.google.com in January.

If you’re wondering how Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert made a Mercurial version of the DragonFly source code, check his recent post that links to his script.

Incidentally, browsing to http://chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de/hg/dragonfly-src will give you a list of recent source changes that have been picked up by the Mercurial repo. Even better: it comes as an RSS feed!

Matthew Dillon has posted a description of what remains to be accomplished before the 1.4 release, and just when that will happen, and he also has a detailed plan of what he’s going to do in 1.5. (Which, when stable, will be DragonFly 1.6.)

That second post contains several special things to note:

• 1.5 will be significantly unstable (at least compared to the previous development versions), so stick with 1.4 for a while if you don’t want trouble.
  
• The introduction of a new acronym that I daresay we will hear more and more often: cache coherency management system (CCMS).
  
• ZFS! (See Flash demo)
  

This post from Joerg Sonnenberger notes a couple tricks about getting the most out of your ATA bus.

Matthew Dillon described his schedule for the upcoming 1.4 release, coming before the end of the year.

Sys Admin Magazine has a new CD out that contains all issues of their magazine (1992 through 2005) and all the issues of The Perl Journal (1996-2002). I think I have all the paper issues of the Perl Journal around here someplace…

If you like Perl and miss the Journal, there’s also The Perl Review, which can show up in both print and PDF form. I like the paper, but I can back up the PDF…

BSDCertification.org is looking for donations. Given how much work they’ve already put into the process, it certainly seems a good idea to support. (Thanks, hubertf)

linuxjewelry.com is closing down, and having a final sale of their goods. Included in that is various Beastie statues and BSD case badges. (Thanks, hubertf)

Want a project for your winter vacation? Matthew Dillon wrote in a post that I don’t have a link for:

I would still like to have a regression suite that can be run with a simple ‘make DESTDIR=(some_place_with_lots_of_space_available)‘. It would be a good project for someone.

BayLISA has Matthew Dillon giving a short presentation on DragonFly. This is on the Apple campus in Cupertino, California, so some of you west coasters can see this. Apparently he’ll have some good statistics to report.

Joerg Sonnenberger has modified nrelease, the release-building setup on DragonFly, to use pkgsrc. That’s the last major step before the next release.

Wiger van Houten passed along a link to the FreeBSD projects and ideas page. There’s some projects there that would be useful for DragonFly, and also there are a number of ideas there from DragonFly.