In case you are using either of those programs, there’s fixes for building/using them.
Entertainment, this week. There’s several items here that will be more entertaining if you’re over 25. Or maybe 35. Get clicking!
- If O’Reilly was to publish any of the various parody books out there, it should be this one.
- Also, looking for those image links led me to this programming language suggestion. Oh! And that led me to this treat for people who remember Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
- A good game critic talking unabashedly about his love of roguelikes? I am so linking it!
- An update on the OpenBSD IPSec backdoor kerfuffle thing.
- OK, back to entertainment. A magic number!
- Wierd: new NetBSD platform support… from Microsoft.
- Huh. Apparently there’s some other meanings for BSD.
- Among other things, this article describes some Ruby tests that work so vigorously to make the tests like natural language that they become harder to write. No big story there; I’m sharing my sense of surprise.
- BSD: it’s tough. (link fixed) The complaints these people make are valid, though.
I’ve had the bulk builds of pkgsrc-2010Q4 finish on 2.9 systems, for i386 and for x86_64. The uploads for 2.9/x86_64 seem to have completed…
‘file’ has been updated to version 5.05 by Peter Avalos. file(1) is one of those utilities that I forget is a contributed, external piece of software, even though it’s been in Unix since 1973.
(file is one year older than me!)
Sourceforge had/has a security problem, so they’ve turned off some services until it’s fixed. However, anything planning to download from Sourceforge will be affected, so some packages in pkgsrc may not be able to build for … a day or two?
Tim Bisson posted new network tests contrasting the virtio driver against emulated re(4) in virtual environments. Previously, the virtio driver performed worse, but a more developed test suite seems to deliver more positive results.
Samuel J. Greear has written a summary of DragonFly’s experience with Google Code-In 2011, noting that the students tacked harder projects than expected, and relatively easy documentation projects were less popular than expected. He has hard numbers on tasks done, too.
I think this article holds the “number of hyphens in a title” record for this blog.
The latest BSD Magazine is “BSD’s and Solaris“, and it sets my teeth on edge to write that apostrophe. Seen via FreeBSDNews, though I haven’t seen it noted in BSD Magazine-sourced email/RSS yet.
The pkgsrc-2010Q4 branch is now available in DragonFly’s git repo, via ‘git checkout pkgsrc-2010Q4’ in /usr/pkgsrc. Enjoy!
Google Summer of Code is happening again! (FAQ, timeline) Of course, DragonFly will be applying to participate as a mentoring organization again this year. The last several years have all been fruitful with completed projects and new developers, so it’s worth the effort.
Tim Bisson and others put together a virtual network driver for DragonFly, based on FreeBSD’s version. Strangely, the emulated re(4) driver performed better, though their initial test was pretty minimal. The already existing DragonFly virtual block device driver is still based on NetBSD’s version. There are some positive side effects from bringing in this work, in any case.
Stuff!
- I find this erasure of the separation between remote code repository and local code editor very interesting. It may upset more traditional people.
- If you haven’t been watching the BSD Events Twitter stream, Dru Lavigne’s written a nice summary of the next few months, including BSD Exam dates/locations.
- The XFCE 4.8 release announcement hinted at some problems with BSD. It’s apparently because udev, a Linux-only product, is the only consistent way to access various items, so XFCE’s power and volume controls use it. There’s no udev on BSD, so we get left out. I’d normally end this with a call for a compatibility layer, but udev is the latest in a series of jumps from framework to framework in Linux, so I don’t know if it would actually do any good. (Thanks, sjg on #dragonflybsd for the link)
- The Economist has an article on open-source that does a hype-free job of describing the state of open source today. It points out two trends that I don’t think are covered enough: the large amount of open-source work funded by companies, and the hidden costs of training and integration. One downside of the “software is free, training costs money” model for open source is that it creates an economic incentive for byzantine configurations and difficult setups. That idea could use some exploration, but I don’t think many people want to, precisely because it’s negative. The article doesn’t go that far, but they should.
Sepherosa Ziehau is planning to get rid of ipfilter. It’s one of 3 firewall-ish programs in DragonFly right now, along with ipfw and pf. Currently, pf is getting the most attention with Jan Lentfer’s porting work, though npf is also on the horizon. However, ipfilter is currently in use at nfrance.com, so its removal may be on hold until it can be shown that ipfw or pf can stand in for it. It looks like it will work out.
Here’s where the binary build is: summarized in a post to users@. So far so good…
Global tokens are now running without the giant lock in DragonFly. Neat! There’s still plenty more to remove, but this is a big step.
Sascha Wildner set most of userland to compile with the gnu99 standard (though gnu89 is still used for contrib/ and some other parts). What’s this mean? Userland code now can match the ISO C99 standard, along with the GNU extensions that go with it.
(I missed this when it actually happened. Sorry!)
James Polera found that M5 Hosting was willing to install a DragonFly server for hosting, in addition to their other BSD/Linux offerings. Their service was also apparently excellent.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org, is back up at a new location, with new disks and new connectivity. pkg_radd should work by default again, as should git.dragonflybsd.org.