Francois Tigeot put together some examples of the improvements from DragonFly 3.2 to DragonFly 3.4. The improvement in tmpfs performance is pretty dramatic.
If you administer one of the DragonFly mirrors, there’s a new /dports directory that can be mirrored. See that second link for details.
John Marino has a concise explanation of why dports mostly uses gcc 4.4 still to compile, even if you’re building DragonFly itself with the default 4.7. It’s a reason to not use NO_GCC44 – yet.
Eric Radman sent along a plug for a utility he is working on called entr(1). The desciption is “Run arbitrary commands when files change.” The site for it has several nifty examples – run make when *.c files change, or convert Markdown files to HTML as soon as they are modified. The really nice thing about it is that it’s perfectly BSD-friendly, and uses kqueue, but will also work on Linux. This beats the “This runs on the one flavor of Linux I use, in one particular shell!” approach I’ve seen from some other developers. See the reddit discussion of it for comparisons to inotify. No, it’s not in pkgsrc/ports yet.
Update: And thanks to Thomas Klausner, it’s in pkgsrc as sysutils/entr, and in ports as sysutils/entr thanks to Eitan Adler. You have no reason not to try it now.
NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge is this weekend, 4/20/2013. Fancy as it sounds, it’s really a single-day hackathon around open software and hardware, with the problems to fix coming from NASA and therefore probably very unique. It’s happening in a bunch of places around the world, but there’s one right here in my town.
Peter Hansteen has an extensive writeup of how he has managed the bsdly.net spam blacklists. Normally I’d stick this article in the Lazy Reading links, but the article is good enough to call out separately. It’s excellent not just for the mechanical aspects of how the blacklists were maintained, but for his strict description on how the process is simple, verifiable, and transparent. That last item, transparency, is how many anti-spam groups fall down.
Here’s a status report on the 3.4 release, pulled right from my mailing list post:
- We have the ability to use pkgsrc or dports (building from source in either case) now
- Several people have committed the remaining last-minute fixes
- I’m not going to have pkgsrc binaries built for the release.
- dports binaries – John Marino and Francois Tigeot are uploading now.
I’d like to have the release available with binary packages for dports immediately, because I anticipate a number of people wanting to try it out. So, the release will be delayed a few days while the packages upload.
The very first copy of Absolute OpenBSD (2nd edition), signed by Michael W. Lucas, is being auctioned off in a charity event for OpenBSD. There’s 5 days left to bid, though the price is already somewhere north of $2 per page.
The DragonFly page on the Summer of Code site is set up. If you are a potential mentor that I’ve talked to before, I’ve already sent you an email with details. If you are a potential mentor I haven’t talked to, you can email me or send a request via the DragonFly page. (Google has a new ‘connections’ method for signup this year.)
If you’re an interested student, take a look at the DragonFly Projects Page. Keep in mind that your proposal does not have to be one of those ideas – new projects are always welcome, and often have the advantage of being unique instead of being one of several similar proposals. (hint, hint)
Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin has put together a new site, bxr.su. His announcement to users@ goes into a lot of detail, but here’s a preview: it’s an OpenGrok site that has a forked version of OpenGrok that’s both speedy and takes BSD into account, along with other nice features.
Here’s the catch: it’s currently IPv6 only. IPv4 will be on as a test just today, and on for good shortly after. Read that announcement I mentioned for details.
If you have a DragonFly 3.2 system and you want to try the 3.4 release candidate, you can delete your local source, edit the Makefile to pull down 3.4 instead of 3.2, and run it.
cd /usr
rm -rf src
vi /usr/Makefile;
(in vi) :%s/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_2/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4/g
(save, quit vi)
make src-create-shallow
… then proceed to make buildworld and so on, as normal.
The caveats: I haven’t tested this yet, and this assumes you don’t have any local changes in /usr/src that you want to save. The usual warnings about lighting your computer on fire, etc., apply.
The DragonFly Git repository of pkgsrc now has the 2013Q1 branch. You can switch to it by editing your /usr/Makefile (look for existing references to either pkgsrc master or pkgsrc-2012Q3) and using the normal commands.
DragonFly 3.4 is branched – as a release candidate, with the current target for 3.4.0 release as the weekend of April 13-14. See the tagging commit note for a list of all the commit messages.
Note that in previous releases, we tagged “x.y.0” on branch, and “x.y.1” on release. I’m now tagging “x.y.0rc” for the release candidate at branch time, and we’ll tag with a more normal (to my ears) “x.y.0” for the release.
If you build a 3.4.0rc image right now, you’ll get an older quarterly release of pkgsrc. That’ll be changed tomorrow as the DragonFly pkgsrc git source is updated and I change where 3.4’s /usr/Makefile points.
The 2013Q1 branch of pkgsrc has been announced. Along with the normal quarterly material, there’s several notes: preliminary Cygwin support is present, ruby 1.8 will be retired in favor of 1.9 after this release, and the pkgsrc.org web page now has a very nice new look and logo.
I plan to branch DragonFly 3.4 very soon, and that version will have 2013Q1 as default.
Update: The 2013Q1 branch should be available by tomorrow on DragonFly’s git; the repository needs to update and convert from NetBSD’s CVS and that takes a little time. I’ll post when it’s ready.
If you were thinking, “Hey, I’d like to try an early version of DragonFly 3.4 before it’s released”, I’ll just point you at the recent daily snapshots of 3.3. These are close enough to a release candidate, I think.
The next release of DragonFly will be 3.4, and it’s probably going to be mid-April.
Hey, look, DragonFly BSD showing in tweetspam! Don’t bother following the tweeted links; they don’t have anything useful. It’s entertaining to see the structure and coding of these bots; they’re no horse_ebooks, of course.
As the title says, if you install MySQL from pkgsrc-current, you’ll now get version 5.5.
Michael W. Lucas is looking for someone to improve the Extended DNSSEC Validator. Specifically, add BSD support. It’s an idea worth supporting, because the standard it works with makes self-signed certificated perfectly feasible.
If you want to take advantage of the binary packages of DPorts, and have a x86_64 system with a recent DragonFly 3.3 on it: Francois Tigeot has you covered. There’s no i386 packages yet, which are the ones I could use right now, darnit.
If you want to try DPorts, see my earlier article.