The freeze for the next version of pkgsrc, 2012Q1, will start March 22nd and end with the quarterly release being released on April 6th.
(I hope someone gets the joke.)
John Marino’s updated DragonFly’s version of GCC 4.4 to 4.4.7, apparently the final version of GCC 4.4. What’s next? I imagine GCC 4.6 at some point. It’s always a fun (maybe bikeshed-ish) conversation on which compiler to install, and which to have in base.
For the curious, I recently sent a bulk build report for pkgsrc-2011Q4 to the lists. Other than ruby-193 (which is fixed in pkgsrc HEAD thanks to John Marino), we’re looking pretty good! I’m curious if KDE or Gnome could actually get installed via binary; that’s sort of an ultimate goal due to the number of packages involved.
Speaking of Ruby, the default in pkgsrc may change soon, along with some of the involved Rails packages.
As several people have told me, there’s benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 vs. 2.10, available on Phoronix. CPU performance shows a significant improvement, in tests that actually test it. (I’d think a file compression test would be disk-limited, for instance.) Disk performance isn’t as great, but that may be in part because Hammer no longer will starve reading to benefit writing; that makes benchmarks look worse but improves real-world interactivity. I’m sure there’s more quibbling to do, since it’s lies, damn lies benchmarks.
If for some reason you needed DragonFly 2.6 ISOs, or older, there’s a mirror.
If you want to build Firefox 10 out of pkgsrc, make sure your DragonFly system is up to date; there’s a recent fix needed to make that happen.
I tagged these when they happened in previous months, but I forgot to post them:
“peeter” got wip/jdk16 to build normally on DragonFly, and listed how to do it. I don’t know if it still applies.
Sascha Wildner updated the isp(4) driver from FreeBSD, adding new supported chipsets and making it able to load as a module.
Also from Sascha Wildner, we’re now using one source only for PCI IDs. Think of that next time you are looking at dmesg, and it makes sense.
If you’re in New York City or the UK, there’s two new DragonFly mirrors for your downloading pleasure. Check the mirrors page for details.
Matthew Dillon’s CPU bug hunt has scattered its way across various news sites, some more accurate than others. He’s posted a followup that is probably a more valuable read than any of the news reports.
A few days ago, I posted about Python 2.4 and Python 2.5 leaving pkgsrc – it looks like it’ll be a little bit longer, at least for the 2.5 version. This means the Zope packages will be gone too, since they depend on Python 2.4. This won’t affect you if you aren’t using these packages, of course.
If you said “Yes!”, you’re in luck. Markus Pfeiffer got ghc to compile on DragonFly, and his fixes (for DragonFly at least) to enable it are already committed.
The default version of Python in pkgsrc is going to become 2.7. This will mean the 2012Q1 release will use that version by default. Older versions, meaning Python 2.4 and 2.5, may be going away. At least, that’s how the linked thread started but I’m not totally sure about it as I read farther through.
Take a look at the schedule if you’ve been thinking about going… (seen via multiple places) This is as good a time as any to point out, once again, the very valuable BSD Events Twitter feed.
That’s exactly what Michael Lucas talks about in this recent post; using ssh to browse from a different machine, but using a local web browser. He uses it to get around a network problem, but I imagine there’s a number of other applications. This is one of the valuable tips from his recent book.
See the release page for details. This release took longer than normal because of a crazy bug hunt, but the payoff is that this version performs better than ever.
Note: The x86_64 GUI ISO image had a problem due to file size (over 2G); redownload if you’ve had trouble booting it.
I was reading an article about how Tumblr scaled to handle the huge amount of data it’s regularly pushing out. Apparently, it started life as a traditional LAMP stack, but they’ve since moved on – to software packages I have not yet needed to ever use. Being open source software, it all has crazy names. Some of these packages are perfectly familiar to me now, but others are completely new.
Anyway, for fun, I decided to see how many of these sometimes new-to-me packages were present in pkgsrc. I’ll reproduce a paragraph from the story that lists the software they use, and link each one that I found in pkgsrc.
- Apache
- PHP, Scala, Ruby
- Redis, HBase, MySQL
- Varnish, HA-Proxy, nginx,
- Memcache, Gearman, Kafka, Kestrel, Finagle
- Thrift, HTTP
- Func
- Git, Capistrano, Puppet, Jenkins
That’s actually more than I thought I’d find, though I can’t articulate why. Anyway, if any of the names are unfamiliar to you, now is the time to follow up. Redis, for example, looks more interesting to me at a casual glance than the normal NoSQL models I’ve heard about.
The “Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique” is mirroring DragonFly – it’s on the mirrors page or you can just go right to it if a French mirror is useful to you.
I’m planning to tag the 3.0.1 release of DragonFly this weekend. There’s still a few bugs, so if you are able to help, please do. Otherwise, they will be errata.
Michael Lucas installed WHMCS, a commerical hosting management tool, on FreeBSD. He tells a story of doing so, and in the process happened to list all the PHP modules needed for it to run. I’m linking it because that list is going to come in useful for someone, someday.
If you’ve noticed the main dragonflybsd.org website being down, that’s because both network connections (on different networks!) serving it are down. This makes the website unavailable, and the source code, but you can still pull down images, packages, and the like from avalon.dragonflybsd.org. Hopefully this warning will be out of date soon.
Note: It’s back.