February’s BSD Magazine is headlining “ZFS on FreeBSD”, along with a bunch of other material, including an interview/example for the next BSDCan convention. There’s some BSD-project-specific news in there from this site about DragonFly, along with MirOS, MidnightBSD, and FreeBSD.
pkgin, the binary pkgsrc manager similar to apt/yum, is now at version 0.4.0. You can get it now if you use pkgsrc-current, or just wait for the next quarterly pkgsrc release.
As Matthew Dillon notes in a recent post, procedures are now assumed to be MPSAFE (i.e. without the Giant Lock) by default. Any new work should follow this idea, and it doesn’t have to be documented specially. The inverse used to be true, where the code that happened to work without the Lock was rare, and therefore needed to be pointed out. Now, the good result is the norm.
Nuno Antunes has been working on upgrading netgraph(4) to version 7. His initial patches are available for testing.
Peter Avalos went looking for updates to /bin/sh, and found a lot of them, including regression tests. Even though sh is… 15 years old? Older? It dates back to BSD 4.4 and before – anyway, it’s been around forever, but there’s still things to do with it.
So, I felt lucky recently. I updated shiningsilence.com from DragonFly 2.6 to DragonFly 2.8, and wanted to upgrade my pkgsrc packages from pkgsrc-2010Q3 to pkgsrc-2010Q4.
You can do this with pkg_rolling-replace, or various other tools, but I wanted to see if I could do it completely with binary packages. I used pkg_radd -uv <pkgname> for each of the major packages I had installed.
Surprisingly, it worked, for every package. I had to force-install some Perl modules because I was moving from 5.10 to 5.12, but I think I may have been able to use an additional -u switch to get by that problem. I did use pkg_leaves to identify packages I didn’t need, and removed them to reduce the number of items to upload.
It was exactly what I wanted. Previous pkgsrc upgrades had taken most of a day, as I had to build from source and figure out what went where. We’ve had a better success rate in bulk builds recently, and this paid off in an upgrade process that only took perhaps an hour.
If you’re interested in mentoring for DragonFly and Google Summer of Code for 2011, please speak up. You don’t have to mentor if you don’t see any projects you like – I just need an initial count for the application. If you don’t want to mentor at all, but you’ve got ideas: there’s a place to tell people about it.
Peter Avalos updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0d, due to a recently discovered bug. He’s also brought the fix back to DragonFly 2.6 and 2.8, so it’s available for most anyone.
BIND version 9.5 has reached End of Life status. In fact, it did it some time ago. However, net/bind95 in pkgsrc has just been deleted. Update to 9.6/9.7, if you still had9.5 in place.
If you’re using the binary pkgsrc package installer pkgin, version 0.4 is available for testing.
They’re finally uploaded! See my rather lengthy post about it on users@ for all the details.
Chris Turner went off into some extra detail on how the rc system works, with extra links for anyone interested in some history.
Due to a crash yesterday on git.dragonflybsd.org, the Git repo was not up to date, briefly. It’s been fixed. This will only really matter if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly and rebuilt your system in the last 24 hours or so.
The theme for this month’s Open Source Business Resource is “Recent Research“. The topic’s broad, so there’s something for everyone. The article on licensing (BSD and otherwise) is of interest.
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.
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 pkgsrc-2010Q4 branch is now available in DragonFly’s git repo, via ‘git checkout pkgsrc-2010Q4’ in /usr/pkgsrc. Enjoy!
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.
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.
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!)