Summer of Code accepted students

There’s 5 slots for DragonFly in Summer of Code for 2009, and the students in those slots are listed below.  We had some very good applications; more than we had room for and higher quality than last year.  If you did not get in, please consider working independently.

Student: Alexander Hornung
Project: DevFS for DragonFly BSD
Mentor: joe talbott

Student: Dan Chis
Project: Support debugging of multi-threaded applications
Mentor: schubert simon

Student: robert luciani
Project: Profile kernel contention on MP systems
Mentor: Samuel Greear

Student: Jordan Gordeev
Project: Finish amd64 port of DragonFly
Mentor: Matthew Dillon

Student: efstathios kamperis
Project: C99/POSIX Conformance Audit
Mentor: hasso tepper

(announcement here)

New pkgsrc tool: pkg_dry

There’s a new tool being put together for pkgsrc installation and management, called pkg_dry.  There’s an initial version for download with instructions from its creator, Emile “iMil” Heitor.  It looks to duplicate the functionality of apt-get or yum, by handling binary-only remote package management.

Someone please test this on DragonFly, though not on a production machine…  If it does end up matching apt-get (the only thing I like in Debian) in terms of functionality, that will be fantastic!  I have wanted something like this for a while.

Viewer for git

Can someone who uses git more heavily than I do look at Tig, a git viewer, and mention if it is useful?  It looks interesting, as one of the features that git ‘lacks’ is a visual client other than at the command line.

OSBR, roguelikes

I’m going to mesh together two unrelated items in this post:

The April OSBR is out, with this issue being a focus on Open APIs.

The newest @Play column covers winners of the 7DRL, or “7 Day Roguelike” contest, where contestants build a new roguelike game in a week.  There are some real oddities, like Decimation.  I’m not sure how many of these will build on DragonFly, darnit.

Help the Macys

This story popped up last year, focusing on Kip Macy’s legal issues.  Kip is a BSD developer, contributing to FreeBSD and having worked on checkpoint support in DragonFly.  Another side of his story has come to light.  He and his wife could use the support, but there is (that I know of) no immediate way to help.

It would be nice if there was some common news source for BSD topics, instead of being an also-ran for Linux; this is an example of where an online community can support its own members, instead of that negative story that has been out for months.

Messylaneous, 03/23/2009