Posted on
Lazy Reading for 2012/11/04

I’m glad 3.2 is out the door.  I think I spent more time on release notes and watching package builds than any other release.

Your unrelated link of the day: Sir, You Are Being Hunted.  I link to the Kickstarter for this game for no other reason than I think it would be fun to play.

Posted on
From make to bmake

John Marino is working on a very good idea: bringing bmake into DragonFly as a replacement for the current ‘make’.  bmake is going through more active development and apparently also in use/will be used? on FreeBSD, so syncing up with the same make flavor as FreeBSD and NetBSD will help everyone.  It’ll also remove the problem where you ‘make’ everything in DragonFly, except pkgsrc packages which you ‘bmake’.  It’s not changed over yet.

(What does OpenBSD use for make?)

 

Posted on
Do you use TeX?

I don’t, but I know there are people that do.  That’s why I’m pointing out this discussion where it appears that TeXLive 2012 won’t support NetBSD, which may mean no DragonFly either.  There’s the not-yet-packaged alternative kertex.  TeXLive is in pkgsrc, so I don’t know if that means the package will be discontinued or just altered.

(Please correct me where I go wrong here; I’m not very familiar with this, but it sounds like a drastic enough change that it should be mentioned.)

Update: as several people pointed out, it’s just prebuilt binary versions that aren’t being provided upstream.  The packages will all still be present in pkgsrc.  So, no functional change for most everyone.

Posted on
Some pkgsrc bulk build comparisons

Here’s some recent x86_64 bulk builds: one on DragonFly 2.11, one on NetBSd 5.0.2, and one on Linux 2.6.37.4.  Some data of note: DragonFly is within 8%-ish total packages built compared to NetBSD, which could be considered the baseline.  Linux, the more common platform for most of the software built, is another step less.  I don’t know if there’s any dramatic conclusion to get from this other than, “Hey, a lot of packages build on DragonFly!”

Posted on
Lazy Reading for 2011/10/16

I build this up over the course of the week, so I’m never sure what to put here. Does it matter? The meat is the links.

  • The Binding of Issac.  It’s a roguelike, with shooter elements.  It’s also creepy.  Here’s the Flash demo.  (Windows and Mac only, aww.)
  • Why transparency is a good idea.  (via…  Michael Lucas?  I lost track, sorry)
  • The JFDI Theory of Language Adoption.  This applies to operating systems too; create the shortest possible path between people and what they want to do on that OS.
  • NetBSD has added SQLite to the base system.  (via)  Interesting…  having a database(ish) always available leads to some new ways to keep data, outside of the usually “stuff in a text file” format.

Your totally off-topic link for the week: Fat Birds.

Posted on
Huge cleanup for games

Recently, Sascha Wildner committed a huge number of changes to the various games, bringing them in line with what’s on NetBSD and style(9).  This was all put together by Ulrich Spoerlein.

I draw attention to this not because it changed anything with the games in a functional sense, but because it’s huge (450 files changed, 31450 insertions(+), 29998 deletions(-)) and because it came out of nowhere.  It’s always nice to have new surprise contributions arrive.