If you liked KDE3, you may like Trinity. Matthias Drochner would like you to help get it in pkgsrc.
The answer is “not very”. As I wrote in a post to kernel@, DragonFly 3.0 will be tagged soon, and released when there’s pkgsrc-2011Q4 packages to go with it. Probably a week if everything goes to plan.
John Marino has pointed out, with a number of examples, that gnat-aux is the best pkgsrc-based compiler for DragonFly right now, in terms of compatibility and support. It’s certainly good news if you are an Ada programmer. He lists some interesting numbers to demonstrate this superiority, though you can’t buildworld with it yet. (gcc 4.4, on DragonFly as part of the system, will do this normally.)
I just mentioned DNSSEC in last week’s Lazy Reading, and here’s a “How to get DNSSEC with BIND 9.8.1 working” article from Michael Lucas. It’s pretty simple… Conveniently, BIND 9.8.1 is available in pkgsrc as net/bind98.
I’m linking to this small discussion about licensing and its documentation in pkgsrc, just because these paragraphs, out of context, are good for any pkgsrc user to know.
The links are sheer entertainment this week. No strong options or anything, not even about that U.S. legislative mess called SOPA.
- I greatly enjoyed this history of personal computer mishaps and blunders. Of course, nothing like any of that has ever happened to me. Ever. Ever ever ever.
- Nintendo Entertainment System stories. (a comic) Also familiar to anyone of a particular age.
- This is good advice about env(1) – use it.
- “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos“, a video via matthiasr on EFNet #dragonflybsd.
- “What’s the strangest language feature you’ve ever encountered?” (via) Some of these are mind-boggling. I’ve also never seen APL before, yeesh.
- My Year in Roguelikes. I think a few of the games mentioned are in pkgsrc.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Basic Instructions. Well, not totally unrelated, since BSD author Michael Lucas’s tweet about it reminded me. I’ve got the first book; I need to get the second and third.
The freeze for pkgsrc-2011Q4 has started. No updates to pkgsrc, other than for security, for the next two weeks.
The last quarterly release of pkgsrc for the year is scheduled for the end of this month. This means the freeze, where only bugfixes are applies, will be starting on the 17th.
Two tips for working with pkgsrc, derived in part from this mailing list post on users@ (follow the thread) and from my own experience. If you put WRKOBJDIR=/usr/obj/pkgsrc into /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf :
- You can clean up any leftover package building files by deleting the files in that directory and leave your pkgsrc files untouched.
- You can have a read-only /usr/pkgsrc, which means it can be shared over NFS (or SMB?) between multiple machines, DragonFly or otherwise.
Some time ago, Matthew Dillon worked on a bulk build system that built as much of pkgsrc in parallel as possible. It’s in the tree now as ‘fastbulk‘, for anyone wanting to try it out. I used it a bit; I didn’t measure the degree of speed increase, but was able to get about 70% of the packages built.
There’s a new page up on the DragonFly website, about using rpkgmanager to manage your pkgsrc-installed packages.
Almost all the packages in pkgsrc support non-root installation now… except these last 31. I recall something about their removal by the next quarterly release if they still don’t work, or maybe just after. Jump in if one of these packages is useful to you.
This recent structure change (are there others like this? Maybe?) means that existing binaries may need to be recompiled for anyone tracking DragonFly master. This probably means that an upgrade from 2.10 to 2.12 will require rebuilds of all binary pkgsrc packages.
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!”
Not a lot of links this week, for some reason.
- The best obituary I’ve seen yet for Dennis Ritchie, where he’s contrasted with Steve Jobs.
- The best paper abstract ever.
- Michael Lucas documents his DragonFly update.
- Our tcplay TrueCrypt implementation is getting noticed.
- pkgin-0.51 is available in pkgsrc-current, though it’s not in the most recent quarterly release.
Your unrelated comics link for the week: Oglaf. This week’s OK, but it’s frequently NSFW, and frequently hilarious.
I know this happens normally, but I like to point out that it exists. From the recent pkgsrc-2011Q3 bulk build reports I posted, Samuel Greear found two problems to fix, and thanks to him and OBATA Akio, net/net-snmp and devel/poco are fixed for DragonFly.
I have some pkgsrc-2011Q3 builds done, for x86_64 and i386. I performed them on DragonFly 2.11, but they should work fine for 2.12/2.13. They’re uploading to the pkgsrc-2011Q3 folder on mirror-master, so you’ll need to set PKG_PATH correctly to use them via pkg_radd.
PKG_PATH=http://mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org/packages/x86_64/DragonFly-2.13/stable/
The x86_64 package upload is done, and I anticipate the i386 one will be done within the next 24 hours.
Among other changes to pkgin 0.5 (available in pkgsrc-wip but not pkgsrc-2011Q3), it now notices if you need a newer pkg_install because you’ve shifted to a more recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, and grabs the appropriate binary package to fix that. Thanks, iMil!
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc is out. You can download it via CVS, or update /usr/Makefile to pull down the correct branch. I’ll be building binaries as soon as I can. I like the release announcement style.