avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org, is back up at a new location, with new disks and new connectivity. pkg_radd should work by default again, as should git.dragonflybsd.org.
Here’s the state of my build of pkgsrc-2010Q4 packages:
- DragonFly 2.8/i386 – in progress
- DragonFly 2.8/x86_64 – in progress
- DragonFly 2.9/i386 – just started (happens on Avalon)
- DragonFly 2.9/x86_64 – in progress
So it will be some days yet… building over 4000 packages total is never quick.
If you’re using pkgin for managing pkgsrc packages, there’s a new bugfix to cover scenarios where there’s an old and new version dependency on the same item, like php between versions 5.2 and 5.3. It’s described in French, or translated English. (Thanks, Antonio Huete)
Normally I hold this for Sunday, but I’ve got a good batch of links already. Something here for everyone, this week.
- A git cheatsheet, and another git cheatsheet. I may have linked to the latter one before, as it looks vaguely familiar. Anyway, bookmark. (Thanks, luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- What should you do about bad blocks on a disk? Get a new disk.
- If you ever wanted to port software, there’s a pkgsrc developer’s guide (thanks Francois Tigeot) that shows you how.
- It’s NOT LINUX, for the billionth time. It’s BSD UNIX (certified, even) under there!
- “Children of the Cron“. An entertaining pun. (via)
- Nothing to do with BSD, or even computers, really: Gary Gorton, interviewed about the recent financial crisis, at a Fed bank website (!?). Interesting because I like economic matters, and because it’s the first web page where I’ve ever seen pop-up links added usefully, as a sort of footnote that you don’t have to scroll. (via)
- Michael Lucas recently had a machine broken into. Since everything on the machine is suspect, he’s using Netflow data to figure out when it happened, and how, which is not surprising given his most recent book. He has two posts describing how he backtracks his way to the probable source.
If you run pkgsrc-current, not the quarterly releases, the png library has just been updated to 1.5. This may break a few applications for now, and require a lot of rebuilding on your next update, since many packages depend on this.
If you are running a quarterly release of pkgsrc, you are unaffected.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2010Q4, is out. I’m working on the build of binary packages… It’ll be some days.
Aleksey Cheusov is putting together a package manager for pkgsrc, called nih. (For “Not Invented Here”). It’s binary-only at this point, so you’d need to run distbb or pbulk to generate packages, or download from avalon.dragonflybsd.org.
MirBSD is apparently also interested in pkgsrc as an alternative to the exclusive-to-MirBSD Mirports. The more the merrier, I say.
The planned freeze is underway; so pkgsrc-2010Q4 should arrive soon. How soon? January 1st, if it’s by the traditional schedule.
The latest(?) version of BSD Magazine is out. Among other things, it has an intro to pkgsrc. The site lists November 2010 for this issue, but it just showed up on the Twitter feed, so I’m not totally sure I have this right. In any case, it’s a free download.
Francois Tigeot figured out how to get it to work.
I never really noticed this before, but it’s possible to include your own patchsets into pkgsrc and have them picked up as part of the build process, using $LOCALPATCHES.
Somehow I ended up with a zillion links for this week’s Lazy Reading. I hope you’ve got some spare time for this… Let’s get right into it:
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author (see links on site), has started Twittering. He’s also found the Wikileaks/NetBSD association that I didn’t know about, as Julian Assange even shows up in the NetBSD fortunes file. Also, while linking to his blog, I’ll point at his post on “Write what you don’t know“. Think of that article next time you feel you don’t know enough to contribute to something – especially open source.
- There’s a lengthy dialog on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list about pkgsrc, and “Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc“. You can follow the whole thread on the listing page. I am all for the idea. Everybody and their brother has an App Store these days. Ports/pkgsrc are perhaps the original app store ideas, and I’d like to see them brought to the same level as these commercial entitites. This is important: pkgsrc is perhaps the only app store equivalent in existence that is not tied to a platform; that exists only to get you software rather than to provide a way to tie a platform into its developers profits.
- Hey, a roguelike zombie apocalypse game! Aw, it’s Windows-only.
- Mikel King has an editorial that sums up the many places BSD serves as an underpinning to products – a good checklist, if you don’t know of them. He’s also written an instructional article on passwordless/SSH setup.
- Along the same lines, Promote Perl by Building Great Things. This applies to BSD products too; telling people it’s great doesn’t work as well as making something great and showing that a BSD system is part of what makes it so.
- Did you know there are even BSD Certification classes in Iran? I really need to do that… though probably not at that location.
- Yacc is not dead. (via) I link to this because I had a moment of nerd excitement realizing that blog’s title is intended to look like a bang path.
- Database design ideas. There’s been a good series of posts there lately, good for anyone wanting to move beyond the basic CRUD details.
wip/jdk15 now works on i386, too, under specific circumstances.
Francois Tigeot has wip/jdk15 working for DragonFly/x86_64. It’s not there yet for i386…
If you have net/proftpd installed, and you installed it in the last week or so, you may want to upgrade. There’s been a security problem with the source files.
Rui-Xiang Guo has brought chromium, the base of Google’s speedy Chrome web browser, into pkgsrc, in the wip branch. He’s looking for testers of the work, especially on DragonFly. Please try it and report!
Tomas Bodzar found robotpkg, a pkgsrc-based collection of robotics-related software. Because of its pkgsrc origins, it should in theory work with DragonFly, or most anything.
The utility pkg_add has a -u option that tells it to upgrade any existing matched package with a given binary package. Since pkg_radd passes options on to the underlying use of pkg_add, after automatically setting a remote repository for binary files, pkg_radd -u <packagename> tells pkg_add to automatically find and upgrade a package.
I never thought this would work. However, I’m building a package on a system that has pkgsrc-2010Q1 packages installed, but a pkgsrc-2010Q3 /usr/pkgsrc. Every time I’ve encountered an error because installed software was too low a version, pkg_radd -uv <package_name> has resulted in a quick upgrade.
I’m not recommending this as a new upgrade method; I’m noting how unexpectedly well this experiment is going. It may be just blind luck, but this sure would be nice if it ‘just worked’.
Francois Tigeot was able to get wip/jdk15 to build on DragonFly, from pkgsrc-wip. Unfortunately, the package has been removed, but he’s looking to put it back.