Messylaneous for 03/24/2010

In an effort to catch up…

Easy reading for what’s broke

Every time a bulk build of pkgsrc packages is completed, a report is uploaded listing what built and what didn’t.  Since there’s so many reports from the now-automated build, I’ve sorted it by architecture and release, to make lookups faster.

This is handy if you’re looking to fix pkgsrc apps on DragonFly, and you need a target.  It’s also a good way to see if a desired module exists as a binary.

(b)make install change in pkgsrc

Joerg Sonnenberger announced new behavior in pkgsrc: Performing “bmake install” in pkgsrc with a package that supports DESTDIR will build a binary package and then install from that package.  This means a package will be successfully build before the installation process is started, and I assume is to assist further work down the road.

Details: The old behavior was to build and install directly, which “bmake stage-install” can reproduce.  DESTDIR support means that the software can be installed as non-root.

Messylaneous for 2010/02/16

It’s like someone turned on the activity faucet; there’s so much to post about lately!

  • PkgsrcCon 2010 is May 28th to 30th, in Basel.  The date’s been declared, but not much else – yet.
  • Chunks of KDE in pkgsrc are now updating to the KDE4 versions by default.  This only affects pkgsrc-current users, not pkgsrc-2009Q4.
  • An interesting story about computer manufactuing and MicroSD problems.
  • In Praise of Online Obscurity – this article makes me think of communities like DragonFly and the other BSDs.  In essence, growth causes smaller independent groups to form out of a larger membership, because a social group can only be maintained to a certain size.   Perhaps this is why FreeBSD’s evolved a core group, or other groups form, like Wikipedia ‘editors’.  (via)  I’m catering to my own interests in group dynamics here.
  • Jan Lentfer’s brought in his hostapd and wpa_supplicant work, mentioned previously.
Things that are done

There’s a number of things that all came together in the last 24 hours or so, which means: bullet points!

  • Jen Lentfer took my suggestion and ran with it.  He’s got an update to Sendmail 8.14.4 on the way too.
  • Binary pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages for DragonFly 2.4.x/i386 are all uploaded.
  • I finished a build of pkgsrc-2009Q4 for DragonFly 2.5.x/x86_64 – take a look and fix some of the broken items, if that interests you.
  • Weekend reading: check out this Trivium post as there’s some interesting historical items.  I may try that LackRack idea in a environment that doesn’t fit a normal rack well…