Specific issues to fix

Want to make Hasso Tepper’s day?  He’s posted 4 separate bugs for DragonFly that revolve around pkgsrc packages: sysutils/hal, sysutils/libgtop, audio/pulseaudio, and HTML5 video in FireFox.  All of these (except the last) are issues that have been present for a while, and fixing any of them will help a number of other pkgsrc packages work correctly on DragonFly.  If the work appeals to you, please dig in.

Upgrading pkgsrc; a summarized discussion

Siju George asked about updating pkgsrc packages, both on DragonFly mailing lists and on pkgsrc-users@.  The ensuing discussion can be boiled down to several alternatives: pkg_chk in a separate chroot, pkg_rolling-replace, or pkgin, pointed at avalon.dragonflybsd.org.  I’ve used pkg_rolling-replace several times with good results, and it may be possible to convince it to use binary packages, too.

More bullets

I’ve got a number of little items, so more roundup:

  • How much disruption happened in DragonFly after introducing a dynamic device system?  Surprisingly, very little, as most of pkgsrc still builds.  Thanks are due to Hasso Tepper for the corrective work.
  • _why makes some very perceptive comments.
  • Jordan Gordeev’s been working on the very difficult AMD64 port as part of his Summer of Code work.  He says thanks for the help, and others reply in kind.  Speaking of which, it’s possible to boot 64-bit DragonFly now, though it’s not production-ready.
Pkgsrc parts explanation

This isn’t breaking news, but it provides definition for pkgsrc: there’s ‘stable’ branches of pkgsrc that aren’t called ‘stable’; they’re tagged as quarterly releases.  You may have already inferred this from my postings.  Alan Barrett went into detail on the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list.

pkg_radd improvments

If you’re on DragonFly 2.3.1 or 2.3.2: I’ve uploaded a full pkgsrc build to avalon.dragonflybsd.org based on pkgsrc-2009Q2.  It’s possible to use pkg_radd to automatically download and install packages for those systems.  (and pkg_search will search the remote repository for you.)

If you’re on DragonFly 2.2.x, I’ve modified the pkg_radd target for that release so that when pkg_radd makes a request, it is redirected to the appropriate place on avalon.dragonflybsd.org instead of attempting (and potentially failing) to find a matching mirror.

I said close to the same thing as the above text on users@; the short form of all this is that pkg_radd should generally work for everyone.  Tell me if that’s not your experience.

Goals for DragonFly

This blog post talks about the identified reasons Ubuntu has been so successful in growth over the past few years.  The post uses it as a comparison to Perl, but it holds some lessons for DragonFly.  Some items we have now – a Live CD, simple install, regular release schedule – and they’ve been very useful.

On the other hand, the available applications is something that can improve – as nice as it it to build from source, immediate installation of binaries is best.  Heck, some companies base their business around it.  Pkgsrc is getting closer to creating an “app store” for DragonFly.  We’ve got a civil community, but I’d like to figure out ways to make it even more accessible.

(Nobody mentions this when talking about Ubuntu’s success, but having a large, privately-funded company backing your open source project also helps.)

While on the subject, I would love to have a job like Jono Bacon’s.  He works with all the issues that I think about.