Category: pkgsrc

Samuel J. Greear started a new topic on kernel@: what Revision Control System should DragonFly move to, based on needs. This is a subject that can lead to lots of bikeshedding, but it has stayed pretty calm so far.

Also, ideas from me: packaging pkgsrc into releases, and zipping the release ISO.

The 2008Q2 pkgsrc bulk build pn pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has been redone; it should flow out to the mirrors normally.

I really like pkgsrc.  It’s a big system that works well for managing a huge variety of software packages, across multiple platforms, and it’s been beneficial to DragonFly for making  a lot of programs instantly accessible.

The issue nobody’s fixed – yet – is that there are plenty of ways to upgrade, some of which don’t work (make update), or involved homegrown solutions that miss the goal most people have: the ability to say simply “Upgrade this” and have it work.  This is why programs with the same functionality but simpler usage become popular.

(Prompted by a number of recent “How do I upgrade pkgsrc?” questions on DragonFly and pkgsrc mailing lists.)

The most recent quarterly branch of pkgsrc is out.  Read the release announcement for details of new changes, which include an improved Ruby Gems framework and Joerg’s work on DESTDIR (staged installs) support.

The binary packages on pkgbox for DragonFly were built with a prerelease version of this branch.  (Please, use a mirror as soon as it propagates.)

I’ve completed a full build of binary pkgsrc packages.  However, bandwidth to dragonflybsd.org is getting hit pretty hard right now, so please, be patient and use a mirror if possible.  (once they update…)

Hasso Tepper has been doing a lot of work updating pkgsrc packages for DragonFly; look at one of his recent bulk reports to see the details.

By the way, Firefox 3 is out but not in pkgsrc… officially. If you want to move to 3 right now, you can find it in pkgsrc-wip.

Update: As several people commented, it is out, though I wasn’t seeing it in the normal place I look.

Hasso Tepper recently completed a bulk build of pkgsrc on DragonFly 1.13. He’s posted the end result, and it’s looking much better than it did at the last quarterly release: 87% complete, and only 5% of the remaining amount were actual build failures – the rest were dependencies on those failed items.

Hasso Tepper, who has been submitting many pkgsrc changes lately, noticed a few non-trivial pkgsrc issues.  He listed them out as available projects for anyone who wants to help out.

I spy with my little eye (well, with Google) patches to Python for DragonFly support. This is part of a bunch of other fixes he put together. Thanks for doing the work, Hasso!

A recent post on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list from Herb Peyerl describes one of pkgsrc’s biggest issues: upgrading. Much discussion ensued, with some solutions suggested, and others chiming in with similar experiences. It sounds like there’s pressure building to fix that part of pkgsrc, which I can only welcome.

Leonardo Taccari created a NetBSD reference card (link to 2-page PDF). The command section also applies, by and large, to DragonFly, as does the entire pkgsrc reference. (via Hubert Feyrer)

pkgsrcCon 5, in Berlin, Germany, June 13 – 15, is less than one month away from closing registration. Register now if you want to attend (since the hosting university does not allow walk-ins). If you want to present, your deadline is slightly earlier, on May 25th.

Jeremy C. Reed, on the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list, has proposed a ‘upstream’ pkgsrc hackathon. This would be specifically to construct patches to submit to the vendors of given pkgsrc packages, so that the changes would no longer have to be maintained in pkgsrc. This is a good idea; please jump in if you want to help with DragonFly-specific changes, or if you have access to some of those upstream vendors.

I have a collection of small things I’ve been meaning to link; here they all are in a post.

Waxy.org has the details about the never-published sequel to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game (original playable as Java or as Flash), taken from a backup drive circa 1989; readers of a certain age will appreciate the historic Infocom details, and the page includes (for those with Java) a somewhat playable version of the sequel, Milliways. Waxy also had a link to a history of Interactive Fiction, for those who aren’t as familiar, or if you want to know why Infocom is important. It’s not hard to draw a line from these early games to the LucasArts adventure games and other later variations, like my personal favorite.

Seeing this CPAN search trick for the search bar in FireFox reminds me of something linked to by Hubert Feyrer some time ago: a pkgsrc.se search plugin, so that instead of trawling your /usr/pkgsrc via the command line, you can search through the just-as-fast-but-prettier pkgsrc.se pages for package details.

This undeadly.org article highlights an interesting tool called pkg_mgr; it’s designed to work with OpenBSD ports, but it’d be nice (and I assume not too difficult) to have it work with pkgsrc.

Someday, are we going to be nostalgic for the old default-font no-image open source software web pages? Everyone seems to be getting into making it pretty.

Dru Lavigne’s latest blog post has even more links to click; I’ll draw attention to two of them: the prescient 1967 article “The National Data Center and Personal Privacy“, and OpenSourceHowTo.org.

I’ve put a page on the DragonFly wiki describing my procedure for building all the packages in pkgsrc using Joerg Sonnenberger’s tool ‘pbulk‘.  Suggestions are welcome.

The most recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2008Q1, is out.  I’m working on building it on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org right now.  I’ve been running into a wierd problem with lang/python21, though.

This article, “Rethinking the interface to CPAN“, over at Perl Buzz, describes something there needs to be more of in the open source community.  CPAN, for those who don’t know, is a way to automatically add various libraries to a Perl installation, similar to BSD ports/pkgsrc or Ruby’s gems.

This is the message from the article: provide a solution to a real problem.  I bring this up because a reoccurring frustration people have with pkgsrc is how to upgrade packages.  Now, there’s no lack of ways to upgrade, but none of these solutions are a match for what people want: an upgrade method that works without frequent side effects or extra work.  This is why portupgrade is very popular for FreeBSD, or apt-get for Debian; it generally works as expected.  We need more of the thought process that leads to those solutions, in open source.

I’m not bring this up just to pick on pkgsrc; we need this sort of thinking for the DragonFly BSD website, too.  It (and the other BSD websites) take the role of a library shelf, with information only available by sifting through it until you find what you want.

Compare that to the Firefox website: most people are going to visit there to download Firefox.  A smaller contingent will already have it and want to upgrade it.  There’s a very clear visual path for 90% of the visitors to the site.  Now, go to any of the BSD operating system sites, and say “How do I install a working desktop system, with X and a window manager and so on?”  It’s going to take some digging.

pkgsrc.se, which has always been a nice way to browse through available pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip applications, is working on a new test site.  Details on the changes are listed in Hubert Feyrer’s post that first alerted me to this change.

Jeff Blank has a patch for people using both Postfix and IPv6 on DragonFly.