Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner have converted snapshot/release building over to use dports instead of pkgsrc. If you want to try one of those snapshots, look in the snapshots directory… Oh, and here’s the mention of this on kernel@.
In the week after DragonFly 3.4 was released, Francois Tigeot was tracking downloads for each type of packaging system. It looks like dports downloads far outnumber pkgsrc. I think there’s reasons it appears different in uptake, but it’s still neat to see people trying the new system.
Ansible seems to be a configuration management system that’s lighter than puppet or salt. I had a student talking about it in my class tonight. BSD users Hubert Feyrer and Michael W. Lucas have both posted about it recently. Anyone want to repeat their experiences?
If you were perhaps thinking of setting up transmission-daemon, a BitTorrent server, this post on pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org will help you out.
It’s been 2 years since the pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 2.12/2.13 were getting updated, so I am going to remove them. If you’re running DragonFly 2.12, you’ll want to either build from source or upgrade DragonFly.
Eric Radman sent along a plug for a utility he is working on called entr(1). The desciption is “Run arbitrary commands when files change.” The site for it has several nifty examples – run make when *.c files change, or convert Markdown files to HTML as soon as they are modified. The really nice thing about it is that it’s perfectly BSD-friendly, and uses kqueue, but will also work on Linux. This beats the “This runs on the one flavor of Linux I use, in one particular shell!” approach I’ve seen from some other developers. See the reddit discussion of it for comparisons to inotify. No, it’s not in pkgsrc/ports yet.
Update: And thanks to Thomas Klausner, it’s in pkgsrc as sysutils/entr, and in ports as sysutils/entr thanks to Eitan Adler. You have no reason not to try it now.
It looks like Postgres versions less than 9.0 are going to be removed from pkgsrc soon. Be ready to update, if you are running one of those extremely older editions.
The DragonFly Git repository of pkgsrc now has the 2013Q1 branch. You can switch to it by editing your /usr/Makefile (look for existing references to either pkgsrc master or pkgsrc-2012Q3) and using the normal commands.
The 2013Q1 branch of pkgsrc has been announced. Along with the normal quarterly material, there’s several notes: preliminary Cygwin support is present, ruby 1.8 will be retired in favor of 1.9 after this release, and the pkgsrc.org web page now has a very nice new look and logo.
I plan to branch DragonFly 3.4 very soon, and that version will have 2013Q1 as default.
Update: The 2013Q1 branch should be available by tomorrow on DragonFly’s git; the repository needs to update and convert from NetBSD’s CVS and that takes a little time. I’ll post when it’s ready.
I hope you like reading; there’s some very meaty links this week. Go get a cup of tea and settle in. You drink tea, don’t you? You ought to.
- Reading about KDE’s repository near-meltdown makes me think we need more checks for DragonFly. We have the advantage of Hammer, of course, which would help in the same way that the linked article names ZFS as a ‘fix’. (via multiple places)
- We know that Apple will reject apps it disagrees with. Google also will do so. Has there ever been a program rejected from pkgsrc or (FreeBSD/OpenBSD) ports on content grounds? Not that I know of – anyone remember differently? I’d argue that’s a favorable point for the BSD packaging systems, though it may just be that no application has tested those boundaries yet.
- Portscanning all IPv4 addresses on the planet. Possibly the largest distributed effort ever? The detail in the maps and returned services is especially interesting. (via)
- Scale Fail, a Youtube video of a 2011 talk about screwing up your services. Mostly about the humor, but the underlying points are valid. (via #dragonflybsd IRC)
- There’s still improvement possible to fsck, apparently based on this. That’s UFS2 fsck.
- What is your most productive shortcut with Vim? A very thorough explanation of verbs, marks, and registers. Holy cow, I wish I had known about ‘: … v’ before. It’s long, but worth it. (via)
- Matthew Garret’s description of Secure Boot vs. Restricted Boot with UEFI, (via a coworker who went to Libreplanet 2013). I’m still not sure what DragonFly will need to do about this.
- I missed mentioning this earlier: 20 years of NetBSD. We’re coming up on 10 soon.
- Dragonfly drones. Unrelated except for name.
- That guy who starts to froth madly every time BSD is mentioned on Phoronix is still there (see comments).
- Mainframe computer supercut. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter asked people for their lists of webcomics that could go in a ‘Hall of Fame’. The resulting list is a lot of really, really good material. Go use up a few hours reading.
I saw this Hacker News post and figured I should emphasize: pkgsrc is still going to be available in the 3.4 release of DragonFly; we’re not suddenly switching to dports. I don’t want anyone to think they’re going to have to rip out all their packages and go to a new, untried system, all at once.
Right now, if you install PHP, or something dependent on PHP, from pkgsrc, you get PHP 5.3. The default for pkgsrc will move to 5.4, though I assume that’s going to be after the pkgsrc-2013Q1 release scheduled for the end of this month. I don’t know the upgrade path, but it sounds like 5.3 is on the way to retirement, in any case.
The freeze for pkgsrc-2013Q1 has started; expect the next release at the end of the month. (Ignore the subject line).
The freeze for the next quarterly release of pkgsrc – 2013Q1 – has been announced by Thomas Klausner. March 17th to start, March 31st to end.
The 2013 version of pkgsrcCon is happening in a few weeks in Berlin, Germany. As announced, the presentation list is up. If you can’t make it to Berlin, there will potentially be video recordings of the event.
Cygwin is a ‘supported platform’ in pkgsrc now. This means your Microsoft Windows machine can now build packages out of pkgsrc. I have no idea how many packages actually succeed, but it’s interesting to see the same tools there as on other platforms.
As the title says, if you install MySQL from pkgsrc-current, you’ll now get version 5.5.
There’s two changes in pkgsrc recently that might affect you: graphics/png was updated, so many dependent packages will require recompilation. Also, editors/emacs was moved to a general package instead of being specifically named by version, so now you can install ’emacs’ instead of ’emacs24′ or whichever version.
This week I will both post this on the correct day AND get the date in the title correct.
- An oldie but goodie. ENHANCE. This will make anyone who has done photo/video editing twitch. Check the author’s Tumblr for more supercuts. (indirectly via)
- Many people complain about regular expressions (and more recently), but they are an insanely powerful tool if you know them well. If you do, figure out this crossword. (PDF) (via)
- Followup on the first two links in that last item: xkcd drives a lot of traffic!
- If you are on Windows, you probably use PuTTY for ssh. It saves everything in the registry, which can occasionally mean losing all your configuration. There’s manual ways to save it, but there’s also PuTTYtray. (I’ve used portaPuTTY in the past, but it seems to be missing/no longer updated.)
- Actually, holy crap there’s a lot of variations/addons for PuTTY.
- That makes sense given how many terminal emulators there are, really.
- Why piping something off the Internet right to a shell isn’t a good idea. (via)
- Remember when the computer section in bookstores had books that involved programming? (unfair, I know.)
- “Don’t Be A Stranger“, musing on how there isn’t enough meeting strangers through the Internet any more. Here’s the odd thought I had while reading that article: I couldn’t pick most of the other DragonFly developers out of a lineup, but I’ve been working and talking with some of them for a decade.
- You could build Photoshop version 1 yourself – just substitute the original Mac libraries.
- Related: Photoshop is a city for everyone.
- Some of the oldest color film footage. Not the oldest,but possibly some of the earliest commercial film. Of course, the first thing filmed are young, attractive women. This is a re-occurring theme.
- Hey, a comprehensive year-end BSD roundup.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Epic Tea House Server. Interesting just because of what he does and because I’ve never encountered tea from a samovar, though I’ve read of it. (via)
Wait, this is better! That previous link led to this film from an English chemistry professor about tea chemistry. At first I was just entertained by his hair and his accent, but when he put tea in a NMR spectrometer, I decided this was the best tea thing ever. Even better than Elemental!
Pierre Abbat noticed that when using pkg_rolling-replace, his Python packages would fail to be built/replaced. This is because pkgsrc puts the version number into the name of the package, and he was moving from Python 2.6 to 2.7. OBATA Akio and Greg Troxel had suggestions/explanations.