Matthew Dillon is planning for a January release for 1.4; while a good number of bugs have been found and squashed, there’s still a problem with network interface removal that needs to be fixed before release. However, a second release candidate will be assembled tonight.

I have a lot of little items mostly about the 1.4 transistion, so I’m just going to dump them all out:

* There’s a 1.4 cvsup file that will track the 1.4 release. This will be in the 1.2 release too, as soon as I figure out how, or someone tells me how to commit to a tag.

* the ‘.sh’ suffix requirement for rc scripts is dropped from 1.4 onward; this may happen to 1.4 too. This is needed for some pkgsrc scripts that do not end in .sh.

* cvsup is going to be replaced , one way or another.

* DragonFly will never be binary-compatible with FreeBSD 5+.

* Please, won’t somebody fix rcorder?

A contributor over at the #NetBSD Community Blog called me out on my errors. I corrected my goof on CGD, but I need someone to explain what the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip is. I know one’s a “work in progress”, but that doesn’t answer what the relationship is between the two, or how pacakges may move between them. I’m calling you smarty-pants out on the rug now – I want you to answer what 30 seconds of web surfing has not!

“Ed” posted a quote about STM – Software Transactional Memory – where memory usage in a multiprocessor situation is treated in a similar fashion to the way transactions are used in a database. Matthew Dillon wrote a lengthy response describing how DragonFly matches or improves on that system.

You may need to update your $PATH for pkgsrc when moving to 1.4, as the upgrade doesn’t necessarily change it for you. Fresh installs will be fine, however.

UnixReview.com has the “2004-2005 Annual SAGE Salary Survey” available on their site; skim it and look for your salary range.

The first release canidate for 1.4 is available now. A changelist will be available after Christmas Day, with the official release following.

How’s Joerg Sonneberger’s bulk builds of pkgsrc for DragonFly going? It’s like this. The relevant stats for those too impatient to read: 4,269 packages built out of 5,742 (75% success rate).

The BSD Installer is at version 2.0; this is not yet (I think) the version included with DragonFly BSD. The web page isn’t updated yet, but it’s downloadable. Note that the download is just the installer, without an operating system to install.

If you have an account on leaf.dragonflybsd.org, the pkgsrc-wip code is available at /archive/NetBSD-pkgsrc/wip or /usr/pkgsrc/wip. (softlink)

pkgsrc-wip, as I understand it – see comments, is the current version of pkgsrc. pkgsrc is normally released with new versions on a quarterly basis; following pkgsrc-wip gets the Work In Progress version. Less stable, more up to date.

As the final changes for the 1.4 release go in, Matthew Dillon describes the release plans as such:

I’ll be rolling the release branch thursday evening and start playing around with version numbers and release tags and such!

The official release will not occur until a day or two after Christmas.

Joseph Garcia has added a commit history to his DragonFly BSD wiki page. It’s a nice summation of major code changes.

Among other things, UnixReview.com has a review of “Routing TCP/IP, Volume I, Second Edition”, and an interesting article called “Forensic Tools in Court“.

Matthew Dillon has placed the slides from his recent presentation at BayLISA on the DragonFlyBSD website; his post describes some details about the content there.

Going by Jennifer Davis’s comment, video of the event should be on video.google.com in January.

If you’re wondering how Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert made a Mercurial version of the DragonFly source code, check his recent post that links to his script.

Incidentally, browsing to http://chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de/hg/dragonfly-src will give you a list of recent source changes that have been picked up by the Mercurial repo. Even better: it comes as an RSS feed!

Matthew Dillon has posted a description of what remains to be accomplished before the 1.4 release, and just when that will happen, and he also has a detailed plan of what he’s going to do in 1.5. (Which, when stable, will be DragonFly 1.6.)

That second post contains several special things to note:

• 1.5 will be significantly unstable (at least compared to the previous development versions), so stick with 1.4 for a while if you don’t want trouble.
  
• The introduction of a new acronym that I daresay we will hear more and more often: cache coherency management system (CCMS).
  
• ZFS! (See Flash demo)
  

This post from Joerg Sonnenberger notes a couple tricks about getting the most out of your ATA bus.

Matthew Dillon described his schedule for the upcoming 1.4 release, coming before the end of the year.

Sys Admin Magazine has a new CD out that contains all issues of their magazine (1992 through 2005) and all the issues of The Perl Journal (1996-2002). I think I have all the paper issues of the Perl Journal around here someplace…

If you like Perl and miss the Journal, there’s also The Perl Review, which can show up in both print and PDF form. I like the paper, but I can back up the PDF…

BSDCertification.org is looking for donations. Given how much work they’ve already put into the process, it certainly seems a good idea to support. (Thanks, hubertf)

linuxjewelry.com is closing down, and having a final sale of their goods. Included in that is various Beastie statues and BSD case badges. (Thanks, hubertf)

Want a project for your winter vacation? Matthew Dillon wrote in a post that I don’t have a link for:

I would still like to have a regression suite that can be run with a simple ‘make DESTDIR=(some_place_with_lots_of_space_available)‘. It would be a good project for someone.

BayLISA has Matthew Dillon giving a short presentation on DragonFly. This is on the Apple campus in Cupertino, California, so some of you west coasters can see this. Apparently he’ll have some good statistics to report.

Joerg Sonnenberger has modified nrelease, the release-building setup on DragonFly, to use pkgsrc. That’s the last major step before the next release.

Wiger van Houten passed along a link to the FreeBSD projects and ideas page. There’s some projects there that would be useful for DragonFly, and also there are a number of ideas there from DragonFly.

Are you going to 22C3? That’s the 22nd Chaos Communications Congress, a hacker convention in Europe, if you aren’t familiar with the acronym. Sascha, corecode, and Andreas are going.

The bugs page on the DragonFlyBSD website has been updated with a security officer(s) address, on the off chance a security issue is found and a confidential contact is needed.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has put together a Mercurial repo of the DragonFly source code, for those who like their SCMs decentralized.

I took my own advice and made a little experiment: a cheesy status page for Joerg Sonnenberger’s pkgsrc binary site. The page lists the update time, in descending order, for all the packages on the site. (and links to them too.) Could it be better? Yep.

Jeremy C. Reed is writing an article, and he’s taking a survey of DragonFly users.

I have a number of small posts to link, and I’m placing them in one article: First, Joerg Sonnenberger mentions that he is updating his pkgsrc binary collection on an ad-hoc basis, though not everything is there yet. (Tracking updates is an afternoon project that would be enourmously beneficial, if anyone wants to try it…)

Also, Bob Bagwill contributed his own description of How Cabling Should Be. Last, Hiten Pandya commented on the idea of automatic crash reports, much like the “Feedback Agents” that upload crash information on the Windows platform.