Hasso Tepper has made /dev/audio a symlink to /dev/dsp.  DragonFly’s sound device hasn’t been /dev/audio in a while, but until recently in pkgsrc, applications that used audio would default to /dev/audio for playback.  With this symlink, they all should work - or at least not be directing sound to a nonexistent device.

This isn’t dramatic news, but I can never remember which device is the right one, and this fixes that little issue for me.

python15 and zope25 are being removed from pkgsrc, unless someone speaks up.  If you’re that someone, post to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org list about it.

Hasso Tepper is taking advantage of his new pkgsrc commit bit and working on a KDE change, by removing the need to have arts included when building the rest of KDE.  He’s testing on DragonFly, so a side benefit will be better DragonFly integration.

User “dark0s Optik” has put together a graphical tool for managing pkgsrc, called “pkgsrcgfe”.  I’d say to give it a whirl, but I don’t recall seeing a download link yet.

Hasso Tepper has been helpfully submitting DragonFly-specific pkgsrc fixes for some time; his reward/punishment is commit access to pkgsrc. Congratulations, Hasso

“Rumko” found that after upgrading clisp to version 2.47, pkgmanager stopped working for him.  Watch out if you’ve been using pkgmanager to handle pkgsrc.

Hasso Tepper’s continued to post better and better bulk build results from pkgsrc, and has more patches on the way for when the 2008Q3 release is done.

Hasso Tepper is continuing his pkgsrc bulk builds, with his most recent build showing 7,130 packages built successfully, an increase of 116 over his last build.  (I don’t know if he’s using local patches…)

As a followup to his pkgsrc bulk build, Hasso Tepper would welcome contributions from anyone interested in making pkgsrc’s version of the GNOME desktop and the various C# utilities work better on DragonFly.

Hasso Tepper completed a bulk build of pkgsrc (current) on DragonFly 2.1 - about 7/8th of all the packages built.

The freeze on pkgsrc development for the next quarterly release has been announced; expect the 2008Q3 branch in about 2 weeks.

The 2008Q2 packages collection on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has been rebuilt and updated by me; any new binary packages should appear at a mirror soon.

Thomas Klausner is removing qt1 and qt2 from pkgsrc.  If you’re using one of the few applications that still require them, tell him before the 14th.

Eric Gillespie posted in the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org to announce the apache22 package now has shared module support; it’s not on by default. (Apache’s a common enough program that it’s worth singling out this announcement.)

The pkg_radd utility that comes with DragonFly downloads binary pkgsrc packages from a variety of mirrors and installs them automatically.  However, the mirror script wasn’t redirecting to servers other than the overloaded pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org; I corrected that and it now downloads randomly from a number of mirrors.

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.)