DragonFly BSD Digest » pkgsrc

Some BSD Multimedia

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:28:56 +0000

Here’s several things to look at:

Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010, on Youtube. I’ve talked about it before because I saw it in person; it’s a good talk. Ironically, he talks about getting a publisher interested in your book, and he just self-published.

Hubert Feyrer linked to the slides of two pkgsrc talks at FOSDEM; one about bringing pkgsrc to MirBSD, and one about pkgin, which is included in DragonFly.

NetBSD Hackathon, February 10-12

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:12:54 +0000

There’s a NetBSD Hackathon going on February 10th through 12th, mostly online. I mention this because it may have some effect on pkgsrc, used by both NetBSD and DragonFly. Hackathons for pkgsrc usually happen separately, but no harm in keeping an eye out for any positive benefits.

Updating Samba to 3.6

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:36:33 +0000

I’m posting this because it will save someone (possibly me) an hour of aggravation someday. If you are updating Samba from version 3.0 or 3.3 to a later version, it’ll take your existing config but possibly silently break on user authentication.

Up-to-date packages and pkgsrc

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:08:08 +0000

Ulrich Habel wants to update some of the Perl 5 modules in pkgsrc. He published a request for comments, describing what he plans to do for changing some dependencies. He does note that Perl 5 in pkgsrc is at 5.14.2, which is very recent.

I was talking to a relative today who works at a large financial company, which is standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise. I find it strange that Red Hat, which has a lot of money behind it, still ships a years-old and arguably broken version of perl. By using pkgsrc, you’re getting more up-to-date software than people that actually shell out money for the privilege of compiling software.

If you liked KDE3, you’ll like this

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:50:19 +0000

If you liked KDE3, you may like Trinity. Matthias Drochner would like you to help get it in pkgsrc.

How long until DragonFly 3.0?

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:56:26 +0000

The answer is “not very”. As I wrote in a post to kernel@, DragonFly 3.0 will be tagged soon, and released when there’s pkgsrc-2011Q4 packages to go with it. Probably a week if everything goes to plan.

Gnat-aux is the way to go

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 01:23:08 +0000

John Marino has pointed out, with a number of examples, that gnat-aux is the best pkgsrc-based compiler for DragonFly right now, in terms of compatibility and support. It’s certainly good news if you are an Ada programmer. He lists some interesting numbers to demonstrate this superiority, though you can’t buildworld with it yet. (gcc 4.4, on DragonFly as part of the system, will do this normally.)

How to get DNSSEC going

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:01:42 +0000

I just mentioned DNSSEC in last week’s Lazy Reading, and here’s a “How to get DNSSEC with BIND 9.8.1 working” article from Michael Lucas. It’s pretty simple… Conveniently, BIND 9.8.1 is available in pkgsrc as net/bind98.

A pile of sh and pam fixes

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Peter Avalos added an avalanche of updates for PAM and sh, so I’ll link to a few of them. The changes are mostly sourced from FreeBSD. The PAM changes remove pam_krb5 and pam_ksu, for which there’s an alternative.

Licensing for pkgsrc

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:59:41 +0000

I’m linking to this small discussion about licensing and its documentation in pkgsrc, just because these paragraphs, out of context, are good for any pkgsrc user to know.

Lazy Reading for 2011/12/18

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 20:08:20 +0000

The links are sheer entertainment this week. No strong options or anything, not even about that U.S. legislative mess called SOPA.

I greatly enjoyed this history of personal computer mishaps and blunders. Of course, nothing like any of that has ever happened to me. Ever. Ever ever ever.
Nintendo Entertainment System stories. (a comic) Also familiar to anyone of a particular age.
This is good advice about env(1) – use it.
“Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos“, a video via matthiasr on EFNet #dragonflybsd.
“What’s the strangest language feature you’ve ever encountered?“ (via) Some of these are mind-boggling. I’ve also never seen APL before, yeesh.
My Year in Roguelikes. I think a few of the games mentioned are in pkgsrc.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Basic Instructions. Well, not totally unrelated, since BSD author Michael Lucas’s tweet about it reminded me. I’ve got the first book; I need to get the second and third.

pkgsrc-2011Q4 freeze started

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:34:05 +0000

The freeze for pkgsrc-2011Q4 has started. No updates to pkgsrc, other than for security, for the next two weeks.

pkgsrc-2011Q4 freeze soon

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:06:02 +0000

The last quarterly release of pkgsrc for the year is scheduled for the end of this month. This means the freeze, where only bugfixes are applies, will be starting on the 17th.

Two pkgsrc work directory tips

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 02:09:22 +0000

Two tips for working with pkgsrc, derived in part from this mailing list post on users@ (follow the thread) and from my own experience. If you put WRKOBJDIR=/usr/obj/pkgsrc into /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf :

You can clean up any leftover package building files by deleting the files in that directory and leave your pkgsrc files untouched.
You can have a read-only /usr/pkgsrc, which means it can be shared over NFS (or SMB?) between multiple machines, DragonFly or otherwise.

fastbulk now added

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 04:10:10 +0000

Some time ago, Matthew Dillon worked on a bulk build system that built as much of pkgsrc in parallel as possible. It’s in the tree now as ‘fastbulk‘, for anyone wanting to try it out. I used it a bit; I didn’t measure the degree of speed increase, but was able to get about 70% of the packages built.

New rpkgmanager page

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 17:32:20 +0000

There’s a new page up on the DragonFly website, about using rpkgmanager to manage your pkgsrc-installed packages.

DESTDIR: 31 left

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 03:23:00 +0000

Almost all the packages in pkgsrc support non-root installation now… except these last 31. I recall something about their removal by the next quarterly release if they still don’t work, or maybe just after. Jump in if one of these packages is useful to you.

Structure changes mean recompilation

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:12:40 +0000

This recent structure change (are there others like this? Maybe?) means that existing binaries may need to be recompiled for anyone tracking DragonFly master. This probably means that an upgrade from 2.10 to 2.12 will require rebuilds of all binary pkgsrc packages.

Some pkgsrc bulk build comparisons

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:36:34 +0000

Here’s some recent x86_64 bulk builds: one on DragonFly 2.11, one on NetBSd 5.0.2, and one on Linux 2.6.37.4. Some data of note: DragonFly is within 8%-ish total packages built compared to NetBSD, which could be considered the baseline. Linux, the more common platform for most of the software built, is another step less. I don’t know if there’s any dramatic conclusion to get from this other than, “Hey, a lot of packages build on DragonFly!”

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/23

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 19:12:58 +0000

Not a lot of links this week, for some reason.

The best obituary I’ve seen yet for Dennis Ritchie, where he’s contrasted with Steve Jobs.
The best paper abstract ever.
Michael Lucas documents his DragonFly update.
Our tcplay TrueCrypt implementation is getting noticed.
pkgin-0.51 is available in pkgsrc-current, though it’s not in the most recent quarterly release.

Your unrelated comics link for the week: Oglaf. This week’s OK, but it’s frequently NSFW, and frequently hilarious.