Category: FreeBSD

I am wearing the pointy hat now. Yesterday evening I broke the INDEX.
The index is a database-like file to search the FreeBSD ports collection. It contains names, descriptions and dependencies of all ports. It is generated by “make index”. index breakage usually occurs if someone wants to be extra clever and the commiter is not suspicious enough.
I made the commit yesterday, just before i went home, and at home i prefered to read the newspaper before checking email. After I have found the bunch of emails from the Tinderbox, I fixed it immediatly, but bad luck, the tinderbox now has a problem and did not pick up my fix. It continues to email failure reports to ports@FreeBSD.org just to make me feel guilty.

“I think that FreeBSD can best be visualized as a vast desert full of
committers who are totally lost.” Silby on the freebsd-cvs-src Mailinglist

All Computers that have one of my FreeBSD.org SSH Keys on their disk are shut down.
My fingers are itching, but I can’t work for FreeBSD on Christmas.

Alan Cox closed XFree86 Bug 525. Unfortunately it was not a Chrismas gift, but he just splitted the bug into several hopefully more manageable bugs.

Yesterday PR number 60000 arrived at FreeBSD.org. Since my first PR in October 2001 nearly 30.000 PRs passed. Impressive numbers, eh?

Okay, All my three 5.x Machines are running 5.2-BETA now.
5.1 was released on June 9. It was a huge improvement over 5.0 which had several problems that bite me, like a broken xl(4) driver that made it unusable. 5.1 worked for half a year on my main Workstation and no major problems prevented me from being productive. Although le tried to use it on the univie newscore, and found several problems under heavy load.
Hopefully 5.2 will be as stable. Before Codefreeze CURRENT was quite unstable due to several last-minute commits. But after a week in Codefreeze it feels usable again.

On a FreeBSD Mailinglist imp pointed to a recent addition to OpenBSD: Support for wi(4) based USB WLANS Adapters like my Netgear MA111. Next time i have some spare time I will look into porting this to FreeBSD. But probably someone else with more kernel Fu and more freetime will beat me.

Why are all Floppies I touch broken?

As always before a release KDE fails on some strange architectures, resulting in annoying mails from Kris on the KDE Mailinglist. This time aRts on AMD64 (somewhere in gsllib) and koffice on IA64 (The usual -fPIC issue). I am currently testing a sledgehammer fix for koffice on pluto2 and I hope Adriaan takes a look at aRts.

With two days delay, caused by problems with the bento-Ports Cluster, the Ports Freeze has finally started. Unfortunately the TODO list ist still quite long, so I don’t know if we will manage to release before Chrismas.
I spent the weekend, updating the evil Acer Laptop to 5.2-BETA, which went surprisingly smooth and with help from Lukas I tried to explore the ACPI Configuration. Unfortunately “shutdown -p” still does not work, and resume is also broken.