At long last, FreeBSD 6.3 has been released. It as the usual set of bugfixes, and stability and performance improvements from its predicessor 6.2 along with some interesting updates. See the release announcement for more details. Now, we can concentrate on the release of 7.0, which have an impressive set of new features.

One of our most active ports committers is in desperate need of a break, and away from human beings. Alaska doesn’t sound too bad a place for it. If you appreciate his work, please consider giving a donation to Martin Wilke to recharge his mental batteries and do even more FreeBSD work :-)

For those who haven’t noticed the announcement on the ports mailinglist, or noticed the flood of commits that started already before the announcement, the ports tree has been thawed, with the usual restrictions (see my announcement below). Note that the first committer to break INDEX will owe all portmgrs a beer at the next BSD conference, and a carton of beer if it’s within the next 24 hours.

The ports tree is now in “thaw” state after the tree has been tagged for
the 6.3 and 7.0 releases. This means that most normal commit that
affect only _one_ port are allowed. Sweeping changes are specifically
not allowed and when in doubt, please don’t hesitate to ask portmgr.

Please also take into account that the 7.0 release won’t be for several
weeks yet, so we reallly need you all to be careful about what you
commit as we tags might need to be slipped later. Also, please contact
portmgr for any security related commits to get the tag slipped. For a
more detailed description of what is, and what is not, allowed, please
see: http://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/implementation.html#sweeping_changes

Thank you for your patience,
-erwin

Currently, the 2.x branch of tinderbox doesn’t support 8-CURRENT. marcus added support for it in the HEAD branch, and from that, it looks like a patch to rawenv just like tinderbox.env in HEAD makes ports build in 2.x as well. A new release is due any day now, but this might help if you can’t wait for that.
miwi just sent me the patches for 2.x, portbuild needs to be changed as well, so you’ll need: patch1 and patch2.

After several months of, ehm, “development”, the new homepage for our local Unix User Group AaUUG finally went live tonight. Based on WordPress, this will ease the maintaince by several hundred percent compared to the old site. Also, we now have an RSS feed, so please welcome us to the Web 2.0 era.
A very big thanks to Brix for taking care of the old, and converting to the new site!

Last Friday and Saturday, it was time again for this years EuroBSDCon, this year closeby in Copenhagen. All the usual suspects were present and mingling occurred during the the hallway track. For me, the most notable talks were the TCP-to-SCTP Translation Shim Layer by Ryan Bickhart, which might make testing SCTP services more easy. Pawel had spiced his ZFS talk up a bit with some superheroes, leaving people laughing on the floor. And with technology progressing, we also had the first virtual presentation by Sam on video, who unfortunately had the flu and couldn’t make it. Luckily I don’t have to deal with monkeys chewing on cables every day :-)

Brix and me had taken my motorbike over and were staying at Morgans place in Malmö. The weather was very nice for the time of the year, so on Sunday we did some sightseeing around Malmö, including a ride in the old tram. Almost like a mini vacation walking around there. More pictures here.