CVSROOT/modules obsoleted

After years of frustration voiced by many committers over time, Pav finally put the word out to remove CVSROOT/modules. It only adds a shorthand for checking out ports, so only the port name needs to be typed and not the full path, i.e. ports/$category/$portname. However, this can be easily achieved by a short shellscript (for other committers, see ~erwin/bin/coport on freefall for an example), and it takes quite an effort to maintain the modules file, as you can guess from its revision number of 1.20060. I would know, for some time I’ve been running a nightly script to check if all entries are done right and/or are missing and informing committers if anything is amiss. Thus, after considering the cost vs. benefit, I have emptied the file and edited addport/rmport to no longer edit it. Adding a new port was never this easy.

Oh, and it’s not every day you got to commit to a file and remove over 18.000 lines from it. Yay!

On xorg-libraries, /usr/X11R6, sysinstall and more

So far, I’ve had a wonderful day. It started by trying to figure out why several hundred of packages are failing on i386-6. After a long time trying to find a general pattern, I boiled it down to xorg-libraries. It turns out that when Kris did some spring cleaning and removed the /usr/X11R6 directory from bindist, it is now a symlink created during pre-install in xorg-libraries. What happens next on deinstall is that pkg-install sees the symlink and edits several /etc files to remove the mention of X11R6 there so those scripts are not run twice. As the removal of X11R6 in /etc was not MFCed to RELENG_6, this means that those files are changes and thus show up as leftovers on pointyhat.

So far so good. Now, how to fix this:

  1. MFC the changes to /etc. This may break existing installations, but only if src is updated and not ports.
  2. Readd the directory to bindist on 6 so the symlink isn’t created and pkg-install does not edit /etc. Nasty hack.
  3. Don’t run pkg-install during PACKAGE_BUILDING. This is already set in Makefile, but not in the package. And now comes the fun part. Moving this to the package will cause problems as PACKAGE_BUILDING is set during sysinstall, so installing xorg packages from sysinstall will leave X11R6 behind in /etc.

Stay tuned for fixes.

BSDCan 2008 report

The FreeBSD Foundation generously sponsored my plane ticket for BSDCan this year. I wrote a few words about what I did at the conference, apart from the pub track of course, and some of you that weren’t there, might be interesting to see what actually happens at BSDCan when people are not listening to talks or out drinking beer, so here it is:

I held a short talk at the DevSummit on the state of the ports tree and
an update on the work portmgr is doing these days and some of the larger
issues we are facing (slides). I also held a BOF at the conference
itself on ports in general. Unfortunately, not many people turned up but
those who did got some pointers on how to start more actively contributing
to FreeBSD ports and we discussed some more general ports related subjects.

In addition to the official track, I held several informal meetings.
The upcoming release schedule for the next many releases was discussed
with the release engineering and security teams. Together with another
portmgr member, Mark Linimon, I met George Neville-Neil on behalf of the
core team to discuss a specific personnel issue that got escalated. I
also had lunch with the two other portmgr members attending, Mark
Linimon and Joe Marcus Clark for a general discussion on portmgr
issues. I cornered Ken Smith on how to start helping out on contacting
ftp administrators of outdated and/or incomplete mirrors, and cleaning
up the list of mirror sites. Additionally, I had some brainstorming
talks with Peter Losher of ISC, who runs the US half of ftp.freebsd.org
while I run the EU half, on optimizing mirror synchronization and
creating some statistics on downloads, which Mark Linimon was willing to
analyse if we could provide him the data.

All in all, a very productive conference, with lots of minor issues very
easily resolved over a glass of coffee/beer/milk, than over e-mail. A
lot of thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring the trip.

Ports support for 5.X is no more

As of June 1, 2008 00:00:00 UTC, FreeBSD 5.X support in the ports tree
is End Of Life. This means that a ports tree checked out after this
date is not guaranteed to produce usable packages on 5.X. Additionally,
5.X package builds on the cluster will cease. Users are encouraged to
upgrade to 6.3 or 7.0 if they wish to continue to track the latest ports
tree.

A tag, RELEASE_5_EOL, has been laid down to mark the last point in the
ports tree that officially supported FreeBSD 5.X. Port Manager asks
that you not rush to remove 5.X support right away as we’d like a
settling-down period, and we want secteam to have a chance to make their
EOL announcements as well.

Back at the office

Somehow I made it to the office this morning before the canteen had opened for breakfast. Rumor has it, they were closed last week because they had found rats in the kitchen. Not a bad week to be away :)
My body, though, seems to be a bit confused as to where in the world it is right now, which isn’t too surprising after being delayed for about 33 hours, so the whole journey back from Ottawa to Ã…rhus lasted from Sunday lunchtime to Tuesday 7pm (both local times). Funny though how random strangers meet when hit by an accident like a cancelled flight and being put in an airport hotel instead. I met a couple of poles studying in Stockholm and a canadian girl on her way to southern Sudan for MSF and we quite enjoyed our time just reading books in the hotel lobby. Certainly refreshing after spending several days being locked up in conference rooms with several hundred computer geeks :-)
Anyway, back to the coffee machine and try to stay awake and maybe even do some work.

BSDCan 2008

BSDCan 2008 is over again. As last year, I spent a few days in Montreal doing some siteseeing. Mark Linimon and Adrian Chadd joined me there, and some miles were walked and some beers were consumed. On Wednesday, we drove off to Ottawa. Somehow, Google Maps managed to send us to the wrong university at the exact opposite side of the city, so we had some more siteseeing there.
For the first two days, we held a FreeBSD DevSummit with talks in the mornings and informal meetings during the afternoons. I managed to corner some people about several issues that are much easier resolved in person (or even over a beer), which was one of my primary reasons of being there. The next two days was the conference itself with several interesting talks. Only a few people turned up for the FreeBSD ports BOF I held, but they did go home with some helpful hints.
After that, it was heading back, but that’s a separate post altogether…
Did I mention there are some pictures as well?

Motor days

Already the day after returning from a 2 week vacation, Sander and a teammate René dropped by on their motorbikes from Holland. The weather was with us, except for one day with rain and even hail, which was averted by a warm cup of coffee in a local kro. We did some nice driving on some of the smaller country roads outside the city and managed to add over 600km on the counter. Not easy to take picture while driving, so y’all have to manage with this one.
3 bikes

FreeBSD 5.5, 6.1, and 6.2 EoLs coming soon

With both FreeBSD 6.3 and 7.0 out, the older releases of the 6.x branch, 6.1 and 6.2, and the legacy 5.5 release will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Also, ports infrastructure will no longer be supported on the 5.x branch. Start planning your upgrades rather sooner than later!

On May 31st, FreeBSD 5.5, FreeBSD 6.1, and FreeBSD 6.2 will have reached
their End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security
Team. Since FreeBSD 5.5 is the last remaining supported release from the
FreeBSD 5.x stable branch, support for the FreeBSD 5.x stable branch will
also cease at the same point. Users of any of these FreeBSD releases are
strongly encouraged to upgrade to either FreeBSD 6.3 or FreeBSD 7.0 before
that date.

Please note that the End of Life dates for FreeBSD 5.5 and FreeBSD 6.1
were announced in May 2006; and the End of Life for FreeBSD 6.2, which
was originally announced as January 31, 2008, has been extended by four
months in order to allow time for users to upgrade.

The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wishes to inform users that May 31st (the
security team’s End-Of-Support date for FreeBSD 5.x) will also be the end
of support for the Ports Collection on both 5.5-RELEASE and the 5-STABLE
branch. Neither the infrastructure nor individual ports are guaranteed to
work on these FreeBSD versions after that date. A CVS tag will be created
for users who cannot upgrade for some reason; as of that commit, these users
are advised to stop tracking the latest ports CVS repository and instead
stay with the version as of that tag.

Full announcement.

New portmgr member: Florent Thoumie

Portmgr is pleased to announce that Florent Thoumie has accepted the challenge of being a portmgr member. Florent has been with the project for a long time and is one of our most active committers. Amongst other things, he was one of the people that worked on the complete overhaul of the X11 infrastructure with the Xorg 7.2 upgrade.
He will join the other portmgr members on integrating infrastructure patches and quality assurance in addition to other portmgr tasks.

Wish him luck!

95. Belgian pale ale

3,8kg Pale ale malt
250g Munich II
170g CaraMunich I

Mash for 60 min at 67°C

38g East Kent Goldings (5,6% alpha) for 60 min
14g Saaz (3,8% alpha) for 40 min
14g Saaz (3,8% alpha) for 15 min

WLP500 White Labs Trappist Ale yeast
OG: 1.034 (8,5 brix)
FG: 1.005 (4,0 brix)
3,9% ABV
25L

21/5 bottled with 107g sugar