4,5kg pilsner malt
Mash for 60°C for 60 min.
pH 5,6
2ml lactic acid
100g Saaz (4% alpha acid) for 60 min.
44g Hallertauer (3,8% alpha acid) for 60 min.
25g Saaz for 15 min.
25g Saaz for 5 min.
WLP802 Czech Budejovice Lager yeast
OG: 10,7°brix (1.043)
FG: 4,8°brix (1.004)
5,2% ABV
19L
Bottled on June 5th with 92g dextrose.
On behalf of portmgr, I am pleased to announce that portmgr has found a new secretary: Thomas Abthorpe. Thomas has been a FreeBSD ports committer since 2007 and has made more than 1000 commits since. He has previously served on the ports-security team and is currently a member of the KDE and donation teams. He has also mentored several new ports committers over the years.
In his role as portmgr secretary, Thomas will help portmgr keep track of ongoing issues, keeps the portmgr, and other bookkeeping work like organizing votes and stay in touch with other FreeBSD teams.
Please welcome him onboard!
The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed. Until 7.3 is released, sweeping commits still need explicit approval from portmgr to assure that tags can be slipped for potential security issues. For more information what constitutes a sweeping change, see the portmgr web pages.
In preparation for 7.3-RELEASE, the ports tree is now in feature freeze.
Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches are allowed without prior approval but with the extra Feature safe: yes tag in the commit message. Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with unusually high number of dependent ports, and any other commit that requires the rebuilding of many packages is not allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr after that date.
When in doubt, please do not hesitate to contact portmgr.
Again this year, the FOSDEM organization had reserved a DevRoom for the BSDs. I hadn’t been to FOSDEM for several years and was pleasantly surprised to see how many BSD developers and users had turned up.
Unfortunately, I did miss the first talk as the Sunday bus schedule clearly didn’t scale to the huge numbers of conference goers. The second talk was Ed Schouten on his Newcons project for FreeBSD. Of course, I was already familiar with the utmpx part of the project with ~100 ports failing on the cluster after those changes and we’re working together on fixing those. Ed showed some very promising performance improvements and much better UTF-8 non-ASCII support, although some fonds do need more work.
Benny Siegert introduced some of the nitty-gritty of autotools and libtool to ease software portability over multiple platforms. While some of the most hated parts in the ports world, they are by far an improvement over previous tools and, especially, manual development.
Next up was Shteryana Shopova showing how to debug the FreeBSD kernel with the large number of tools provided by the operating system. With generous amounts of examples and demos, she gave a number of tips on which information to include when sending a problem report to the FreeBSD bug tracking database to get the best support from the FreeBSD developers, and even more important, how to collect that data out of a crashed system.
A face seen at most european BSD-related conferences over the last many years, Marc Balmer presented a case study of using BSD Unix and BSD licensed software in a commercial setting, talking both of the advantages of the BSD license over other licenses (illustrated by the number of words in the license), the BSD development process and contributing code back to the project, and about the point of sale (POS) software his company makes on top of a BSD operating system.
By far the most popular talk with well over 80 attendees, Axel Beckert talked about the Debian/kFreeBSD project, building a Debian GNU userland on top of a FreeBSD kernel. While he spend some time to answer the biggest question of all: “Why?”, I’m not sure everybody was convinced by the answer: “Because we can”. Most people will probably still install Debian when they want Debian and FreeBSD if they want FreeBSD, there are some that consider this combination the best of both worlds. It will be interesting to follow how the project will develop in the future.
Treading carefully not the restart the version control system wars of old, Giorgos Keramidas showed how he tracked the FreeBSD subversion changes in his local Mercurial setup. Some of the speedups of having the changes locally in a Mercurial repository over a remote subversion system were quite impressive, and the combination does provide some advantages for people wanting to develop proprietary changes locally while still easily being able to import upstream changes.
Last but not least was Brooks Davis with a short presentation on his current work to increase the number of groups a process (and thus user) can be a member of. The historic lessons on how FreeBSD and other Unices handled this was both hilarious and sad at the same time, but with the number already increased from ~15 to 1023 in 8.0 and going forward to not having any limit at all, the future looks bright.
In all, a very interesting and well-attended BSD track at FOSDEM this year. Many thanks to the FOSDEM organizers for providing the room and to Marius Nünnerich for inviting the speakers. I hope to be there again next year.
In preparation for 7.3-RELEASE, the ports tree will be in feature freeze after release candidate 1 (RC1 )is released, currently planned for February 8.
If you have any commits with high impact planned, get them in the tree before then and if they require an experimental build, have a request for one in portmgr hands within the next few days.
Note that this again will be a feature freeze and not a full freeze. Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches will be allowed without prior approval but with the extra Feature safe: yes tag in the commit message. Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with unusually high number of dependencies, and any other commit that requires the rebuilding of many packages will not be allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr after that date.
4,5kg Maris Otter
450g Special Roast
230g Crystal (40L)
230g Melanoidin malt
120g Chocolate malt (400 EBC)
Mash for 60 min @68°C
50g East Kent Goldings for 60 min
20g East Kent Goldings for 5 min
White Labs WLP037 Yorkshire Square yeast
20L
OG: 1.055 (13,2 °brix)
FG: 1.015 (7,7 °brix)
5,3% ABV
Bottled on April 5 with 80g dextrose.
After the final preparations have been wrapped up, FreeBSD 8.0 is a fact and ready for download or upgrade. The all the new features and improvements are too numerous to mention, ranging from networking, scalability, virtualization, wireless, ZFS to USB. See the official announcement, or even better, a comprehensive article by Remko Lodder, for more information.
3kg pale malt
3kg wheat malt
Mash for 60 min @67°C
40g Williamette (5,2% alpha) for 60 min
9g Centennial for 0 min
9g Williamette for 0 min
White Labs WLP320 American Hefeweizen yeast
19L
OG: 14,1°brix (1.057)
FG: 7,3°brix (1.011)
6,1% ABV
Bottled on January 10 with 90g dextrose
Even though 8.0 hasn’t been released yet, with the second release candidate available for testing, a number of regressions have already been committed to HEAD, or FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT. The single change that caused most fallout in ports was a commit to the sh(1) parser that disallows mismatched quotes in backticks that broke a large number of badly written ‘configure’ scripts. A number of those have already been fixed, but there are still plenty of errors out there. The fix is usually easy, like the one for tcl83, so if you’re looking for something to do while the ports tree is still in a slush state, please give a hand by fixing some of the new errors on 9.0. For a full list, see the logs of the pointyhat cluster.