3:55 PM - mports index
I just posted a freshly generated index on the webserver. make fetchindex grabs this file and its also retrieved when the local index is broken at times. I'm quite bad about keeping it updated as it had be about 45 days since I updated it last. On the upside, the index generated fine the first time.
Its cleanup day for mports. I'm going to attempt to build packages this weekend and do our first package filled isos. That also means you can expect a new snap this weekend if all goes according to plan. That snap will include the timezone changes, the new BSD licensed gzip import from NetBSD/FreeBSD, the libarchive updates, openssh 4.6p1, and so on.
I should also clarify that there is one commited mport that does not work. Mozilla was imported to help us work on the problems with it. Its currently building on some systems, but the GUI does not seem to be connected to the backend code so it does not do much of anything. We suspect a project with their security manager. Adding a new OS to it isn't fun. The linux versions of Mozilla branded browsers are available as well as opera. I may try to get permission from opera to distribute opera on our isos. Its working very well on MBSD. I realize a lot of people like that browser in spite of its closed source and "unique" UI. I have to admit it works very well on unix like systems. I would probably buy it for my wii if i could get a wii!
I just did a test install on an old HP Pavillion made around 2000. It shipped with windows me and has a celeron 700Mhz processor. It took about 5 minutes to install mbsd on it. I'm going to build a few packages on it since its got a clean install.
Archite is continuing to work on building new packages and trying to figure out what is wrong with mozilla. He's also researching making pf our default firewall. I personally like ipfw, but most others I've talked to prefer pf. There are several advantages to pf so we'll see where that goes. The version in our tree is from around OpenBSD 3.7 or so. We'd need to work on updating it.
I also did a successful test package-split today. We need to build a few more packages as we've updated freetype2 and a few other things that mess with a lot of x11 ports.
As far as new ports are concerned, I am simply going through ports I started to work on previously and commiting them if they are now working. Most of them just needed some dependancy which is now in and I forgot about them. Most notably I got several of the broken KDE ports in.
On the topic of GNUstep, we're hoping to start installing GNUstep + xorg as part of the installer soon. If we ship a working snap with packages this weekend, we'll start working on the installer to automate that step. We'll also add some new meta ports to install GNUstep based software. After these steps are completed, we'll do our first release.
Concurrently, ctriv will be working on what we are currenly calling "mport" which is a package management system. pkg_add and other package tools will become wrappers for this new system. It will be written in C and eventually a graphical version will be built as well. Most likely the gui version will be a GNUstep app. He's almost done planning and will be developing a perl based prototype in the near future. It hit me the other day that GNUstep has an installer available. I want to look at that before we go to much farther with "mport" but i suspect some integration will be required.
We're looking at having a database containing all the packages available, their security status, some meta tags describing them, and a few other pieces of information. End users would just do something like mport install pkgname. There would also be mport status, mport list and so on. The hardest step so far has been finding a name for this thing that is not a usability nightmare and still not taken. mport, mpkg and several other variants are taken.. i'm starting to see why gentoo called thier stuff emerge/portage. All the good names were taken.
I'll create an entry with new ports later.