MidnightBSD Developer Journal

Welcome Fred Gibbs (fgibbs) to the MidnightBSD project. He has joined the project to work on documentation. He is a technical writer.

GNU cpio was updated to 2.7 in CURRENT last night. Many of the other BSDs use pax for cpio including NetBSD and OpenBSD. We may think about that down the road.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm trying to update many of the applications in contrib. We've got quite a bit of stale software in there.

In the last few days, I've updated bzip2, cpio, less, and tcsh.

I'm considering updates to amd (auto mount...) , diff and so on. diffutils was released in 2002 which was the first update since 1994. FreeBSD did a number of local patches over the years that we inherited so a feature comparison might need to be done and a verification that we aren't depending on anything weird for ports before I can update that. (same goes for patch which is now included in it)

In the case of amd, we wouldn't benefit from new features just a few bug fixes.

We've decided to migrate to bsd.mport.mk as soon as possible. There probably will be a disruption with various ports during this process. If you find a broken port, please report it to us using various methods (bugreport.midnightbsd.org, forums.midnightbsd.org, email, etc)

I will post when the transition is required for all users. CURRENT will be switching very soon. I don't like to call RELENG_0_1 stable, but compared to CURRENT it should be. Anyway, that branch will also switch after we know its "safe".

I haven't been posting about new ports lately but there have been several. The most recent commit:

mports/security/secpwgen

Mostly, I've been trying to update ports as we've got many that were added last year and have not had any TLC. I do hope that is corrected soon.

This is a great time to join the project. We are nearing a release in June and have some exciting changes coming.