MidnightBSD Developer Journal

I've decided that I'm going to avoid ports for awhile.  There is a great deal of work to do in other areas of the system.  Apparently, I'm not keeping up with ctriv's changes. :)

I'll still maintain several ports that I've commited and possibly change the maintainer on them to my personal email address. 

I'll need to work something out with Phil and Chris for status reports that we can publish periodically.  I am not sure if RELENG_0_1 has been getting the mports updates as current has.  At this time, I do not know if we will hit our June target for 0.1 Release. 

I expect the project to move slowly over the next week.  Most of us are very busy this week.  I'm in limbo with sysinstall until I can test the installation of new packages.  I've started some minor changes to the loader.

I don't want to get too involved in the bcw driver debate.  I just wish this wouldn't have happened as I was personally looking forward to a BSD implementation for broadcom chipsets. 

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070406104008&thres=(u+*+100)+/+c+%3E=+75

Had this happened to us, I would have hoped for a private contact from the GPL code owner.  I also would have wanted to release this information myself through the project website instead of what actually transpired.  The OpenBSD project has a stronger view on GPL that we do.  I suspect this was part of the reason the reaction has been so strong on both sides.  I feel bad for the OpenBSD developer. 

I might as well take the opportunity to clarify our position on licensing.  In short, BSD code is preferred.  We hope to maintain the kernel + userland with BSD licensed code.  Obviously, using GNUstep we have a great deal of LGPL and GPL 2 code in the X11/GUI portions of our system.  We are trying to keep that code as default installed ports to keep it isolated as much as possible.  At one time I greatly disliked the GPL, but now I've realized there are some cases it makes sense. 

Our stance on BSD only code in certain portions of the system must be so in order to share code between our project and the many BSD projects.  We could start using GPL code, but then we would become an island with no other land masses to swim to. 

ctriv committed fixes for the qt33 port, and opera.  He's also working on GNUstep.  gnustep-base and a few other gnustep ports are now working.  If GNUstep is already installed, some GNUstep ports are working.  Many still have make package related errors. 

Ports relying on binary packages seem to die on make fake or make package.  I've personally noticed problems with compat4x, compat5x, and the linux emulation packages. 

At the moment, I wish Just Journal had a poll feature.  We started talking about packages to include in the first release.  There is a balance between packing too much cruft and not enough software that people need.  With our ports system, its possible for end users to install additional software.  At the same time, our target audience is not the typical CLI friendly BSD user.  Out of the box, we need a few basics working.  I'd rather not turn this into the typical bloated linux distro.  I also doubt my mirrors would be happy with me if I started shipping four disc installers.  One or two is the ideal target. 

ctriv has been planning the mport library that will be used by pkg_tool replacements and the GUI mport interface which will be developed by raven (nightlily on IRC). 

I've mostly been testing ports and playing around with sysinstall a bit.  I need to write a new installer, but for the first release we plan on using a modified sysinstall.

We are starting to make progress with the transition of ports.  Its very import that people mention broken ports.  We are testing everything, but hitting ports that people depend on first is always a good thing. 

Today, I fixed the windowmaker port. 

I'm going through X11-wm.  wmii, skippy-xd, ratpoison and pekwm are working.  (bottom up approach) 

The opera port is known to be broken right now.  lynx and links were updated yesterday and should be new versions that also work properly.

Opera has two problems.  First, qt33 is not installing.  If you already have qt, you'll find that the port is dying trying to package up its manpage.  Some ports that we know are broken have been added to bugzilla. 

Once we are done with this transition, all ports will correctly create packages.  This will be helpful to anyone running more than one system on the same architecture.  It will also simply building packages for us.

I recommend that no one use the CBL "anti spam but not for spammers" list.  It falsely accuses legitimate mail servers running on BSD of having windows trojans.  Clearly this is impossible.  They refuse to help or work with people they list. 

Further, if you do not get a reply from me make sure you or your ISP is not using that list. 

I hate spam as much as the next guy, but this is not the answer.  Worst of all, these people will not provide any evidence what so ever of the accusation.  There is no email with headers.  There is nothing they will give you. 

We are in the transition period to bsd.mport.mk.  That means many ports are currently broken.  Many X11 ports do not install properly at this time.  ctriv is working on this transition nearly everyday so progress is made. 

Critical issues at the moment:
GNUstep base doesn't work well.  This is clearly a big issue and we believe transitioning to the new gnustep-make 2.0 will fix this issue as it has destdir support. 

QT 3.3 is not installing just right.  This means KDE and friends aren't going to work. 

If you wish to use mbsd, i recommend you stick to the 0.1-special snap with its packages or grab some packages from the FTP server.  Those packages should run on newer mbsd versions, although this will also switch you over to the new ports system. 

This transition will be worth it.  I do not know how this transition will effect our release schedule.  It was critical we move forward with it, however.  I will work on the base system and installer during this transition.  Our security officer has been working on his new binary patch system.  Our remaining developers are working on different projects related to ports or documentation.

I've built a few amd64 packages.  You can find these on the ftp server under current. 

management/cracking:
kismet
aircrack
aircrack-ng

GNUstep related:
ruby-gnustep
gdl2 (think EOF for GNUstep)

Note: If you have any problems installing the gdl2 port, try installing postgresql81-client first.  There seems to be a subtle problem with detecting pq.4 as postgresql81-client is not fully installed when called from gdl2.. i'm looking at that.  The port itself should work fine.

To see a list of mports with descriptions on the web: http://www.midnightbsd.org/mports/README.html

A security hole was found in Clam Antivirus.  Versions prior to 0.90.2 are vulnerable.  Our port has been updated to address this issue.

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.

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".

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.

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

cvs 1.12.13 is now in CURRENT.
tcsh 6.15.00 is now in CURRENT.

We've created a branch which should be more stable. We hope to have a basic release ready by sometime in June.

The first release will include binary packages using the old system. mport will (hopefully) be available between .2 and .4. For the .2 release, we plan to work on the installer. From now on, each release will have a specific goal.

If you find bugs in 0.1, please report them using our bugtracking system (ideally) or our forums.

The first system will most likely be text based with options to install xorg and GNUstep. I have not completed the changes to the installer for GNUstep installation yet. As soon as that is done, I'll post an RC for 0.1.

Also, we had to back out propolice due to breakage in the threading libraries. As we had hoped to do a release, it only made sense not to leave an obvious flaw in the system before branching. We're re-evaluating the patch and also considering just moving toward gcc 4.1.

RELENG_0_1 will have the following (unless a security issue arises):
OpenSSH 4.6p1
tcsh 6.14 (6.15 in CURRENT soon)
Bind 9.3.4
gcc 3.4.4
ksh
OpenNTPD 3.9p1
sendmail
...

bsd.mport.mk is in "alpha" now. There will be continuous testing and changes to ports over the next week as we clean up problems. The new system does a fake install and rolls packages similar to OpenBSD's ports system. As we've been using modified FreeBSD ports for most things, there are several problems with this approach. Ports which do not honor PREFIX are broken. We're working on this issue.

Today, I added two linux flash plugin ports. I also added the linux-mplayer-plugin port but it appears there might be problems with mplayer. I'm going to work on that issue.

I fixed the dependancy in the xine port on an old version of curl so that should be working again. I'm waiting for the test compile to finish.

I've been working on adding several missing tk ports so that we can bring in the FreeBSD mbone category. Most of us don't have a great deal of experience with ipv6 so its a good time to pick it up.

We've also did several changes to the Opera port. The "native" version stopped working unless we used shared QT. The reason for this is our recent pro police patch. That means we can not add the opera linux plugins port, but we were able to get opera to work again on i386 and now on AMD64. (its still 32bit)

I decided to install AMD64 MBSD on my destkop. We didn't have any active developers running it as we've been trying to focus so much on the common desktop case. I'm working on fixing mports and any bugs I encounter. Its actually running much more smoothly on my desktop than the i386 version. There have been some ports problems but i'm taking care of them as I go. I'm also building some packages which I will post on the FTP server at a later date. You will need the propolice patch to use the packages.

I will be making new snapshots soon with propolice included. We're still cleaning up a few things for that snap. Also, I'd like to wait until mports settles down a bit since the index must be clean.

GNUstep compiled after a little hiccup on AMD64. It was actually an excternal dependancy. I need to do more testing on that.

A word of warning, if you have an old install of midnightbsd, consider that propolice is a very intrusive change and you may have problems. After following /usr/src/UPDATING and before buildworld try to compile a simple program linked with pthread or thr. If it works, you're OK.

We've removed giant lock from portions of geom. Please report any unusual behavior.

I just updated sed(1) with several interesting changes from FreeBSD. Yar has done a lot with that lately. I still need to update the man page.

Finally, we're experiencing a lot of HTTP traffic. Our security officer posted a piece on osnews about the Pro Police patch. We've had several people volunteer so its certainly worth the exposure, but our site might be slow. If you are downloading, please be sure to use a mirror.

So far several users have had great success with the new patch. One of my systems experienced a problem with the patch. Any program linked with pthread or thr would seg fault. A few ports are not working well.

If you installed opera, be sure to use the shared library qt version. We are still reviewing other ports.

From our security officer:

After a long weekend and much testing, I have integrated propolice into our system.. This will translate into both a more secure and stable userland, kernel, and mports system. While this is very well tested on OpenBSD and a few other systems, it is still very much beta for us. We will be requiring a lot of testing of both the base system as well as that of mports. While many mports will not be affected, I am certain that many of them have horrid code that will turn up when we least expect it.

This is only the first step in what will become numerous security changes to our base system. While we are creating a Desktop system that will be easy to use, another aspect is that we must keep it secure with little needed interaction from a user unless they want to.

Please send any issues or concerns that you find with this change to security@ and we will be happy to explain and or try and resolve your issue.



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