Just in case you missed it on the mailing list, http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2010-June/061882.html, the tentative date for Feature Freeze will be June 18, noonish UTC.
Archive for the 'Ports' Category
In preparation for 8.1-RELEASE, the ports tree will be in feature freeze after release candidate 1 (RC1) is released, currently planned for June 11.
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.
Howdy Guys,
Few Weeks ago i wrote that i’ve got a job offer in Kuala Lumpur,
I got this Job now and unfortunately now I need now to reorder my
life a bit. So first step is now to step down from KDE, Gecko
and vbox teams. I am not really happy about this step but sometimes
priorities goes to new state and we have to reorder something.
I’ll spend my time more to portmgr stuff, mentoring fresh
Blood, Gnats cleanup’s and committing any good stuff. I’d like
to say many thanks for all the nice time in these teams 
.
- Martin
Howdy Guys,
Few Weeks ago i wrote that i’ve got a job offer in Kuala Lumpur,
I got this Job now and unfortunately now I need now to reorder my
life a bit. So first step is now to step down from KDE, Gecko
and vbox teams. I am not really happy about this step but sometimes
priorities goes to [...]
On May 24th, 2010, License support files (bsd.licenses.mk and bsd.licenses.db.mk) from Google Summer of Code 2008/2009 were committed. Unfortunately, the Porters Handbook has not been updated to reflect this change.
For information on how to incorporate these new KNOBs into your ports, please review the Ports License Auditing Infrastructure page on the FreeBSD Wiki.
During the month of May, we were fortunate enough to see the return of two old committers. Â Marc Fournier, aka scrappy@, well known for http://www.bsdstats.org, and Ade Lovett, aka ade@, aka Mr. Autotools.
Please feel free to drop them a note to say welcome back 
I am pleased to introduce Rene Ladan, (rene) to the ports tree! He has been a long time ports contributor, and a Dutch Documentation committer. He made the classic mistake of sending in too many PRs, so I decided to punish him.
Congratulations, Rene!
Last month (yes I know I am late), Gabor Pali asked me to co-mentor Giuseppe Pilichi (jacula@), to join the FreeBSD Haskell Effort, aka the Haskell World Domination team. As I had the pleasure to mentor pgj@ into the ports world, it seemed fitting to assist with jacula!
Congratulations, Giuseppe!
There has been some discussion lately about if and how to "revamp" the ports system to make it more usable by general users, which was in part started by a post on PostgreSQL.org. Unfortunately there has been very little feedback from users themselves - which is probably a mistake, but also - there was very little feedback from the population (not a particularily small one) that is the cross-section of users and developers. Some ideas were presented, but at the end it all started revolving around banding the gaps and smaller improvements that will, I think, be practically invisible to the end-users.
I'd like to present some of my ideas here.
There has been some discussion lately about if and how to "revamp" the ports system to make it more usable by general users, which was in part started by a post on PostgreSQL.org. Unfortunately there has been very little feedback from users themselves - which is probably a mistake, but also - there was very little feedback from the population (not a particularily small one) that is the cross-section of users and developers. Some ideas were presented, but at the end it all started revolving around banding the gaps and smaller improvements that will, I think, be practically invisible to the end-users.
I'd like to present some of my ideas here.
It has been awhile since I blogged, so I thought I would finally post some status updates.
A couple of weeks ago, Erwin Lansing popped up a window in IRC, he wanted to know how life was in my neck of the woods. The red flags should have went up, but they did not. By the end of the conversation, he had me convinced that I would be a good candidate for portmgr-secretary, a position he held for some time. Turns out, he accepted a position on the Board of Directors for the FreeBSD Foundation, and decided he needed to lighten his load. I accepted the position. Erwin tells me it will only a couple of hours a week of my time…
So in my very short tenure as portmgr-secretary, I have been fortunate enough to send acknowledgement emails to new ports committers, and announce in wake of FreeBSD 7.3 being released, and that the ports tree is wide open for commits!
Stay tuned, I hope to keep up Erwin’s tradition of portmgr related blog posts.
Today marks my 1 year anniversary as a FreeBSD developer. I opened my first Problem Report in 2006 and after roughly three years of hacking on the ports system, wxs@ offered to mentor me and on March 11th, 2009 I received an email saying that the port-mgr@ team approved his request for a commit bit for me. I happened to be on vacation in Mexico when I got the email, and just like that a good day turned even better.
The first port I ever created was for mail/p5-WWW-Hotmail. I was working for an Internet Startup and I took the job simply because they were using FreeBSD and I never had an opportunity to use FreeBSD in a production environment. One of the tasks that landed in my lap was to automate the process of checking to make sure that our newsletter was not being delivered to the spam folder of the 3 big emails providers. I took a day or so to learn how to make ports and packages to make it easier for me to roll out all the perl modules I needed.
I wasn’t too happy working at that company, and after a while hacking on ports became a form of therapy for me and I started to get more and more involved with the FreeBSD project and I eventually ended up here.
In the past year I managed to make 148 commits and introduced several new ports into the tree. As of today, there are 21,636 ports available, and it feels pretty good to be a small part of that. While I would have liked to have been able to dedicate more time, other things kept getting in the way. My 1 year resolution is to figure out a way to better manage my time and try and set aside a few hours per week to hack on ports.
I want to say thank you to wxs@, because without him, I wouldn’t be a part of this. I was the first person he mentored, and I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten the chance to work with him. He is extremely bright and very patience and just an all around good guy. Even today when I paint myself into a corner, I can always ask him for help and every time he has managed to guide me in the direction I wanted to go. I owe a great deal to him and consider him to be a very valuable addition to the FreeBSD developer community as a whole.
Howdy!
We’re happy to announce that Xorg 7.5 is ready
for public testing.
The ATI and Intel drivers were patched to work with
the new server, please report any problems to us!
The drivers for Vesa, NV and NVIDIA have been tested
thoroughfully and seem to work fine.
A note to FreeBSD 6.X users: Unfortunately you’ll have
to compile gcc 4.2+ first because the X.org Team doesn’t
support gcc 3.X longer, We strongly recommend you to
update your system to 7.x or above.
Please take a look on our Wikipage. There you can find
the svn repo to checkout X.org ports.
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ModularXorg/7.5
A small merge script to merge the svn checkout into the real
portstree could be found here:
http://people.freebsd.org/~miwi/xorg/xorgmerge
The script is a modified version of the kdemerge script.
Please set the KDEDIR variable to the path of your X.org
ports.
After merging please try
portupgrade -af \*
portmaster -af
Please report any problems and issus to x11 (at) FreeBSD.org.
Thanks to beat@ and rnoland@ for their help.
Happy Updating!
Howdy!
We’re happy to announce that Xorg 7.5 is ready
for public testing.
The ATI and Intel drivers were patched to work with
the new server, please report any problems to us!
The drivers for Vesa, NV and NVIDIA have been tested
thoroughfully and seem to work fine.
A note to FreeBSD 6.X users: Unfortunately you’ll have
to compile gcc 4.2+ first [...]
Thanks to a generous donation by Nathan Whitehorn, a Sun SunFire v210 is sitting on the floor of my office waiting to have FreeBSD installed on it. Since this is the fastest sparc64 machine we have, Mark Linimon and I are planning on using it as a package building machine. However, if there is any other developer who would like to use it as a reference platform, please get in touch with me and I will set you up with access.
In the past, due to our limited access to the sparc64 platform, we were not able to support this architecture as well as we would have liked to. Packages available for sparc64 have fallen behind packages for other architectures such as i386 and amd64. However, once this machine is up and running, I have a strong feeling it will become a valuable resource to the FreeBSD developers working on making sparc64 a Tier-1 architecture
Hello Internet,
We the FreeBSD KDE Team are happy to let you know KDE SC 4.4.0 was
released few mins ago, and we’re ready for a public test. Before
you ask we don’t want to put KDE 4.4.0 in the ports tree before
FreeBSD 7.3 was released.
What is new:
KDE SC 4.4.0 provide many new features, designed to integrate
local and network social services .. and a lot more. The official
release notes for this release can be found at
http://kde.org/announcements/4.4/
Now you can get KDE SC 4.4 with a svn checkout:
svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/PORTS
svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/KDE
svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/Tools/
now try:
sh Tools/scripts/portsmerge
sh Tools/scripts/kdemerge
Please read carefull /usr/ports/UPDATING-area51
http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/UPDATING-area51
Happy Updating!!
Hello Internet,
We the FreeBSD KDE Team are happy to let you know KDE SC 4.4.0 was
released few mins ago, and we’re ready for a public test. Before
you ask we don’t want to put KDE 4.4.0 in the ports tree before
FreeBSD 7.3 was released.
What is new:
KDE SC 4.4.0 provide many new features, designed to integrate
local and [...]
Firefox 3.6 was committed by beat@ latest night, we’re happy to got
all finish before the ports tree is going in the slush mode
to prepair packages for FreeBSD 7.3 Release. Please read careful
ports/UPDATING. We’d like to say thanks to all helpers and
submitters, and a special big thanks to nox for his great debug
session to fix our addon’s problem.
Firefox 3.6 was committed by beat@ latest night, we’re happy to got
all finish before the ports tree is going in the slush mode
to prepair packages for FreeBSD 7.3 Release. Please read careful
ports/UPDATING. We’d like to say thanks to all helpers and
submitters, and a special big thanks to nox for his great debug
session to fix our [...]
Howdy,
We know that a lot people are waiting for Firefox 3.6,
but nox@ found a strange bug which is now solved.
The problem was that starting Firefox 3.6 with certain
addons installed was not possible. Now it looks like all
problems are solved and we can start a CFT.
If everything works fine we plan to commit Firefox 3.6 next
weekend. We should also note that the java plugin currently
does not work with 3.6.
What’s new in Firefox 3.6
* Support for the HTML5 File API
* A change to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to
increase stability.
* The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
* A mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox.
* Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click,
with built in support for Personas.
* Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them
safe.
* Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports
poster frames.
* Support for the WOFF font format.
* Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and
startup time.
* Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.
Please make sure all your addons are compatible with firefox 3.6,
backup your $HOME/.mozilla dir, also you need to reinstall
www/linux-f10-flashplugin10.
here is the patch:
http://people.freebsd.org/~miwi/gecko/firefox36.diff
A big thanks is going to nox@, Andreas Tobler, Florian Seemts.
Happy Testing!
- Martin on behalf of the FreeBSD Gecko Team.
