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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
Please welcome Romain Tartiere (romain@) to the FreeBSD Ports Committers ranks.
Romain has been a driving force in bringing our mono ports up to speed. He’s also been maintaining a lot of C# ports out of our CVS tree. I will be mentoring him.
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I am pleased to announce my latest mentee, Alberto Villa. Alberto has been a dedicated contributor with the FreeBSD KDE team, and it was finally time to punish him with a ports commit bit.
Martin Wilke will be Alberto’s co-mentor in this little adventure!
Congratulations Alberto!
Dima “Red Fox” Panov, aka fluffy@ has been a dedicated contributor to the FreeBSD KDE team, and his hard work has paid off, miwi@ and I have cast him loose to collect pointy hats on his own.
It has been a pleasure being your mentor, Dima, good look, and may your INDEX breakages be elusive 
The FreeBSD Ports and Packages Collection offers an easy and consistent way of installing software packages on FreeBSD and is a very important component of the operating system as a whole.
There are currently 4726 ports with MAINTAINER set to ports at freebsd.org, which means that no one is actively maintaining them. Out of these ports, 243 (roughly 5.00%) are out of date.
If you see a port listed that you use, consider adopting it. If its out of date, consider updating it. Its an extremely simple way to start contributing back to FreeBSD. All that is really required to adopt a port is to change the MAINTAINER line in the makefile, create a unified diff and the submit a PR with the patch.
A good place to get familiar with how the ports system works is to browse through the FreeBSD Porter’s Handbook and join the freebsd-ports mailing list if you run into any problems or have any questions. Another worthwhile read is Michael W. Lucas’s article on Modifying a Port.
So, get to work.
Max has announce the QT 4.6.0 public test. see his Announcement.
The FreeBSD KDE team is pleased to announce public call for testing Qt-4.6.0.
Ports can be downloaded from area51 repository:
svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/QT
and integrated into portstree using ‘qtmerge’ script from
http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/Tools/scripts/
Alternatively you can use patch vs portstree:
http://people.freebsd.org/~makc/patches/qt460.patch.bz2
Knowing issues: devel/qt4-designer fails to build when previous version is
installed, so you [...]
Yesterday i’ve got the idea to update our tinderbox-devel port.
This update include the latest cvs snapshot with few fixes and
two highly experimental patches from beat@ and Tim Bishop.
Fixes from upstream:
- Remove X11BASE support it is now obsolete. (already in ports-mgmt/tinderbox)
- Expand the glob to check for Perl so that it actually
captures lang/perl5.10. (already [...]
Howdy beat@ called few mins ago a secound CFT for the 3.1.2 release, unfortunaltely
we have updated the guest additions to a recent snapshot to fix a kernel module
problem but see self the mail and changelog from him here:
First of all thanks a lot for all the valuable feedback. We have updated
the ports to fix the [...]
Hi All,
Changelog from VirtualBox is available here:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog
Changes in the port:
- VirtualBox and the guest additions have been updated to 3.1.2.
- Port has been renamed to virtualbox-ose to reflect that we are using the
OSE version. Requested by: mm@
- A seperate port for the kernel modules has been created: virtualbox-ose-kmod
- A seperate port for guest additions for [...]
The KDE FreeBSD team is proud to announce the release of KOffice2 suite for FreeBSD.
The official KOffice 2.1.0 notes can be found here.
We’d like to say thanks to all helpers, testers and submitters.
Here is a small Status update about our work on gecko stuff:
beat@ already removed all references to www/mozilla. Also the
switch from USE_GECKO= xulrunner firefox mozilla to USE_GECKO= libxul
is mostly done. Some small parts are still in the tree and we
are working on them. Afterwards xulrunner will be removed.
Finally the first steps for upcoming Thunderbird3 and [...]
So FreeBSD 8.0 was now officially released, and the ports tree was now
opened.
I’ve taken the night and updated python to 2.6.4.
Also as i wrote, I am back to the KDE game,
we have updated Qt to 4.5.3.
fluffy@ spend a lot time to update py-qt4 which is
now 4.6.2, and py-sip is 4.9.3
and as finally we updated KDE [...]
I wanted to try something from the "NOSQL" camp and it looked like MongoDB is one of the darlings of the whole idea / "movement". If this is really representative of the whole group, it's very, very unimpressive. (update: there are better ones 
)
Update: Here is a funny talk about NOSQL.
Read more...
Here is a patch to update python to 2.6.4 and py-setuptools (thx to wen@), it seems all fine to me,
i’ve already update locally without any problems, tinderbox run was also fine and dependency ports
builds without problems. If you like to test the patch feel free and fetch it from here.
If you find any problems with [...]
I don’t like writing long posts so let’s go straight to the point. Here is a shar to test mail/opensmtpd on FreeBSD. Read the comments in the Makefile. Also this is just a preview. The port isn’t complete (I haven’t checked the conflicts yet and it doesn’t update mailer.conf).
For sample configs, have a look there.
Comments/patches welcome.
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