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.

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

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