Gábor’s Blog

There were some discussions on hackers@ and current@ about BSD grep, but I haven’t yet written anything about it here, so it’s high time to do so. First, you can see here what I have done. As you see, the list of functions is complete. There is P (—perlregexp), which never worked on FreeBSD, but I will try to add this as an optional feature to have a nice and complete grep implementation.

There are some problems, though. GNU accepts non-standard regexes, for example (a|), which has an empty subexpression, while our regex library doesn’t. First, I tried to  workaround these in the code, but as I was pointed out later it broke other cases, thus I had to realize that it was not so easy to fix and I needed to remove those workarounds, thus the problem still persists. I’ve looked at our regex library a bit. It was written by Henry Spencer. He has a new version of his library but that version still has the same behaviour. I’ve been told about the PCRE library, which has a POSIX-compatible interface. I realized that in fact it’s just the interface, the interpretation of the expressions in still Perl-like. Solutions are still needed…

Finally, it’s ready! It was committed to CVS by pgj@. You can read it here.

This year, I’m working on porting grep, sort and diff from OpenBSD. You can read more about my project in the original proposal. If you wanto to see the progress, you can look at my wiki page, although I’m going to post the most important milestones here.

Hooray! Gábor Páli is now a translator doc committer. He has translated the whole FreeBSD Handbook to Hungarian. The review of the document is pending at the moment.

Our new translator, Gábor Páli has been doing very well, he submitted 4 new translations, which I committed today, thus we have now a webpage and 6 articles. We are considering starting the translation of handbook, too. I’m glad that made such a good progress in this project and I hope other volunteers will join when they see our results and realize that this is a serious project.

Ok, it’s been a while that I’ve written here, thus I’m dropping some lines about SoC. You can check the actual progress on my wiki page, but I want to write about two parts, which I considered the most important. One of those is the DESTDIR functionality for ports. I also invested a lot of time and effort into this during SoC 2006, but that time I went into a wrong direction. Sometimes it is hard to implement a new functionality later, which was not planned originally, it seems it happened in that case. The good idea came too late and I could not accomplish that in 2006, but as I could participate again, I successfully reworked it and we have now a simple, but working version in CVS. This implementation uses chroot(1) and it made the structure of the ports/Mk code a bit simpler as we have it as a real module, called bsd.destdir.mk.

The another important project was to extract the Perl code from bsd.port.mk into bsd.perl.mk to make it more flexible and better modularized. Each major functionality has a module in ports/Mk, but it hasn’t been the case with Perl thus far. Besides, there hasn’t been implemented a convenient way of version checking. As usual we wanted something like:
USE_PERL5= 5.8.0+
I implemented this syntax for the following knobs: USE_PERL5, USE_PERL5_RUN, USE_PERL5_BUILD, PERL_CONFIGURE and PERL_MODBUILD. With this change each Makefile looks simpler and they provide a consistent IGNORE message if no appropriate Perl version is available. While here, I sweeped the ports and removed the support for old Perl versions to make things even clearer. The big patch hasn’t been committed yet, portmgr@ is running some tests on the package building cluster, as this is a really heavy change and we should pay much attention when handling this case.

Summaryzing this summer, I have to admit that I could not work as intensively as I presaw, because I had private life issues at the beginning of the program. Despite, I think it was cool enough, and of course, I’m going to continue the work on the Ports infrastructure.

Again, the fun has begun. We have a lot of interesting projects. Mine is accepted again. Here’s what I’m going to work on with the mentorship of Andrew Pantyukhin(sat@):

http://www.kovesdan.org/soc/article.html

Well, a lot of interesting things happened in the recent days, thus it’s time to write a bit of summary.

1. The ZFS filesystem support was committed to HEAD by Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd@). Pawel has done a great work on porting this great functionality from OpenSolaris, and yesterday the code hit the tree. It lacks from ACL and extended attributes support and can’t be booted off. There’s no iSCSI target daemon support yet. it is only for i386 and can be used only as a module. These are the current limitations, but apart from those it is reported to work well. As Pawel said, support for amd64 is going very soon and other architectures will be supported later due to the missing atomic operations.


2. There’s a nice utility in the graphviz packag, called dot. It can be used to render nice graphs from text files. Some time ago we already talked about making some graphs to display the mentor-mentee relationships between the project committers, and recently Florent Thoumie added a sample dotfiles to src/share/misc. The files are still being completed, I hope we can add them to our website later.


3. The Google Summer of Code 2007 has begun. Applications are no longer accepted, thus applicants had to submit their proposals by now. I submitted an application about the Ports Collection infrastructure again. I’m looking forward to the results, which we will get to know by 5:00 PM at April 11 Pacific time.

Recently, I got a doc commit bit as well. As a doc committer, the first thing I’d like to take care about is the webpage. The PR count is low for www, but there are some trivial PRs that are easy to solve. Besides, I’d like translate the news/press parts for the Hungarian Documentation Project. After these are solved, I’ll start busting doc PRs as well.

I’ve been working on the Hungarian translation of the webpages for a long time. Recently, I got to the point, where it reached a pretty good shape, so I looked for an active doc committer and Giorgos Keramidas (keramida@) offered that he can help me getting this stuff to the repo. He committed the webpages yesterday, so that we can see how it looks on www.FreeBSD.org. Unfortunately, I found some very nasty things after the first build and spent this day with fixing those rendering issues and finally I succeeded and sent the patches to Giorgos. While fixing these issues I also found some typos and broken links, which are also fixed now. And while here, I also sínced the content, so I think I can announce it in the Hungarian community forums after Giorgos committed the new patches. This translation also supposed to be a little bit of encouragement for Hungarian people to get a bit more involved.