Renato Botelho found yet another very active submitter and applied the usual punishment. Please welcome Robert Noland to the ranks of the ports committers!
Philip has been working on apache for a long time and has been increasingly interesting in FreeBSD as well. Marcelo Araujo finally stepped in and made him commit his own patches. Philip is going to be a great addition to our ports team!
After removing CVSROOT/modules, all hell broke loose. A few committer still used it as a shorthand for checking out ports and saving a few keystrokes. Edwin Groothuis offered to write a script that would update the file once a day and generate it from INDEX. This will keep everybody happy, as the file is still there to use, but it no longer needs to be manually maintained, and the code does not need to be added again to the addport/rmport scripts after I edited them. This should have been done years ago, but there you have it. Thanks a lot to Edwin for writing the automation script!
Yet another guy that just keeps sending patches. At least until now, when Beech Rintoul is starting to mentor him with his own commit bit. Welcome aboard!
After years of frustration voiced by many committers over time, Pav finally put the word out to remove CVSROOT/modules. It only adds a shorthand for checking out ports, so only the port name needs to be typed and not the full path, i.e. ports/$category/$portname. However, this can be easily achieved by a short shellscript (for other committers, see ~erwin/bin/coport on freefall for an example), and it takes quite an effort to maintain the modules file, as you can guess from its revision number of 1.20060. I would know, for some time I’ve been running a nightly script to check if all entries are done right and/or are missing and informing committers if anything is amiss. Thus, after considering the cost vs. benefit, I have emptied the file and edited addport/rmport to no longer edit it. Adding a new port was never this easy.
Oh, and it’s not every day you got to commit to a file and remove over 18.000 lines from it. Yay!
So far, I’ve had a wonderful day. It started by trying to figure out why several hundred of packages are failing on i386-6. After a long time trying to find a general pattern, I boiled it down to xorg-libraries. It turns out that when Kris did some spring cleaning and removed the /usr/X11R6 directory from bindist, it is now a symlink created during pre-install in xorg-libraries. What happens next on deinstall is that pkg-install sees the symlink and edits several /etc files to remove the mention of X11R6 there so those scripts are not run twice. As the removal of X11R6 in /etc was not MFCed to RELENG_6, this means that those files are changes and thus show up as leftovers on pointyhat.
So far so good. Now, how to fix this:
Stay tuned for fixes.
The FreeBSD Foundation generously sponsored my plane ticket for BSDCan this year. I wrote a few words about what I did at the conference, apart from the pub track of course, and some of you that weren’t there, might be interesting to see what actually happens at BSDCan when people are not listening to talks or out drinking beer, so here it is:
I held a short talk at the DevSummit on the state of the ports tree and
an update on the work portmgr is doing these days and some of the larger
issues we are facing (slides). I also held a BOF at the conference
itself on ports in general. Unfortunately, not many people turned up but
those who did got some pointers on how to start more actively contributing
to FreeBSD ports and we discussed some more general ports related subjects.In addition to the official track, I held several informal meetings.
The upcoming release schedule for the next many releases was discussed
with the release engineering and security teams. Together with another
portmgr member, Mark Linimon, I met George Neville-Neil on behalf of the
core team to discuss a specific personnel issue that got escalated. I
also had lunch with the two other portmgr members attending, Mark
Linimon and Joe Marcus Clark for a general discussion on portmgr
issues. I cornered Ken Smith on how to start helping out on contacting
ftp administrators of outdated and/or incomplete mirrors, and cleaning
up the list of mirror sites. Additionally, I had some brainstorming
talks with Peter Losher of ISC, who runs the US half of ftp.freebsd.org
while I run the EU half, on optimizing mirror synchronization and
creating some statistics on downloads, which Mark Linimon was willing to
analyse if we could provide him the data.All in all, a very productive conference, with lots of minor issues very
easily resolved over a glass of coffee/beer/milk, than over e-mail. A
lot of thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring the trip.
As of June 1, 2008 00:00:00 UTC, FreeBSD 5.X support in the ports tree
is End Of Life. This means that a ports tree checked out after this
date is not guaranteed to produce usable packages on 5.X. Additionally,
5.X package builds on the cluster will cease. Users are encouraged to
upgrade to 6.3 or 7.0 if they wish to continue to track the latest ports
tree.
A tag, RELEASE_5_EOL, has been laid down to mark the last point in the
ports tree that officially supported FreeBSD 5.X. Port Manager asks
that you not rush to remove 5.X support right away as we’d like a
settling-down period, and we want secteam to have a chance to make their
EOL announcements as well.
Somehow I made it to the office this morning before the canteen had opened for breakfast. Rumor has it, they were closed last week because they had found rats in the kitchen. Not a bad week to be away 
My body, though, seems to be a bit confused as to where in the world it is right now, which isn’t too surprising after being delayed for about 33 hours, so the whole journey back from Ottawa to Århus lasted from Sunday lunchtime to Tuesday 7pm (both local times). Funny though how random strangers meet when hit by an accident like a cancelled flight and being put in an airport hotel instead. I met a couple of poles studying in Stockholm and a canadian girl on her way to southern Sudan for MSF and we quite enjoyed our time just reading books in the hotel lobby. Certainly refreshing after spending several days being locked up in conference rooms with several hundred computer geeks
Anyway, back to the coffee machine and try to stay awake and maybe even do some work.
BSDCan 2008 is over again. As last year, I spent a few days in Montreal doing some siteseeing. Mark Linimon and Adrian Chadd joined me there, and some miles were walked and some beers were consumed. On Wednesday, we drove off to Ottawa. Somehow, Google Maps managed to send us to the wrong university at the exact opposite side of the city, so we had some more siteseeing there.
For the first two days, we held a FreeBSD DevSummit with talks in the mornings and informal meetings during the afternoons. I managed to corner some people about several issues that are much easier resolved in person (or even over a beer), which was one of my primary reasons of being there. The next two days was the conference itself with several interesting talks. Only a few people turned up for the FreeBSD ports BOF I held, but they did go home with some helpful hints.
After that, it was heading back, but that’s a separate post altogether…
Did I mention there are some pictures as well?