Category Archives: FreeBSD

Portmgr reorganization

Portmgr is happy to announce that two new members will join the team.

Martin Wilke has been one of our most active committers since receiving his commit bit today 3 years ago. He has been working in a number of subgroups including python, ports-security and the KDE team.

Ion-Mihai Tetcu has been interested in regression testing and qualitiy assurance, creating QAT automated tinderbox testing of all port commits on a per-commit basis, and adding on-the-fly feedback to the snapshot builds from the pointyhat package cluster.

Unfortunately, we will also be saying goodbye to Kirill Ponomarew, who hasn’t had much time to spend on FreeBSD and will be stepping down from portmgr.

We thank Kirill for all his contributions in the past and wish Martin and Ion-Mihai the best of luck with the new tasks bestowed upon them.

Partial ports thaw

The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed. Until 7.2 is released, sweeping commits still need explicit approval from portmgr to assure that tags can be slipped for potential security issues. For more information what constitutes a sweeping change, see the portmgr web pages.

Ports tree frozen in preparation for 7.2-RELEASE

The ports tree is now frozen for the 7.2 release cycle.

No commits will be allowed without explicit portmgr approval. We hope we can keep the freeze short and go into slush after two weeks. The tree will be completely unfrozen after the release is announced. For the full schedule, see the release schedule.

As always, only commit that fix existing breakage will be allowed during the freeze and we encourage everyone will help fix as many ports as possible for this release. For more information about what kinds of commits are allowed during which period, please see the portmgr policies webpage.

Ports freeze to start April 13

The ports freeze for the upcoming release of 7.2 will start in one week time on April 13. Release packages will be built immediately and have to be ready for RC2 which is scheduled for April 20. To keep the freeze as short as possible, the date might be moved depending on any delays in the src release process. Also, to keep this freeze this short we kindly ask anyone with commits in their queues that might have any larger effect on the packages to run their changes by portmgr from today to make sure no new regressions are introduced.

As always, we are looking for volunteers to fix outstanding errors, and this is a good time to focus on existing errors and regressions instead of new features to make sure as many packages can be included in the
release.

For a list of outstanding build errors, please see this link.

Remember: All commits after April 13 need explicit approval from portmgr!

FreeBSD ISO download statistics

I decided today that I could do with a day without sightseeing and it was time for some good oldfashioned hacking. I’ve been wanting to graph the downloads from the FreeBSD mirror I’m administrating for some time, but never found the time. Today was a good day to do something about that.

The most significant, and easy to quantify, data is the number of installation disc downloads, so I wrote a quick and dirty logfile parser to filter out the disc1 isos. Quite a large number of downloads are aborted or cancelled halfway, so they needed to be filtered out. There still seems to be an issue with the data from some 10 weeks back seemed really glad to graph data per second and my measurements are only once a day, they were a factor 86400 off. Changing datatypes from absolute to gauge fixed this, so I’m happy to let this run while I’m off to Sydney at 5am tomorrow.

Ports tree is unfrozen

Quoting Joe Marcus Clarke:

The ports tree has been unfrozen, and is now in the usual “slush” state
pending the releases of 6.4 and 7.1. This means no sweeping commits (or
commits which change a large number of files) until these releases are
announced. If you are in doubt as to whether or not a commit could be
considered sweeping, please ask portmgr.

A short description of what a sweeping commit is, can be seen on the portmgr webpage, or send us an email.

Ports freeze for 6.4 and 7.1 in effect

In preparation for both the 6.4 and 7.1 releases, the ports tree has been frozen. All commits have to be approved by portmgr. See the portmgr webpage for more information about what is and isn’t allowed during the freeze. We are aiming for a short freeze period, so we will be quite strict in allowing commits during the freeze. Of course, we do appreciate any help fixing existing errors in the tree, so if anyone is bored, a good starting point will be portsmon.

New committers: Max Brazhnikov and Josh Paetzel

Two more people fell for the usual trick. Apart from sending the usual many PRs, Max Brazhnikov has been very helpful in the KDE4 upgrade that happened a few weeks ago and Martin Wilke sponsored him for a commit bit. Josh Paetzel has been around for a long time, both on the mailinglists and IRC, and of course, sending a lot of patches, and Ade Lovett decided to sponsor a commit bit for him. Welcome to the both of you!

New ports committer: Robert Noland

Renato Botelho found yet another very active submitter and applied the usual punishment. Please welcome Robert Noland to the ranks of the ports committers!

New ports committer: Philip M. Gollucci

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!