The MirBSD Korn Shell R45 has been released today, and R44 has been named the new stable/bugfix-only series. (That’s version 45.1, not 0.45, dear Homebrew/MacOSX packagers.)

Packagers rejoice: the -DMKSH_GCC55009 dance is no longer needed, and even the run-time check for integer division is gone. Why? Because I realised one cannot use signed integers in C, at all, and rewrote the mksh(1) arithmetics code to use unsigned integers only. Special thanks to the people from musl libc and, to some lesser amount, Natureshadow for providing me with ideas what algorithms to replace some functionality with (signed shell arithmetic is, of course, still usable, it is just emulated using unsigned C integers now).

The following entertainment…

	tg@blau:~ $ echo foo >/bar\ baz
	/bin/mksh: can't create /bar baz: Permission denied
	1|tg@blau:~ $ doch
	tg@blau:~ $ cat /bar\ baz
	foo
 

… was provided by Tonnerre Lombard; like Swedish, German has got a number of words that cannot be expressed in English so I feel not up to the task of explaining this to people who don’t know the German word “doch”, just rest assured it calls the last input line (be careful, this is literally a line, so don’t use backslash-newline sequences) using sudo(8).

I uploaded a full bulk build of binary packages for MirBSD/i386 corresponding to the pkgsrc-2013Q1 release. About 7,000 binary packages are available in this build, including the pkgin package manager that makes installing binary packages as easy as apt.

See the pkgsrc page for instructions on how to install pkgsrc for MirBSD. Build logs are available on S3.

The MirBSD Korn Shell must-have bugfix releases R42b (for the current formal release series) and R41c (for the last bugfix-only stable series) have been issued. Debian testing/unstable users get the fixes through their package management, versioned 40.9.20120630-7 targetting wheezy (hopefully). Debian experimental users will receive a 42b-1 upload, closer to what other distro packages provide, soonish, targetting jessie.

Since we lack anything better (that, unless Freshmeat, is actually usable), by request of our packagers, new mksh(1) releases will be announced on our miros-mksh@ mailing list starting now.

There is one week left to submit your talk proposals for the BSD devroom at FOSDEM 2013. We still have quite a few slots open, so do not be shy! See the original announcement below:

FOSDEM 2013 will take place on February 2-3, 2013, in Brussels, Belgium. Just like in the last years, there will be both a BSD booth and a developer's room (on Sunday).

The topics of the devroom include all BSD operating systems. Every talk is welcome, from internal hacker discussion to real-world examples and presentations about new and shiny features. The talks will be 45 minutes including discussion. Feel free to ask if you want to have a longer or shorter slot.

If you want to do a talk, please submit your proposal to

bsiegert at google.com

and include the following information:

• Your name
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with ~400 from other projects)
• A short abstract of one to two paragraphs
• A short biography introducing yourself
• Links to related websites/blogs etc.

The deadline for submissions is December 17, 2012. The talk committee, consisting of Daniel Seuffert, Marius Nünnerich and Benny Siegert, will consider the proposals. If yours has been accepted, you will be informed by e-mail within one week of the submission deadline.

The MirBSD Korn Shell R41 has finally been released. This is a major “everything” version with important fixes as well as new features and behavioural changes. Sorry for the delay.

See also the:

• detailed changelog
• packagers’ info
• users’ caveats
• Preformatted manual page (HTML, PDF, plaintext)
• Download NEW as gzip(1)’d ustar(1) distfile!
• OpenSuSE Buildservice SRPM (and more, including binaries; just browse that directory tree)
• mailing list