I planned to write a more lengthy wlog entry but since I have gecko2 here visiting me for a few days I don't get to do as much stuff as I'd like to (but on the other hand he helps me cleaning up the appartement and spots a few rare MirPorts bugs). Thus, this must suffice:

I wonder why Benny is still using the ancient operating system, Plan 9, when there is an SSH v.2 client for the progressive operating system MS-DOS® – he should use that instead, so he could directly commit from there. (For the record, an MS-Shell 2.3, along with a few unix-like utilities, runs on 8088 CPUs quite fine, along with the best web browser ever (but if you have an 80386, you be better use the real thing, complete with HTTPS/SSL support instead). The site even has an entropy gathering dæmon (URANDOM$), so… Benny, now please get and install some DOS or my well-known image.

That MS-DOS shell above has got most (not all tho) mksh(1) features! Yay for the Korn Shell!

If you update MirPorts, don't forget to re-run Setup.sh(8)

I've finally got my lazy arse around to start the redesign and sparc enhancement of src/distrib/, but couldn't yet finish the work as ゲッコニくん wants me to sleep. I've even merged bsd.rd, floppy and iso9660 images generation into that and will try to make it even better. The sparc miniroot was, still, not touched by me though. Also, there's no live CD yet :)

Don't forget to always use irc.mirbsd.org:6668 to connect the Freeforge IRC network (use port 6666 if your IRC client does not speak TLS/SSL and you're too lazy to add an irc bridge in inetd.conf(5)). We still sit in #bsd and #mirbsd (as well as Freenode's #mksh).

mksh(1) is now /bin/sh, the other one is nbsh(1) (/bin/nbsh) for now until the bugs are fixed. When MirOS #9bis gets released, its codebase will be tagged as the next version of mksh (R27f) as well.

I probably forgot many thing but it's late and this FreeWRT thingy's been distracting me (let's let wbx handle stabilising ;) and it hasn't yet cooled down much either. So please forgive me.

Other than fixing the website ;) I did only some minor stuff just to keep activity. I also "have to" hack on FreeWRT but it's way too hot for anything productive.

GNU make sucks.

Benny should just use the US keyboard layout anywhere.

I had a hard time fixing FreeWRT, but I eventually succeeded. MirOS, on the other hand, didn't get short either: I renamed /bin/sh to nbsh, to have the option of changing it to mksh until the bugs are found and fixed (nbsh(1) will be kept anyway, so people can check their scripts, to make sure they still work with ash) while they're reported upstream (to TNF), and we got a pciutils (lspci) port. gecko2 installed MirOS 9 and current ports, and we thusly found a small buglet in MirPorts (GNU stuff) which got fixed as well. (growfs(8) works well.) I also did few more minor things to clean up and prepare for other changes.

It has been a rather long time since I have written something here. In the meantime, I moved to Saint-Louis and begun my summer internship. I am working on explosives, and dangerous ones at that. But the people at the institute are very nice and let me work freely on my subject. There is not much to do in the evening, as the town is small. Even if Switzerland and Basel are only a few hundred metres away (really!), I don't go there too often.

After all the interesting talk with Uriel on FrOSCon, I really installed Plan 9 on two machines and tried to work with it. In fact, I am writing this in the acme editor on Plan 9. I managed to get my own user environment as well as TeX running. There is even a web browser called Abaco, which does about as much as dillo but has only 5000 lines of code. It even does tabbed windows, acme-style. The only downside is that I cannot commit from Plan 9 as the ssh client only does ssh1.

But even with all the other stuff, I still do MirOS and MirPorts development. I am on a modem line here so don't expect stuff that requires huge downloads. I have been working on wxGTK 2.6.3 with the libtool patch from pkgsrc. So far, I got segfaults in gcc and even in /bin/sh during the build. I don't know why but the Makefiles expect $(top_builddir) to end with a slash, which terribly confuses the poor shell. I also have distfiles for cairo 1.2 and gtk+ 2.10 on my machine, so this might come in the not-too-distant future. I finally put something into the aqua category: AquaTerm. However, there are no other ports that use it at the moment. math/gnuplot will pick it up if it is installed, I am changing that.

I am getting slower with all the typing because I am constantly changing keyboards between German, French and US—the latter for example here in Plan 9 because I don't know how to change the keyboard layout ...

I started to hack on MirOS again – despite the heat – on the distrib stuff, specifically (using makefs(8), and synching between the architectures), wbx@ called me out for some FreeWRT work *sigh* (I have some TODO there too). So that's it for today I guess. But I'll be back.

Benny finally inaugurated the aqua category in MirPorts.

Hm… hacking on FreeWRT… bad code quality, although I may not rant as much as I want because, as a core developer over there too (yes, I really am one) I represent the project *sigh* but at least the rants won't be found here that easily.

paxmirabilis (MirCpio, aka pax(1) cpio(1) tar(1)) is now being used, instead of GNU tar. It got some enhancements (eg. extracting to stderr or rough glibc compatibility) in the progress and might include direct gzip I/O, and even ZIP (maybe zip, at first only unzip) support later. Yay for MirOS!

My idea is to replace busybox' cpio/tar/pax by paxmirabilis as well, but that will probably only be an option. No idea which one is smaller though.

We also plan to make the packaging system more alike to MirPorts, to reduce overhead and improve legibility. Targets such as update-patches will be added, and the other targets renamed too. In general, we would like to clean up the mess left there…

Maybe it could generate Config.in and the ipkg control file from the Makefile then (for the developer to check in, though) kind of like the DESCRIPTION and CATEGORY fields in a MirPort.

There's much more stuff to do, but for now I'm cursing about da shit (Linux® / iptables) being unextractable on a case-insensitive fuck filesystem like the damned Macintosh have.

Ew, yeah. ncurses was being configured for the build system, instead of the target system. Many ports call autoconf (seen by the message to please provide AUTOCONF_VERSION environment variable), or are in other respects plainly broken, or try to access /dev/pts or something. A few ports still use host tools (e.g. openssl uses nm).

For MirOS, I should plan to feed back binutils and gcc-4.3 ports (to cross-build from lunox to MirOS, at least) to the FSF. Maybe we could, then, even make a Soekris FreeWRT with MirOS kernel and BSD libc? That all isn't even limited to WRT boxen anyway, we plan much more.

Oh yes, and the entropy dæmon… need to investigate about how *nix IPC works best though.

#include <rant/usual/subversion>

If I get the clues about when mksh segfaults, we should bring out an mksh R28 with the fix, I think. Optimally so that mksh R28 is the code which corresponds to MirOS #9bis. Other fixes, such as manual page, or so, are of course greatly appreciated. Send diffs ;)

Most funny thing of today: Mac OSX Tiger comes with /usr/bin/make as GNU make 3.80, but this apparently is not "new enough" for a certain package manager, namely Fink, which brings in its own version, GNU make 3.79.1 – do I need to say that both don't run correctly and the MirPorts Framework is required for GNU make 3.81 on Mac OSX as of now? Besides… someone tell the FSF that case-insensitive file systems are not only occuring on DOS/Windows®!

Thanks to Dr. Pfeffer (pepper) of BOSng, I've now also been out to a geocacheing session for the first time, with his Windows® PDA that can do GPS. It took us quite some time, but it was helluv fun and I hope we'll continue the journey.

(statpics moved here)

Sourcemage GNU/Linux users might now also be able to use mksh(1) and Debian GNU/Linux has accepted the update. After mksh R27e though, I've fixed the regression testsuite to pass if invoked as root, which a few people seem to require… these who never learn… furthermore I got rid of a few bytes in /etc/profile on FreeWRT (and thus in ports/shells/mksh/pkg/DESCR too), using the local keyword, ipv the typeset keyword.

We now have adduser(8) and openssl(1) asn1octetstream (which is also documented in openssltool(1), and will be fed upstream), to complement my vnconfig(8) -f addition. That was quite some hard work, done with a bottle of Met and bottles of beer shared among us at yofuh's place. It is HOT!

I also fixed contrib/samples/etc_profile for foreign hexdump(1) that doesn't support %_aX, added some acronymes, and benz did cups. The web page of mksh got pushed up to -current and a text about its requirements.

Adding the above functionality is a milestone, btw.

The story on Daily Dæmonnews I submitted today got accepted!

surrounder from #UnixNL helps seeding BT, dankjewel!

I did get rid of binstall (the joke) now. And also, fd0 on machines without floppy. boot.net is also superfluous, as the elf2aout(1)-generated boot can be used as netbootloader as well (and quite well) – why not, since bsd.rd.net is created just the same way.

Benny now has internet access at home. I still am trying to prod him to commit that all-japanese wlog entry of his, though. (Wait! That one would even be committed to /?wlog-8 right? Damn boy you're late.)

It actually is cooler than the days before, good.

mksh R27e is spreading slowly, but the goal of mksh's world domination is getting closer…

Originally I had decided to go to bed earlier today, but somehow I'm fascinated by the just-finishing (tarmk stage) sparc snapshot build. I will publish that snapshot on BT now and afterwards try to hack on the miniroot and live CD (text-only for now) so it won't matter if I break stuff. Then I'll put a bigger HDD into the sparc and reinstall.

Some of that old code is so scary…

makefs(8) from TNF has appeared, and I already have filed the bug toolchain/33924 in their gnats ;) I hope they'll help improving it so we might someday get rid of mkisofs(8) in base. I also opened another report – toolchain/33925 with the filesystem size off by a block issue from 2003 or so.

I haven't been able to work much on ports, as expected. Benny on the other hand is currently trying to buy internet access via a modem. Yes a (USB-attached soft)modem, that analog phone line thingie. He'll work a little on ports then, but don't expect too much from him either.

I might also have some real-life things to take care of. I still am, additionally, looking for a job. Offers and donations welcome.

IPv6 tunnel providers suck. All of them. And perl(1) sucks more.

It finally cooled down today with a thunderstorm. Problem: both soil and air are wetter now, so if the sun comes back, it'll be sticky.

It's been even hotter, thus I'm still not sleeping (I'm 7 hours past midnight already) but enjoying the only cool hours right now. Insects, these beasts! They've been plagueing me worse than ever tonight.

Yay! The libc major bump turned out to be necessary, an API changed, an API vanished. And the sparc snapshot due will even have both shared libraries – rebuilding everything takes too long and I so dearly want to get rid of NFS. At least, I'm now already diving in the depths of src/distrib/ and will try my best to make as few regressions as can (no miniroot yet, as time permits).

I wonder if we can use NetBSD®'s makefs(8) for the floppies (any case, it'd just rock!) and maybe mr.fs and miniroot9.fs too (with some flag to make space or something). One also should look at its ISO 9660 building capabilities later (for MirOS #10 then).

I guess I'll have to bring out an i386 snapshot too, after the login manager changes I suggested to miros-discuss@ the other day, and to be fulfilling the "debt" to bring all the security updates out. The overall code is still sort of flaky, but improving. I wonder if it would be better to first fix everything known on sparc (including that miniroot, and maybe even a text-only live CD) beforehand, as to unveil pending MI bugs.

Is anyone reading this here anyway?

I thought it would be a good day, fixing lots of sparc and MI stuff, hacking on mksh(1), hacking on myBB for a friend, hacking on FreeWRT's mksh (making it cleaner) and the profile, maybe Debian mksh update and add sample ~/.mkshrc – the sparc is doing fine – but SOL I am… the internet connection went away.

What do you think about the following

	tg@demo:~ $ cat x.pas ; gpc x.pas ; ./a.out ; file a.out ; ldd a.out ; dmesg | fgrep cpu ; uname -a
	program Hallo;
	begin
	  writeln('Hello, World!');
	end.
	Hello, World!
	a.out: ELF 32-bit MSB executable, SPARC, version 1, for MirOS BSD, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
	a.out:
		Start    End      Type Open Ref GrpRef Name
		00000000 00000000 exe  1    0   0      a.out
		1725c000 17899000 rlib 0    1   0      /usr/lib/libgpc.so.2.1
		23735000 23d57000 rlib 0    1   0      /usr/lib/libm.so.5.0
		16b9b000 1725c000 rlib 0    1   0      /usr/lib/libc.so.38.4
		21750000 21750000 rtld 0    1   0      /usr/libexec/ld.so
	cpu0 at mainbus0: TMS390Z50 v0 or TMS390Z55 @ 75 MHz, on-chip FPU
	cpu0: physical 20K instruction (64 b/l), 16K data (32 b/l), 1024K external (32 b/l) cache enabled
	MirBSD demo.mirbsd.org 9 Kv#9s81-stable-20060627 GENERIC#92 sparc

(ciruZ thinks it is pretty cool ;)

Okay, there's not much more to do except letting the sparc compile a full system during the night and installing that, as well as rsynching the repo to my laptop. I hope I'll soon be at the point where I can do the HDD swapping and get rid of sucky NFS.

I have a mosquito lamp now – UV light and a high-voltage thing killing them. But they're flying away from that and around in the room as if it were disgusting them. *sigh*

After backporting and fixing stuff, this is mainly unbreaking -rHEAD and letting changes settle down. xterm didn't get updated (yet – maybe xterm-213 works better than xterm-215, but for now we still have xterm-200), half of OpenBSD's XF4 fixes were added and some of our own devised (especially since neither XFree86® 4.6 nor x.org trunk can be built with freetype 2.2…) and things simplified. Now, I build everything on i386 (in order to check for regressions) and sparc (want to add a 9 GB disc drive and install a snapshot on that, to get rid of NFS, but there's no snapshot yet). Also a.out debugging symbol handler is back in kernel (sounds like Japanese Engrish eh?) since I fixed the point of breakage.

MirOS boots just fine on a Thinkpad X41, just the Broadcom shit does not like to work. I may backport that, says Benny who just moved to an appartement in the Germany-France-Switzerland border region and except not having a phone (tomorrow) and internet (modem) is doing fine.

Reading more code for FreeWRT… it's cruel. configure is mixing build and host system up – look at libdnet, but keep a vomit bag handy.
By the way… many people dislike subversion, like me, especially after having used it for a few weeks.

Plans? What plans?

I could do an auto-livecd for sparc too. Easily. But mine is running on VT420 on serial console. Also, it is slow. So spare me. (I offer to still do it if users request it. Don't forget releases are no live CDs.

Very late edition, a.k.a. WTF is date(1)?
I'm through with i386 and committed the distrib/lists changes, where I also shuffled some of the things I know won't run on sparc away into md.i386 files. Some has been disabled, even though it builds on sparc, like iopctl(8), because the hardware just doesn't exist. I then screwed around a little in gcc and found out we're still building a threaded gcc even though that's a java only thing, and optimised Makefile.lang (not yet tested). Note, a threaded gcc probably doesn't work on sparc. I decided against keeping the libobjc_gc wrappers unless manually (NO_BOEHMGC=no) or via depends (NO_JAVA=no) enabled, and for keeping c++, Objective-C, and GNU Pascal available on sparc, because there's no reason (except size which is no issue with gcc bloat, er gcc 3, anyway) to differ between platforms at all. They're small enough to not slow down by more than a few hours or so of build time ;-)

My sparc has just gone NOPIC=no, i.e. builds ld.so(1) and shared lib stuff just fine. bsiegert@ isn't (sadly) reachable by phone though, so I continued to hack on autoconf/libtool, regenerated all the stuff and then threw in the new perl. Now I've got to, after refining a few more code pieces, check if everything (including X11) builds on i386 again. On sparc, I've got to take what I've got, build the distrib/ stuff and a snapshot in order to install that on another hard disc.

I think -rHEAD is in pretty good shape, I'll upgrade as much as I'll be able to do in the next days, try to get a stable sparc development, build and test environment, and fix everything outstanding in the base system. Regarding ports, I won't do much but leave that to Benny, I'll do base system in the meanwhile and hope he fixes these ports which do need it. (autoconf 2.60 is in, but I don't think there's any fallout.) Thus, we can (tentatively) release #9bis in two or three weeks.

It's family weekend for me, don't expect too many commits. Also, I'm in that "computers suck" mood again but the weather (too hot) keeps me from giving in to it.

On the other hand, the Netzladen (usual place) has got me back… at least for drinking some fine Met (honey wine).

Benny, when are you going to commit that full-japanese wlog entry of yours?