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BSD Operating Systems

FreshPorts 29

Posted by Nik from the I-love-the-smell-of-fresh-ports-in-the-morning dept.
Dan Langille, creator and maintainer of the FreeBSD Diary, has just unleashed FreshPorts on the world. In a nutshell, this is a changing list of new and updated ports in the FreeBSD ports tree, making it easy to keep bang up to date with new software as it's ported. It's a natural companion to Wolfram Schneider's fortnightly port update messages.
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FreshPorts

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  • Will this include MacOS X? Word on the street is that it will have a FreeBSD kernel. Which of course, will probably confuse people who talk about UNIX when what they mean is just the BASH (or what not) shell. MacOS X is probably the most inovative port of Unix to be mass released.

    Just my $.02, mostly because I feel like putting an actually half way on topic post on this poor article.

  • How many trolls were there before moderation?

    Two IIRC - Meept and DAVEO.

    How many trolls are there now, after the 70-second delay, lameness filter, caps filter, word length filter, and all of Rob's other attempts to get rid of us?

    Not that many if you count the difference between a troll and a spammer. I've written trolls here on /. and they add to the conversation - spam doesn't.

    But I do agree that Rob's going about it the wrong way. Short of AI there's never going to be a way to filter spam out, and he's just making this site a challenge with his "lameness filter" and other ideas. But since I browse at -5 it's still annoying.

  • Any post at -1 gets cut off at 15 lines with the "Read the rest of this comment link...

    I think that it should be based on number of lines taken up for all posts. ((A line > 80 characters or BR) = line) rather than number of bytes.

    Any comment with a word longer than 20 (30? 40?) I think 80 should be safe. maybe 40 just to acomodate those people running lynx through a C64. 20 is too limiting becauase I might find a need to use the word antidisestablishmentarianism, and maybe someone knows how to spell flockynockyneehipilification.

    Most of the more irritating spam (good point about spam v. troll in your other post btw) could be detected using a simple algorithm to spot redundancy.

    This still allows attacks by cutting and pasting large irelevent articles though.

  • Re:Trolls on /. (Score:3)

    by spiralx ( 97066 ) on Thursday May 11, 2000 @01:59AM (#1861081)

    I think the vast quantity of spam (they're not clever enough to qualify as trolls) on this story and others is in direct response to Rob's new "lameness filter" which tries to prevent things from being posted in all caps. Since there are plenty more annoying things than all caps (as we can see here) this is both a) a waste of time and b) asking for trouble.

    Every time Rob adds a new feature to cut down on noise (e.g. moderation, 70 sec delay etc.) it seems to result in massive increases in spam from the lamers. Oh well, since they've only got a ten minute attention span it'll probably die down in a while.

  • you can get the same info from freebsd.org for instance this link [freebsd.org] shows you all new ports within a week.

    it's is a nifty idea to romantisize freeBSD however, as it is currently lurking in the shadows of linux celebraty.

    -Jon

  • >We've got Linux, what the heck to we need Free/Open/NetBSD(I) for?

    Given that BSD existed long before Linux, The same question can be asked...why work on Linux?

    Linux is nothing but a rip-off of Unix, whereas BSD is from the code of Unix.

    (how are those 2 answers, troll? Given you claim you were not trolling, perhaps the above 2 answers will be understandable in a non-trolling way.)

    How about this: the GPL licence (the freedom of the tool) VS BSD (the freedom of the human) Some people think the freedom to do what the human wants to do to a tool (sourcecode/resulting executable) is MORE important than the rights of a tool. The human race has gotten to where we are today via tool usage, and the GPL is more restrictive about how the tool is to be used than the BSD Licence.

    >It's not a question to be dismissed.
    Sure it can. You make these 'grand proclamations' about how linux is wonderful, yet you provide no facts. Just bluster.

    >Standards are just needed so badly.
    Who decides these 'standards'? *YOU*? You are nothing but an AC trolling. The only 'sptandard' I'm seeing from you is "linux"....which has what, 150+ seprate versions? The redhatisnotlinux site acknologies these version ARE fragmented and different when they advocate "build binary distributions for ALL MAJOR Linux distributions. " Real good idea....lets get behind a standard with 150+ different versions.

    >spreading our development efforts so thinly
    As you are *SO* concerend about such then advocate these measures:
    1) The LSB should include ANY OS that wants to support the API via a compatibility layer
    2) All userspace code sould be under a BSD licence so EVERYONE can share the code
    3) All drivers should be BSD licenced so everyone can share
    4) People who write code for Linux should be going to the old tomes/old hackers and asking how to make PORTABLE code, such that ALL UNIX(tm) forms can benifit from the program.

    The final point, as made by ESR, is monoculture==bad, diversity==good. This is better expressed as the History of Unix development. Many ideas are tried, and what wins out is the "better" idea. Without the diverse code base to TRY new ideas, you end up going down blind allies.

    What you advocate is picking one path, and somehow I'm betting most of the world would find following a troll down a blind ally to be unpalitable

  • I think that it should be based on number of lines taken up for all posts. ((A line > 80 characters or BR) = line) rather than number of bytes.

    Yeah, because a BR tag is only 4 bytes - you can have loads of those in any given byte limit. And it would have an effect on large irrelevent articles, at least once they'd gone down to -1.

    Most of the more irritating spam (good point about spam v. troll in your other post btw) could be detected using a simple algorithm to spot redundancy.

    It's never going to go away (unless Rob comes up with an AI post filter :) ) but it can certainly be limited with some checks which should be fairly simple to encode in Perl. Of course any attempt will draw the spammers into more attempts to circumvent it so they'd have to be good.

    Hopefully accounts like "flam0r" will get bitchslapped by Rob soon, but then they can always create more accounts. Oh well...

  • I think its a reaction to the anti-Troll measures. Unfortunately removing these measures will not have the result of removing these trolls. Its just an arms race.
  • It has seemed to me that there are many more trolls or otherwise pointless posts on /. than there used to be. Is this a result of /.'s soaring popularity? Is it the commercial ownership &c. of VA/Andover that piques these people?
    I do not condone censorship, but there must be some way to reduce these trolls - apart from reading at a higher threshold which is what I see myself doing.

  • Re:Ports (Score:1)

    by mr ( 88570 )
    That is an example of the people who are doing the code-writing being unwilling to do the work to port their code.

    ESR, the man who keeps talking about how 'BSD deserves more attention than they get', he has source and RPM versions of fetchmail....no ports, and no package format versions.

    The samba team, mozilla, and many MANY others seem to 'forget' the other OSes. It is their perogative.
  • > But since I browse at -5 it's still annoying.

    Good god man.
    I didn't even know it went as low as -5 !

    Thad

    Thad

  • Go to the Customise Comments [slashdot.org] page and save it as HTML. Find the FORM tag and change the action to point to http://slashdot.org/users.pl, and then look down for the "SELECT name=uthreshold" tag. Under that, find the "OPTION selected value=-1" tag and change the -1 to a -5.

    Save the page, load it in your browser, set your threshold to -1 in the list and submit it. Lo and behold, you can now see comments all the way down to -5. The /. censorhip where bitchslapped accounts are forced to -2 is defeated :)

  • Two relatively easy things that would help IMHO are:

    • Any post at -1 gets cut off at 15 lines with the "Read the rest of this comment link..." in place. You might not be able to get rid of them, but at least they wouldn't take up so much space.
    • Any comment with a word longer than 20 (30? 40?) characters long is rejected. This would avoid the pages being made extra wide, which is probably the most annoying thing of all.

    Just some thoughts :)

  • According to what the web site said, freshmeat was getting to "linux."
  • It's highly unlikely it would include MacOS X, since MacOS X has little to do with the actual FreeBSD project. Mac OS X does NOT have a FreeBSD kernel anyways. It's based on the Mach kernel and includes alot of the userland from both FreeBSD and NetBSD. Get your facts straight before you post.
  • This whole issue is psychological, not a matter of an insufficient tool kit. Think of all the debate over the true definition of a hacker. These folks are up for a challenge, and will look for a way to slip through filters.

    Concerning moderation, there seem to be quite a few users that are annoyed. It behooves the powers that be to pay attention. As Natalie Portman's once and future daughter said,


    ...the more you tighten your grip, the more trolls will slip through your fingers...

    ...or something like that.

    Must recaffeinate


  • I see the trolling as a response to the broken moderation system. There is some very weird moderation going on; Perfectly valid comments and points ending up as flaimbait etc.

    Too many cooks spoil the broth. Same goes for moderators and moderation points.

  • Interesting read. A bit off-topic. To counterpoint the moral of the article, it was posted by an Anonymous Coward though... loses some credibility there.

    Needs a bit more gore on the fangs though...
    don't you think? - (Batman)

    Isn't freedom of speech cool?

  • Has anyone else looked *really* closely at that tray?

    Am I the only person who thinks that's really cute?

  • Ports (Score:1)

    by swb ( 14022 )
    Ports is one of the cool things about FreeBSD (right after make buildworld). The problem as I see it is ensuring that ports get updated in a timely fashion to current versions.

    Samba is still languishing at 2.0.6. RPMs were available a day after 2.0.7 came out.

  • Re:Ports (Score:1)

    by mr ( 88570 )
    Are they the ones who do the .rpm that you cited?
  • You could always try going to http://www.FreeBSD.org [freebsd.org]. Everything's just a click away from there.

    --

  • Yeah, great idea. Lets just scrap everything that isn't the most widely used, and has the best hardware support.

    Let's put all of our developers on a single track, so that we can "innovate."

    VIVA Windows!
  • Whoa, boy. No need to hit the igniter switch there.

    Darwin is actually considered a fourth major BSD variant by some. What you've said is essentially correct, but it oversimplifies. What Darwin is is the BSD core that NextStep was built on way the hell back in 1986 or so, basically BSD over the Mach microkernel with a built-in Objective-C runtime. In that respect, its closest relative is probably Lites. When NextStep became Rhapsody (i.e. MacOS X Server) Apple rebuilt the BSD server using 4.4BSD and a newer Mach kernel; Darwin came somewhat later as Apple chose to release the low-level parts of the system under an Open Source license.

    As for playing with it... Darwin supports pretty much all non-PPC603 PCI PowerMacs (why it doesn't support the 64/6500 series is a mystery to me) and it would be great source material for anyone looking to hack the G4 (are you listening, Jean-Louis Gassee?). The APSL is a bit strange (generally Open Source, but in practice forbids private-only development since Apple claims a right to all derived works), but it's not that restrictive, just a bit overinquisitive. The most useful thing about it is that Darwin 1.0 is essentially the same kernel as MacOS X will use.

    The most interesting thing about it is that John Carmack from id Software has done a lot of playing with it and seems to rather like it, even if it's been a moving target since it first became available. Right now it's a very bare-bones system (wait for OS X if you want flash and friendliness), but it's got enough services and apparently it's stable enough that you could use it for quite a few real-world server applications.

    Question, though: anyone know where to buy a CD with the Darwin installer on it?

    /Brian
  • 1 - good idea. Perhaps that's something I can add to the customizaion features.

    2 - There is only one ports tree. For -current, -release, and -stable.

    3 - The number of people using -current vs -stable or -release is much smaller than you let one. And such people should be smart enough to know what they are doing.

    thanks for the feedback.

  • Re:Ports (Score:1)

    by swb ( 14022 )
    I disagree. I don't know that it's the Samba teams responsibility to come up with user-friendly versions for a zillion platforms.

    The person who needs the blame is the port maintainer for Samba.
  • It seems a bit redundand, even if they are distributing binaries.

    Freshmeat could just add links to ported binary versions...

    Hmm... 1st post?

  • This is a great idea. (Score:3)

    by Rumble ( 6258 ) on Thursday May 11, 2000 @12:19AM (#1861105)
    It's good that somebody actually sat down and worked something like this out... I'm sure there are many people out there that will find this an invaluable resource.

    The only thing I'm wondering is how this will work across the different BSD's, and the different Releases of each BSD, if it implements the same sort of patch system as the ports collections of these fine OS's use at the present time.

    -Ryan
  • Uh...almost.

    The horizontal is still free. If you want to control it, don't use commas.

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