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Tue, 22 Aug 2006

1:39 PM - rdate

rdate is in the tree but i'm not quite happy with it yet.  I'm going to go back to the code when I get a chance.  I also imported updated timezone files last night.  That's not too bad to do. 

Today while looking at df cvs, i noticed they also imported OpenBSD rdate.  That means eveyrone but FreeBSD is using it provided netbsd still is.  I see a convention.  Of course its in freebsd ports anyway...

I'm toying with adding vesa in the kernel by default.  It doesn't make a lot of sense on servers, but it does on desktops.  There are some cases it would be nice on a server too.  I may need to create a desktop and server kernel config soon or do it by architecture.  I'm not sure what happens on sparc64 with vesa for example.  I need to look into that. 

I played with fvwm-crystal last night.  Now that i've tried it, my opinion has changed some.  Using the dock or start menu (nebula?) style it wouldn't be too foreign to others.  I did have a few crashes and certain mouse gentures could really cause some chaos with my mom.  Her app windows would disappear out of nowhere on her.  That might be fixable with customization, but the crashes are not so easily.  It is a devel version of fvwm 2 as a base after all.  Maybe when it goes stable...

Aside from that, I think we've exausted window manager choices.  WindowMaker is still my favorite for personal use however it also crashed when playing with some gnustep apps.  There could be something strange with my system as well.  I'm also using packages from stable for some of it so that could be the problem.  (fvwm is NOT a package) I'll look at the core files later.

Finally, portability is an issue.  We need to make sure the window manager will actually compile on sparc64, etc.  Firefox will not compile on freebsd last i checked.  I think gtk is broken.  I'm seriously thinking about making my own wm now.  I have an interface in mind already, its just picking the libraries to use with it.  We may just do a release with fvwm and see what people do.  I strongly favor using either gtkmm or gnustep for our graphical apps.  The pc bsd installer code is very clean but uses qt.  Its still a model for a good installer.  I did a test install today and was quite impressed.  We need to get there at least. 

I'm thinking these issues must be resolved for .1 release:

zoneinfo Etc/UTC and rdate fix
rc script cleanups (formatting and any necessary changes)
man page clean up (for additions/changes we've done)
All urls pointing to midnightbsd servers. 
Decide what to do about pkg_add and portsnap along with ports.
Some ports ready.  At least xorg, a browser, and some common libraries.
Some update to the em driver.
Look at other contrib software to determine version status.
Changes to the installer to remove freebsd specific features, etc.

.2 release will need this:
security patch procedure including binary patches (roadmap for it at least)
more ports, port utilities
improvements to installer
any bugfixes and some driver updates
more work on the gui environment

By .3 i want to have the window manager determined and hopefully working.  If i write my own, it would be started and useable to some degree.


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