9:17 AM - MidnightBSD: March Happenings
The current focus of the project is to get the mport tools ready for the 0.4 release. mport tools are now the default on CURRENT. They work for basic operations and while we're not actively using it yet, they have a downloadable index with current packages available. This index is created on the server with data from our Magus package cluster database and sqlite3. It includes information like package name, license, mirrors to download the file, version, etc.
I'm currently working on adding additional information to the index about categories mports belong to. This would be nice for display in the installer as well as for searches.
Speaking of the installer, I've been working on modifications to use the mport tools instead of the legacy pkg_tools. sysinstall will eventually be replaced, although I doubt we'll use the pc-sysinstall or bsdinstaller backends from other systems. Most likely it will not be a shell or lua based environment. The installer is our next big project after mport tools.
sysinstall was simplified recently. Several menu options that are confusing to our userbase were removed.
In addition to this work, we've been updating and adding new features to the base system. DRM/DRI code was imported from FreeBSD 7.1 as well as cdevpriv wrappers. nss_mdns was added to the base system; it allows one to find other systems on the network using multicast DNS. Systems running mDNSResponder or Avahi can now be seen on the network. I'm now able to ssh between my iMac and MidnightBSD machines by name (.local).
The time zone update file, tzdata2011c, was imported. An OpenSSL security issue was patched that only affects CURRENT.
Finally, xz 5.0.1 and liblzma were imported into the base system. mports was modified to use the system version when possible.