push/pull from a Git server repository using Mercurial

pure Python implementation of Git file formats and protocols

utility for audio-video information extraction

powerful descriptive vector graphics language

On August 31st, Stuart Henderson (sthen@) announced that the default Python version has changed from 2.5 to 2.6. This was following a commit by Federico G. Schwindt (fgsch@) in the ports tree. Please read on for Federico's full commit message and Stuart's announce:

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php class for building console-style tables

php class to facilitate the search of filesystems

simple C Library for entropy measurement

X.509 Certification Authority management tool

electronic periodic table of the elements

I know it's a bit late in the month but Augusts London *BSD meeting will be held at the Cleveland Arms pub in Bayswater on Thursday the 26th, 7pm
If you use upcoming, you can find the meeting details here

display a tree of processes

simple configuration file class

intelligent input bus framework

personal dictionary manager for anthy

web-based CVS viewer module for Horde

scim input method module for anthy

library to analyze MRT-format BGP dump files

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has tagged 4.8-current. This means that we are one step closer to the upcoming OpenBSD 4.8 release. Keep an eye out for pre-orders! Read below for the full commit message:

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When I think about the names of people on mailing lists who have helped me solve difficult problems or learn something new, often I have no face to go with the name. In my day to day life I may have walked right past them without knowing, or saying hello, or more appropriately, asking to buy them a beer or lunch as a way to say thanks for the help they've given me. If you've been communicating with someone for years via email or even phone, and you finally get the chance to meet them in person, it is always an strange combination of both fun and unusual, or more accurately, both familiar and unfamiliar. It's the contradiction that seems a bit troublesome at first, but it fades quickly. There's a lot of this for people attending their first hackathon, but even those who have attended many hackathons probably experience a little of it due to the new people they're going to meet for the first time.

Wondering "Who are these people?" is only natural but keeping the event organized really does help. A great deal of thought and effort goes into planing and organizing each hackathon. One of the smart things done is keeping a master list of arrival and departure flights so people can coordinate meeting, sharing rides and similar. From the master list, I knew I would be on the same flight from SFO as Chris Kuethe (ckuethe@), so we traded emails to confirm and just assumed we'd figure it out at the airport gate.

Knowing one of the developers would be on the same flight was reassuring. I almost never travel and this was the first time in almost a decade where I was traveling alone without the assistance of a family member or friend. As a novice traveler and first time hackathon attendee, I made plenty of poor decisions in picking out what to bring and I seriously over-packed for the trip. Showing you how stupid I was may save you from making similar mistakes.

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Takuya Asada (syuu@) wrote in to say:

Two OpenBSD developers Yojiro Uo (yuo@) and Yasuoka Masahiko (yasuoka@) work at a leading ISP in Japan called IIJ (Internet Initiative Japan Inc.). I was invited to visit IIJ's next-gen data center experiment facility where one of their experiments is running 300 OpenBSD servers.

They're using OpenBSD servers for an experiment with outside-air-cooling using USB thermo-hygrograph sensors. Of course, the driver was written by yuo-san.

Full story and photos are here:
http://syuu.dokukino.com/2010/08/in-iijs-outside-air-cooled-container.html

record and display with video(4)

How leaders, managers, mentors and coaches motivate others towards a common goal is a very well researched topic. The methods typically used within entirely volunteer organizations center around exceedingly polite interactions, strong encouragement through accolades, and fairly gentle suggestions when mistakes are made. The way the OpenBSD project operates is vastly different from the accepted norms.

Read on to find out more about beck@ and learn why the OpenBSD project succeeds with their goals where others flounder:

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Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has called out on the tech@ mailing list for aggressive testing the new ACPI suspend/resume code to be shipped in the upcoming OpenBSD 4.8 release. Please read on for Theo's message:

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On the 1st of August, Marc Espie (espie@) announced on the ports@ mailing list that the ports tree has been locked, meaning that users are welcome to test and report bugs. Please read on for Marc's message:

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tool to play previews of audio and video files

dynamic front-end for IMP webmail

lightweight front-end for mobile IMP users

mail filter rules for IMP

modular framework for web-based applications

highly configurable pop3/imap4 webmail client

web based calendar application, for Horde

memo application, for Horde

multiuser task list manager, for Horde

contact management module, for Horde

On July 27th, Stefan Sperling (stsp@) added support for the multi-byte characters in the OpenBSD libc. Thanks to the work of the people involved in its development, the OpenBSD C library now supports the Unicode character encoding scheme UTF-8. Read on for the full commit message, some words from Stefan about what needs to be tested and how to do so:

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helper class for PHP WebDAV server implementations

in-memory channels for Tcl, chunks and fifos

Tcl UDP extension

POCO C++ libraries for network based applications

image extension for Tcl/Tk

Python XMPP and Jabber implementation

In all of my interviews at c2k10, there were many things that kept coming up over and over again. One of those things was the release of 2.7 in June of 2000 and 2.8 in November. It was a period when many of the developers, tedu@ included, started to use OpenBSD. There is a reason for these two releases being so popular and a tipping point, so to speak, that attracted many thereafter.

Read on to find out more about tedu@ and learn what this attraction was all about:

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GnuPG extension for Thunderbird

GnuPG extension for Seamonkey

communicate with the i3 window manager

With almost two days of hacking under their belts, everyone was instructed to make their way to Bob Beck's (beck@) house for the traditional BBQ event and Swedish beer hurling festivities. The food was fantastic and the camaraderie undeniable.

Read on to find out more about the famous Annual OpenBSD BBQ and a lot more:

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lua binding of zlib

reliable event logging protocol library

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has tagged 4.8-BETA (see here and here). Snapshots should be available soon for testing, check the mirrors for availability. Read below for the full commit messages:

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library for reading RAW files

hide awfull SSL API in a sane interface

library to edit command lines as they are typed in

GNU standards-compliant Makefile generator

Sécurisation d'un serveur Sendmail La configuration est réalisée pour le réseau mydomain.com, grâce aux logiciels Sendmail, OpenBSD spamd, Spamassassin + milter-spamd pour le système anti-spam, milter-regex pour le filtrage et procmail pour le délivrement. L'achitecture abordée est un réseau de type LAN, avec des serveurs mail en `relai' et un serveur MX principal.

HTML slide generator based on SlideML

Different people get into OpenBSD in different ways and for different reasons. I can give you my own experiences and opinions, but as such, they will fail to be universal or even be correct for anyone but myself. Unlike most undeadly articles, the following will be light on technical details, but hopefully you will find it useful.

As Theo told me over a decade ago, "The project is code," but my opinion has always been slightly different. I intentionally fail to draw a distinction between the code itself, the people contributing it, the friendships between them, and the fun of coding. In a formal sense I know I'm wrong and Theo is right. The code stands on its own. The greatest diff in the world should be committed on its technical merits alone. The trouble is, without other people willing to look at it, test it and vet the ideas, its technical merit may never be known and it may never make it into the tree. The lone genius programmer working in isolation and doing everything himself is a myth. When contributing in a group setting like OpenBSD, getting improvements committed is much easier when you know both the process and the people.

To understand OpenBSD development and why the hackathons are so important, the first thing you need to realize is the OpenBSD developers really care about building the very best operating system possible. You could call the OpenBSD hackathons amazingly successful just by the cold metric of increased volume of source code commits, but you would be missing the more fundamental reasons why OpenBSD hackathons are so vitally important. The hackathons are a chance for like-minded friends to have fun spending a week concentrating and collaborating on something all of them care about.

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This is the continuation and conclusion of the previous [c2k10] article of the same title on portable systems and test environments.

Bob Beck (beck@) said, "We're actually a hiking club with a software development problem," so you can hopefully grasp how important it is to have reasonably portable systems. The down-side of most developers using reasonably portable and reasonably powerful systems is the lack of diversity. The majority of the laptops used by developers are either 32-bit or 64-bit x86 systems (i386 or amd64 respectively). Just because OpenBSD will run on a monstrous VAX and said VAX will be very useful for finding bugs unseen on other platforms, it doesn't mean you'll want to carry one around with you. Diversity of supported platforms and constantly doing native builds on them makes OpenBSD more robust.

Porting the entire OpenBSD operating system to a new platform would be a lot of fun but requires a great deal of skill and a significant amount of time. Even if you're seeking FUN, you may not have time and skill to do a full OS port, so most people would want to pick one of the already supported platforms. If you pick the right system, there will still be plenty of FUN to be had in adding or improving support for some of the unsupported or under-supported parts. Depending on your personal requirements and how much FUN you want to have with it, you always have a number of great choices available within the realm of supported platforms.

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post-processing tool for scanned paper sheets

PolicyKit integration for Qt4

drag n drop extension for Tk

Tk widget to display HTML/CSS formatted contents

system tray icon support for Tk

small JSON library written in ANSI C

The staggering volume of hardware the developers bring to hackathons sometimes causes delays, raised eyebrows or pointed questions when going through customs on international flights. The customs officers are usually wondering, "What kind of person needs five laptops and a suitcase full of parts and peripherals on a vacation?"

Some of the systems hauled to hackathons are generally non-portable, large servers, or smaller embedded systems, but the majority of systems are various types of laptops, each with their own unique challenges and headaches. One of the most frequently asked questions is, "What is a good laptop for running OpenBSD?" Although there have been countless opinions voiced in the mailing list archives, there will never be a "correct" opinion. Requirements and preferences will always vary from person to person and situation to situation, so defining your personal requirements and preferences is a good first step. There is the obvious question of, "What do you plan to do with it?" but defining your own preferences and requirements involves a lot more questions where the answers are often trade-offs.

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Development on the mandoc(1) manual formatter is moving fast these days. Currently, mandoc was hacked on during two hackathon in less than two months. From May 13 to May 17, 2010, Kristaps Dzonsons (bsd.lv and OpenBSD), Joerg Sonnenberger (NetBSD) and Ingo Schwarze (OpenBSD) met at the BEC.de site in Elmenhorst near Rostock, Germany for a mini-hackathon (m2k10) dedicated exclusively on mandoc. Ingo was again focusing on mandoc during the yearly OpenBSD general hackathon (c2k10) and Kristaps was strongly supporting him remotely.

The mandoc utility is a lightweight, portable mdoc(7) and man(7) formatter written in C, started by Kristaps in 2008, so far supporting ASCII, HTML and simple PostScript output. Kristaps has committed to develop PostScript output during the current GSOC.

OpenBSD -current has recently switched over to pre-format the base system manuals with mandoc instead of groff during the system build. The current plan is to release OpenBSD 4.8 built with mandoc this autumn and to remove groff from the base system by the OpenBSD 4.9 release next spring. The NetBSD, FreeBSD and Dragonfly trees also include mandoc, and NetBSD is planning to eventually switch over the tree to mandoc just like OpenBSD did.

If you're unfamiliar with mandoc, you may enjoy reading the previous undeadly article on the topic, otherwise read on for more technical details of the on-going work. Read more...

correctly handle PNG transparency in IE 5.5 & 6

lightweight C++ template library for linear algebra

library to manipulate units of physical quantities

standalone YouTube.com video browser/player

tree widget extension for Tk

PNG photo image extension for Tcl/Tk

Verilog simulation and synthesis tool

gnu privacy guard - a free PGP replacement

lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL

time profiler for Lua

GTK+-based electronic waveform viewer

html help viewer

Changes by:	stephan@cvs.openbsd.org	2010/08/24 03:10:14

Modified files:
	sys/scsi       : Tag: OPENBSD_4_7 scsi_base.c 

Log message:
MFC, original commit from dlg:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
if we're going to set ITSDONE when an xfer is done cos the adapter expects
it, we should clear it before we issue it to the adapter too. retried
commands would have ITSDONE still set otherwise.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

ok krw@

low-level networking for Twisted

PolicyKit integration for GNOME/GTK+2

command-line interface to Google services

The New York City BSD Conference (NYCBSDCon) is the main technical conference on the US East Coast for the BSD community to get together to share and gain knowledge, to network with like-minded people, and to have fun. This event is organized by members of the New York City *BSD Users Group (NYC*BUG). Read more...

roles which support overloading

Moose role for processing command line options

library of commonly used type constraints

Moose role for setting attributes from a config file

Getopt::Long, but simpler and more powerful

libstatgrab bindings for Lua

PolicyKit integration for GNOME/GTK+2

framework for granting privileged operations to users

Flickr .Net API Library

track the number of times subs are called

parse regular expressions

extensions to PPI

hexadecimal dumper

CSS parser and selection engine

string internment library

HTML parser

BMP/ICO decoding library

lightweight web browser

utility library for parser building

GIF decoding library

routines for manipulating stashes

tagging library for the Mono framework

Zero Configuration Networking library for Mono

build IPv4 and IPv6 address space hierarchies

Perl interface for the Tumblr API

perform diffs on arrays

Haskell bindings to cairo

Haskell integration with Parrot virtual machine

Perl 6 Implementation

XML manipulation library

multimedia layer from qt4/kde4

shared desktop ontologies

common perl data validation methods

Perl extension for Consistent Signal Handling