Florent Thoumie

There’s bullshit in my head. Oh, and I’m aggressive too. Fortunately that was me and not des@ or phk@

I’m sorry to see this guy stopping using FreeBSD and I can’t but feel this is somehow my fault. Wait no, I don’t really care.

FWIW, it wasn’t meant to start a religion war, I just figured that if it’s his right to say crap, it’s mine to say it is.

Edit: As Geraud just mentioned it to me, “Beranger” already had to deal with des@

I’m always happy to read feedback about my (limited, I admit) work on FreeBSD. This X.org work has been running for quite some time and is my most significant contribution to ports.

I don’t like being rude to people and I think most of the people I’ve been working with on FreeBSD can confirm I’m a quite cool and helpful guy, open-minded about other systems. While FreeBSD has been my OS of choice for the past 7 years, I’ve never been a zealot, I’ve often recommended some GNU/Linux distributions rather than FreeBSD, just because when you come from Windows, Ubuntu (for example) is just easier to get installed and running.

Anyway, I came across a blog entry today and while I can understand that people may be wrong about some FreeBSD stuff, I’m not expecting those people to make strong (and completely wrong) statements either. Funny thing is that the blog is called “Opensource and Strong opinions”. Let’s rename this “Utter Bullshit and Strong opinions”.

So here’s my answer:

Ok, so two things that might be of interest to you:

• FreeBSD source is branched, FreeBSD ports are not. What does that mean? Well, changes committed in the source tree go to HEAD (or CURRENT) first, except very rare occasions like security advisories or commits related to code having been removed from HEAD. With this commit may be associated a MFC (Merge From Current) delay, if the committer plans on merging the change to STABLE branches (right now, the supported ones are RELENG_6 and RELENG_5). Once that delay has passed and the committer thinks the code has received sufficient testing and/or review, the code is merged to RELENG_* branches of his choice. This doesn’t exist with ports because there are no branches (well only one, which is mainstream). Ports are not associated to any source branch, then saying that “X.org 7.2 never went into 7-CURRENT” is an absolute non-sense.
• Reading manual pages doesn’t hurt. I hate portupgrade, but right now, it’s one of those tools you simply can’t avoid using when dealing with large numbers of ports. People will argue that portmaster is getting better and better but IMHO, it’s not ready for prime time (Doug Barton is working on it on a regular basis, so this might happen soon-ish). So if you want to replace a port with another, you’ll be happy to now that there is such an option (-o). Admittedly, the description can be a bit meaningless to the neophyte, but there’s a really good EXAMPLES section at the end (and it’s worth reading, I can’t stress that enough).

I’m not going to take your points one by one and explain you what to do, because I think I wasted already a lot of time on this blog entry.

If there’s only one thing you should remember about my post, let it be that bashing is authorized, but please get a clue first. Otherwise you’re just making an ass of yourself.

Rant over.

For some time I’ve seen people with wishlists and considered having one but as a FreeBSD committer my contribution was a bit too small to hope for people sending me free stuff.

Some anonymous guy left a comment today asking me if I had one so I figured I could create one at amazon now, so here it is. Obviously this is only a wishlist, so don’t feel obliged to send anything, cause “I did for the lulz”. I also accept checks and paypal donations, you have my email address

Edit: Thank you Matt, Sam, Moose and Jeremy!

Yeah finally. First mail I sent to lesi about xorg-modular was on the 14th of February 2006. It’s a bit more than what Kris announced but hey, now it’s committed o/.

I’m not going to make a long post, cause I’ve already made quite a lot of them. Thanks to everyone involved in testing/reviewing/patching, we wouldn’t have been able to do everything without you.

Announce is here.

Cool things I’ve read:

• teh one-hour commit!

cvs ci -F ~/cvsYPYKXc  46,55s user 46,30s system 2% cpu 1:06:44,82 total

• commit mail is too big!

Your mail to 'cvs-all' with the subject

    cvs commit: ports MOVED UPDATING ports/Mk bsd.port.mk bsd.xorg.mk ...

Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval.

The reason it is being held:

    Message body is too big: 707338 bytes with a limit of 400 KB

So we got 25 slots assigned this year, which is more than what we had last year.

This year again, I’ve proposed our students to open a blog at blogs.freebsdish.org but it seems I’m being more successful this time.

All of our students’ blogs will appear on the main planet site, the complete version and the soc2007 one. Wish them luck!

So we’ve been working on the last details before the merge.

Dejan worked on a safer/simpler upgrade path, which results you can find if you browse x11@ archives. Kris pointed out a few issues which should be resolved within a few days.

We’ve had a couple volunteers to review the xorg big diff this week-end (pav, marcus, rafan, sajd, Erandir, I hope I didn’t forget anybody) so this went pretty fast. We’ll have a quick review again after the ports tree is frozen, right before the merge (which should hopefully happen some time next week).

I’ve submitted a new tarball to Kris to have a last experimental run, just to be sure nothing was broken in the last few days.

If you like to read random crap, point your web browser or your feed aggregator to blog.thoumie.net.

As you may have noticed, freebsd blog stuff has been down lately. Erwin was hosting everything and apache crashed while he was away. For some reason, people with root access to the machine couldn’t restart it and Erwin isn’t supposed to come back before a few days.

I decided to move everything to my own server, so it’s now back online. If you haven’t done it yet, please update your bookmarks and use planet.freebsdish.org and blogs.freebsdish.org rather than the names ending in droso.org or droso.net (as I have no control over those DNS zones).

I haven’t blogged about this in a few weeks so I figured that could be a good time to give everybody an update.

It has been decided that the X11BASE to LOCALBASE migration would happen when we merge the new X.org in the ports tree. The necessary infrastructure changes have been done but some ports are broken by these changes. There are also a few ports broken by new X.org import left to fix.

Good news is that lesi is back so he’ll take x11@ leadership back and work on this; and miwi volunteered to fix part of those broken ports as well. An exp-build has been done last week-end and all of us got the errorlogs, so now it’s only a matter of fixing stuff.

With help from mlaier and sam, I finally committed my first significant contribution to the src tree.

Few months ago, anholt gave me email addresses of people at Intel that would be willing to discuss terms under which we could redistribute their firmwares. After a few emails (and some months), we came to an agreement. I added support for restricted firmwares to firmware(9), mlaier/sam reviewed it and voila!

Commit is here and heads-up is here.

Update: Now, here comes the Press Release!