So, FreeBSD 6.2 is getting ready day after day, the BETA2 was released a couple of days ago, and the ebuilds are now in portage. I’m still updating Defiant, so they are not entirely ready to go just yet.
But let’s see what the changes are for Gentoo in this release. First of all, one I already talked about, and is the usage of the standard baselayout package rather than the freebsd-baselayout: Roy did an excellent work, and this means less work for me to make sure that we are updated in respect to baselayout 🙂 unfortunately this means that to update to 6.2 you need to force overwriting of freebsd-baselayout with baselayout, and then remove freebsd-baselayout.
Then there’s Daijo that is becoming developer, and he’ll be working on supporting AMD64 platform in Gentoo/FreeBSD, and Roy instead started working on SPARC64 support (which is likely more stable than AMD64, considering its age 🙂 ). I’ll be really happy to see that we have enough portability to actually get three different architectures working fine on Gentoo/FreeBSD.
But what I’m working right now is a backstage change, that will improve the integration between Gentoo/FreeBSD and the rest of Gentoo, and would improve our citizenship status: stage building with catalyst. Right now the stages I built were created with simply a ROOT variable change and an emerge script. The result is somehow usable, but it’s not exactly the cleanest thing out there. It’s also a redundant set of scripts, not counting that they are anything but bug free, and thus you see the various attempt on getting the stage right.
The problem with the latter change is that we don’t have a direct equivalent of mount –bind in FreeBSD, although the same result can be easily achieved by using unionfs. The problem is that the default implementation of unionfs in FreeBSD 6 seems to be pretty broken, at least standing by this page, and I cannot mount more than one level of unionfs, to the result that catalyst does not even initialise cleanly. I’ll be checking the patch in freebsd-sources soon after the beta2 update is done here, and I hope it will work. If it does not, it will be the start of some hacking sessions on Catalyst until I can make it work 😀
Of course today I’m not limiting myself on Gentoo/FreeBSD: I’ve been called for my new job yesterday, today I’ll be confirming a meeting next week, so in the next days I’ll be trying to cleanup my stuff to leave a clean floor if someone else would be helping me when I’ll be employed during the working week 🙂
But feel free to sleep relaxed, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon (unless someone wants to get rid of me).
Maybe I’ll also try to write the famous entry about books I promised one month ago now….