News MidnightBSD News

From the MidnightBSD developer blog

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 21:42

perl removed from base

We're in the process of migrating to perl in mports from base. Perl went into midnightbsd many years ago (around 0.4 i think) There are a few reasons for the change but here are a few: * Difficulty in updating * Delays between releases * Security fixes are easier * Less software requires Perl now than when we made the decision The biggest downsides are with mports as a lot of it still uses Perl. We're working on that....

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 18:47

mport package manager issue on 3.1.3 release

It seems that mport install doesn't work sometimes and gives no output. Workaround: mport download pkgname /usr/libexec/mport.install /var/db/mport/downloads/pkgfilename.mport where pkgname is something like gmake and pkgfilename.mport is something like gmake-3.8.1.mport...

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 18:51

Project Status 2024

Here are our plans for 2024: * 3.2 release - bug fix release with some base system third-party library updates. This is on track to be released in the next few months. TODO: decide if perl will migrate to ports. (likely) * 4.0 work started - still planning what will be in this release Updating mesa and llvm ports (llvm 12 recently added) * Migrate from svn to git to magus indexer. (done today) Find ways to cut costs month to month. (spending roughly $300 a month on server/cloud plus on prem infra including business internet connection) * Determine what we want to do with portsnap. Love to know if you use it....

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 19:56

mports status

Packages for i386 and amd64 MidnightBSD 3.1 have been released this month. We're currently trying to fix a number of vulnerable mports with updates and also add support for PHP 8.3....

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:36

xfce 4.18 now in mports

We updated xfce desktop to 4.18 in mports....

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:39

Ravenports

MidnightBSD 3.1.0 now includes the keys and the install will bootstrap Ravenports. This will create a /raven directory and allow you to install software using /raven/sbin/ravensw Refer to the Ravenports website for more information on how to use"http://www.ravenports.com/" (http://www.ravenports.com/) Please note that we don't setup paths for /raven/bin, /raven/sbin, etc, automatically. You'll need to do that to make it easier to run apps there....

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:36

mport 2.4.4

MidnightBSD 3.1 includes mport 2.4.3 mport clean now removes temporary files that might get left behind by other operations mport clean now removes left over /var/db/mport/infrastructure/* folders that might get left behind prior to a fix for mtree files last year. (mostly for older systems) mport's internal rmtree functionality has been modified to use native C routines rather than executing rm -r as a system command. (Please report any issues with removing files in packages on delete with this) This is slightly faster with very large packages. (0.03 seconds or so) mport list updates will now give you better information about why a package is not found in the index. If the package is listed in the MOVED file in mports repository, it will tell you if it's removed/expired or moved to another location. Now that MOVED file contents are part of the index, we can start doing smarter updates in the future. The first package build to include this data is the latest amd64 3.1 build that is likely going to be used for the upcoming midnightbsd 3.1 release. We've tagged 2.4.4 in git with additional improvements - Adds mport config list to display all configured values - Fixes a bug with non-interactive console messages when downloading a file. (Uses percent and cuts down on output)...

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:33

MidnightBSD 3.1.0 release

MidnightBSD 3.1.0 has been released. You can learn more about it in the release notes on github"https://github.com/MidnightBSD/src/releases/tag/3.1.0" (https://github.com/MidnightBSD/src/releases/tag/3.1.0) or the MidnightBSD website at "https://www.midnightbsd.org/notes/" (https://www.midnightbsd.org/notes/)...

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 05:35

Magus changes

I started working on some changes for Magus to parse the MOVED file. In MidnightBSD, a lot of tools don't do much with that file so it's never been consistently managed. The idea is that we can index it with each magus run and then provide the data in the index file generated for packages. This would provide hints about packages that were really removed vs renamed. We could then install the renamed/moved package on upgrades and when using the mport list command, it could more accurately guess if packages were removed or just unavailable. This solves a problem that's bugged me for awhile with mport. Of course, we're only working on the first step now. The steps for this are: 1. add it to the magus indexer. (needs testing) 2. Export the data during a magus bless from the new MOVED table in the postgresql database to a table in the generated sqlite index files for mport to use. (need to update magus bless utility) 3. Modify mport package manager to read the data from the table in the index 4. Update the mport list command to display more accurate data about packages that have expired, will expire, or are deleted/removed 5. Modify the mport info command to display information about package expiry etc 6. Modify the upgrade command (and possibly update) to make more intelligent decisions about package renames and possibly ask a question on upgrade/update/install paths about packages that are deprecated....

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 17:39

Ravenports

The Ravenports folks are looking into supporting MidnightBSD so there'd be an additional source of packages for the OS available. We've done some work on the firstboot script in Current to support this experimental bootstrap/integration. "https://ravenports.com" (https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fravenports.com%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0uMVjg3t_yhUBGkmZ9QmxzhW2-5JDf-6IIXGi8bwTGCakYxi_t9izKSm8&h=AT2Ck8GeDXP9VGOpgSdqAkvGxr9EBrNYPAftHRB4taVm3mrx4EAZro1if-f_zhGkUQx2U0h2ruJyz-n0bZFPgYhozuD6jw6_diwQjyvcIeHz3sOKtFz5fSEZnvvotsnEy_nXITlglw&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT0TNQaC3S5MuF6UsUWpaA4CILyzoDeDe6CIfOsHsi8kaYX5Z9K07JdOiPPYDnqQ-WB_yaHHyiZrqx8hffIYz3j_Aegd8K8-IQvk79hI2lX_knNFUuiOUZH-9R8Hfn4mP_Fn0vsYHGWkziu9cTI_lrM5Mt3-2Q) This is certainly not final yet, but looking promising. There are a number of packages available via Ravenports that aren't available in mports. For example: recent firefox releases! We won't be discontinuing mports, and consider this an additional package manager / repository. However, we will try to make it easy to use on a fresh install and support it as much as we can....

Sun, 28 May 2023 18:59

New Browser: Raphael

Midori 9.x, the default browser in MidnightBSD, went EOL.? The 10.x version of the browser is electron based and doesn't support many operating systems.? That put us in a pickle.? We need a default browser and webkit browsers have been the most consistent with working on MidnightBSD.? Therefore, we forked Midori 9 as Raphael.? It's on github at "https://github.com/midnightbsd/raphael/" (https://github.com/midnightbsd/raphael/) All browsers don't have to be chromium based.? That's a bad thing!? We've also made progress on the firefox-esr port and getting that to build.? It's close to working but still some hurdles.? If we can get that fixed, we have two?decent options. If you're interested in helping with the Raphael browser or fixing the firefox ports, we are open to pull requests!...

Tue, 16 May 2023 17:02

Short term goals

Here's a list of some short term goals we're hoping to get done in the next few months: * mports: fix firefox-esr port * Add llvm12 or 13 to mports and update mesa libraries using it * Update perl in current? * Look into updating CPAN included in stable/3.0 perl to fix a CVE * Import bug fixes / improvements from FreeBSD 12-stable branch from September-December 2022 into midnightbsd current.? * Look into updating the mport manager to work with newer libmport versions...

Fri, 12 May 2023 14:05

Project status update

First, we've had several contributions over the last few weeks.? Thanks, new contributors!?? In current, we imported 2?months' worth of bug fixes from FreeBSD 12-stable.? ?We've also made several changes to the firstboot script.? For folks running current, please test the new firstboot script changes.? If you want to run it, just delete /etc/fbreceipt and run /etc/rc.d/firstboot start (after installing the latest version)? We've also had a few server outages lately. Here's what's going on:? 1. We had a botched upgrade to our primary virtualization server.? This was running VMware ESXi.? A CPU upgrade killed a motherboard as the CPU wasn't actually supported, as I misread the support list.? The motherboard was replaced.? Additionally, some memory modules had failed in that.? Those were replaced.? We are in the process of migrating VMs to a bhyve environment.?? 2. We upgraded our primary network switch.? The new switch is an aruba instant on 1960?12XGT and replaced an aging buffalo bs208 8 port nbase-t switch.? Since the new switch doesn't have 2.5G support, we had to upgrade the network card in our file server to an intel x540.? (it was using a realtek dragon 2.5G)? 3. While upgrading the network switch, we uncovered a thermal issue with another server.? We'll have to bring that down to replace some fans soon.? It's our other virtualization server used primarily for package builds....

Fri, 05 May 2023 13:34

Project Update

project update: We're still restoring VMs from our recent server issue. Some services are back up, but we still have a few like Jenkins, OpenGrok, and build nodes for our package cluster to restore. We've been running package builds on a single server lately. The latest amd64 run has had a few issues that we're working through. mport package manager has received several updates in recent weeks. It now supports an audit command that lets you check for CVEs against a copy of the NVD data. Usage: mport audit mport audit -r mport -q audit The first version prints a list of all CVEs with descriptions for each package. The second includes a list of packages that depend on this vulnerable port so you can also update those. The third doesn't give details about the vulnerabilities and just prints a list of vulnerable packages with package name and package number using the "global" -q aka quiet flag. This isn't included in MidnightBSD src git yet as we're working through a few bugs. You can check it out and try it now though git clone "https://github.com/midnightbsd/mport.git" (https://github.com/midnightbsd/mport.git)...