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FreeBSD is building a graphical installer

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FreeBSD is working on a graphical installer. Finally. The first hurdle to overcome when testing a new Operating System is to get it installed. What is more, the first impression new users gather from an Operating System is its installation process. The state of the art for Operating System installers nowadays definitely involves a graphical process. This is the case for mainstream systems but also for other UNIX systems comparable to FreeBSD: RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, or even Devuan GNU+Linux Regardless of the technical level of the actual user, this is how the platform will be compared in the public eye. Instead, with knowledge of the current bsdinstall(8) and bsdconfig(8) utilities, I envisioned a BSD-licensed replacement for Xdialog(1). Just like when invoking bsdconfig with the -X switch for graphical mode, it could be dropped in instead of bsddialog(1) and allow graphical installation – while sharing the infrastructure of the current installer. To avoid confusion with the current implementation of Xdialog from the x11/xdialog port, I have named its replacement gbsddialog(1). It also has to be said that Xdialog is quite obsolete (latest release in 2006) and this shows visually too. ↫ Pierre Pronchery in the FreeBSD status report I can’t believe it’s taken FreeBSD this long to both consider and build a graphical installer. Currently being enveloped in the world of OpenBSD, there’s clearly so much the BSD world has to offer to desktop users such as myself, but at the same time, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that the various BSDs can address to make the experience just that little bit more pleasant. They obviously don’t have to – not every project is aiming at desktop use – but it just makes onboarding so much nicer. The next step – perhaps in 2037 – would be to offer a desktop-oriented installation image, with a default desktop environment and settings optimised for desktop use. Right now, a lot of fiddling and optimisation for this use case is left to the user, and for newcomers such as myself this means a lot of reading, making sense of contradictory advice and suggestions, wading through endless, often outdated, online guides, and so on. Now, I don’t particularly mind doing this, but I’m sure it’s chasing people away who could end up making meaningful contributions. Meanwhile, after trying out FreeBSD for a while a few weeks ago but it not being a good fit for me, I’m now exploring and using OpenBSD and it’s been a great experience. Although unlikely, I hope OpenBSD, too, can perhaps consider making some minor affordances to desktop users – because as I’ve learnt, OpenBSD feels right at home on a desktop, more so than I ever expected.

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Drupal Core News: Announcing the inaugural Project Update Working Group members

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Congratulations to the inaugural members of the new Project Update Working Group.

This is a new working group tasked with helping maintainers prepare contributed projects for the next major release of Drupal core.

The inaugural members are as follows:

  1. Norah Medlin (tekNorah) (provisional)

  2. Vladimir Roudakov (vladimiraus)

  3. Sven Decabooter (svendecabooter)

  4. Naveen Valecha (naveenvalecha)

  5. Kristen Pol (Kristen Pol)

  6. Matt Glaman (mglaman)

  7. Darren Oh (Darren Oh)

  8. Mark Casias (markie)

  9. Kim Pepper (kim.pepper)

  10. Björn Brala (bbrala)

  11. Lucas Hedding (heddn)

  12. Pedro Cambra (pcambra)

  13. Allan Chappell (generalredneck)

  14. Jakob Perry (japerry)

  15. Timo Huisman (Timo Huisman) (provisional)

The group will work in the coming weeks to establish processes and changes required to Drupal.org to facilitate the role.

If you wish to get in touch and say congratulations, you can find them in the #project-update-working-group channel on slack.

Simple Test for Revealing Fake Rubyists in the Rails Community

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Here is a very easy test for figuring out if someone in the Rails community is a Real Rubyist who truly gets Ruby and its unique benefits 100% compared to other programming languages or a Fake Rubyist who is just riding the Ruby on Rails bandwagon because it is “cool” or because they heard about it from an acquaintance without thinking for themselves…

OpenSMTPD table protocol changes, now with the backstory

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Regular readers will be aware that OpenBSD ships with its own mail server implementation, OpenSMTPD in its base system.

In a recent message to the tech@ mailing list, Omar Polo (op@) asked for comments or oks for a patches implementing a change of table protocols. A little later, Gilles Chehade (gilles@) posted the backstory to the misc@opensmtpd.org mailing list with the backstory for this change.

The message follows in full below (apparently the otherwise fine marc.info archive site no longer archives the list): 

Date: Fri, 03 May 2024 08:22:03 +0000
From: gilles@poolp.org
To: misc@opensmtpd.org
Subject: smtpd: change the table protocol

Hello,

This is a copy of a mail I sent to OpenBSD hackers a few days ago so you are aware of work
being done on OpenSMTPD by Omar Polo.

~~~

TL;DR: proposal to change table backends wire protocol to one that's closer to filters, it
       has proven to work for years now, comes with many benefits and it is a very trivial
       change that we can pull in a handful of hours:
       https://tmp.omarpolo.com/smtpd-tables.7.html

Read more…

Dude, Where’s My Archive?

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TWIF generated on Thursday, 02 May 2024, Week 18

F-Droid core

Four weeks ago in the 14-th TWIF we announced the start of 1.20 testing and the repository management improvements that it brings. Over the years, the concept of a “repository archive” kinda stayed the same. Basically, instead of serving the users the full list of all the versions of all the apps, we give them only the latest three versions for each app, as users will just update to the latest one anyway. This keeps an index update easy to download, and this was improved again a couple of years ago by offering diff-updates (not the full index, just the difference compared to your local index), so if you update once a week you’ll end up downloading 200Kb or less.

Since the Archive will collect old versions continuously, its size grows each cycle, and the index as expected, making working with it a heavy task for your device. For this reason we don’t encourage its use unless it’s really needed, eg. for running on old Android versions, and to disable it when done.

As the Client focus is to draw users to the actual main repo, and not to emphasis the Archive, with the latest repository management design it was decided to treat Archive as an option that users can toggle on, instead of having a separate repo entry. This toggle is in the repo details, “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’“, 🙂 oh, I mean under the mirror list. This list is under a work in progress redesign of its own, so it’s a bit finicky to scroll right now, leaving even astute Android users to wonder how an Archive can be added or used.

To be fair, the linked Fedi post above has this information in the first picture, but we understand that we’ve looked a lot at these strings and we are biased to consider them “good enough”. One reason to test these changes as early as possible is to gather feedback from users. If you have thoughts on a better wording, feel free to ping us.

Community News

Aurora Store was updated to 4.4.4 and will deemed stable in the next-next index update. You can update now manually if you wish.

Grazer Linuxtage Schedule has changed its application identifier due to some, ahem, alternative centralized store policy. Its users are advised to uninstall and install the new app aptly named: Grazer Linuxtage

NewPipe is reproducible again and was updated to 0.27.0 fixing a lot of bugs users were waiting for months already. We hope future versions get delivered faster.

Updated Apps

72 more apps were updated

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

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