Index: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-04-2015-06.xml
===================================================================
--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-04-2015-06.xml (revision 46954)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-04-2015-06.xml (revision 46955)
@@ -1,297 +1,373 @@
This is a draft of the April–June 2015
status report. Please check back after it is finalized, and
an announcement email is sent to the &os;-Announce mailing
list.
The second quarter of 2015 was another productive quarter for - the &os; project and community. [...]
+ the &os; project and community. BSDCan was held in Ottawa in + June, and both it and the Developer Summit preceding it allowed + developers to plan for the future and discover what others have + already accomplished.Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work!
The deadline for submissions covering the period from July to September 2015 is October 1, 2015.
- ?> + ?>Two new documentation committers were added to the team in the second quarter of 2015.
Mathieu Arnold is a member of the &os; Ports Management Team. Over the past year, he has worked on many large and complex updates to keep the Porter's Handbook current, and continues to update this important document.
Anne Dickison is Marketing Director for the &os; Foundation. She will focus on updating and improving the &os; main web site.
We welcome both new committers and look forward to their additional contributions!
During the Developer Summit held in the two days before BSDCan, a documentation working group meeting was held. We discussed some of the biggest opportunities available to the documentation team.
Modernizing our translation system was, again, a major topic. Making it easier for translators to do their work is vitally important. Translations make &os; much more accessible for non-English speakers, and those people and the translators themselves often become valuable technical contributors in other areas. Progress was made in this area, and we hope to have more news soon.
Methods of making it easier for people to contribute to documentation was another major topic. At present, we use DocBook XML for articles and books, and mdoc(7) for man pages. These markup languages are not very welcoming for new users. There are simpler documentation markup languages like RST, Markdown, and AsciiDoc that take less time to learn and use. In fact, these markup systems are all similar to each other. These systems tend to be more oriented towards visual appearance rather than the semantic markup of our present systems, there might be ways to work around that.
Following the theme of making contributing easier, we also discussed giving easier access so users can make additions to the &os; Wiki. Like any other useful web resource, it was horribly abused by spammers and access was limited to prevent that abuse. It is tricky to allow submissions yet keep the quality of submitted information usefully high.
Due to the markup systems used, it is difficult to review documents for the quality of their information. Annotator is a Javascript system that allows adding notes to an existing web page. This would allow us to hold content-only reviews of documentation web pages. Reviewers would not see markup, so they could concentrate only on whether the information was accurate and complete. To use this as desired, we need some help with ports and testing.
Complete a port for the backend storage component of Annotator. Preferably this would be the lowest overhead and most open-licensed version available. Assistance from those familiar with Python and Javascript web development is welcome.
pkgsrc is a fork of &os; ports from the NetBSD project with a focus on portability and multi platform support. At present, pkgsrc supports building packages on 23 different platforms from a single tree, including &os;
While pkgsrc is not a replacement for ports in most use cases, it holds a unique position in mixed platform environments where software ideally needs to be the same version across the board and should built in a consistent manner, saving the user from having to resort to manually building programs or re-implementing a mechanism to do so.
With the recent 2015Q2 release earlier this month, it is now possible to generate over 14000 packages on FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE (up from 12800 last quarter).
Work is in progress to add pkgng support to pkgsrc.
Improve platform support to skip libusb on &os; where libusb is bundled in base. This is causing the biggest breakage at the moment.
Expand the effort to -STABLE and -CURRENT branches and, if possible, architectures other than AMD64. Shell access welcome (without privilege is sufficient).
UEFI-enabled boot1.efi and loader.efi have been modified to support loading and booting from a ZFS filesystem. The patch currently works with buildworld, and successfully boots on a test machine with a ZFS partition. In addition, the ZFS-enabled loader.efi can be treated as a chainloader using ZFS-enabled GRUB.
The work on boot1.efi also reorganizes the code somewhat, splitting out the filesystem-specific parts into a modular framework.
More testing needed for the following uses: ZFS with GRUB+loader.efi, ZFS with boot1+loader.efi, UFS with boot1+loader.efi (test modularization of boot1.efi)
Have boot1.efi check partition type GUIDs before probing for filesystems.
Get patch accepted upstream and committed.
+Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix + and Unix-like platforms, such as &os;. It aims to be fast and + lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to + use.
+ +During this quarter, the team has kept these applications + up-to-date:
+ +Mathieu Arnold (mat@) committed + PR197878, + updating the Xfce section in the Porter's Handbook.
+ +We also follow the unstable releases (available in our + experimental repository) of:
+ +Create documentation about usage of + sysutils/xfce4-power-manager (it needs some love, + PR199166).
+ +Some hidden features were introduced in the 1.5.1 release, + and as we also support ConsoleKit2 (fork of + sysutils/consolekit), help for users is + required.