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Re: nosh version 1.29



Bloody Thunderbird! Here's that again, I hope without the surprise reformatting after pressing "send" this time:

The nosh package is now up to version 1.29.

* http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/
* https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-07-2015-09.html#The-nosh-Project
* http://jdebp.info./Softwares/nosh/

There's been a lot going on since version 1.28 .

2016 leap second
----------------

The TAI to UTC conversions know about the forthcoming leap second.

service bundles
---------------

As usual, there are several new service bundles, from powerd++ through zfsd to fwknopd. The new fs-servers target allows one to order the initialization of NFS servers before loop-to-self NFS mounts. The new multi-user-pre target is another ordering target that allows services such as the motd file updater to be ordered before TTY login services. The instantiated kdm@tty7 and kdm@ttyv6 services have been replaced with a single kdm service, with a view to dealing with display managers better in the future. I have some plans in this area.

The Samba service names have been fixed. Debian calls them nmb, smb, and winbind; but the Samba doco and most places on the WWW call them nmbd, smbd, and winbindd. The latter names are used in the service bundles package, with aliases pointing to them from the Debian names.

doco
----

The doco has been improved and kept up-to-date in various places, including correct descriptions of set-service-env and print-service-env after one confused user got in touch. PC-BSD is now named as TrueOS where the reference is not historical.

code review
-----------

As a result of some code review that was offered, std::auto_ptr is now gone and a rare memory corruption bug in safe_execvp() has been fixed. Building from scratch when one doesn't have a prior daemontools or freedt toolset installed also no longer hits a bug.

configuration import improvements
---------------------------------

In an effort to clear those last few remaining items on the nosh roadmap, a whole load of configuration import (pppd, sppp, rfcomm_ppp, dhclient, wpa_supplicant, natd, and hostapd) has been consolidated under the umbrella of static-networking. I plan to expand this further in 1.31, given how much is already in 1.30.

Linux kernel VTs
----------------

Management of Linux kernel virtual terminals has some improvements, including setting UTF-8 canonical mode editing and keyboard composition modes, and emitting the control sequences that set up the screen saver.

tai64nlocal changes
-------------------

tai64nlocal has adopted a minor but important change from the BSD and GNU C libraries: before reading the start of a line it flushes its output. This came from trying to use it as a co-process in GNU awk. To prevent deadlocks, GNU awk co-processes need to be in what is effectively line buffered output mode even though their standard inputs and outputs are not terminal devices. This is now the case for tai64nlocal and it can be used to convert TAI64N timestamps as a GNU awk co-process.

FreeBSD and TrueOS packaging
----------------------------

The largest change, however, is in the FreeBSD/TrueOS and OpenBSD packaging.

This is a change that is going to happen in the Debian packaging in a later version. It's partly to simplify the package maintenance, and partly a step towards having OpenBSD packages that work. A single package description is fed to both the new pkg tool that exists on FreeBSD/TrueOS and the old pkg tool that exists on OpenBSD. It's not perfect, as there are things that are easy with the new pkg tool that are hard with the old one; and the OpenBSD packages are still not fully functional. But things are better than they were. The OpenBSD service bundles package now almost properly sets up per-service user accounts and log directories, for example.

=======================================================================
===========  IMPORTANT UPGRADE NOTE FOR FreeBSD/TrueOS: ===============
=======================================================================

An important consequence of the aforementioned is that the semantics of the nosh-bundles package have changed. In earlier versions, the various nosh-run-* packages were how one set services running, except for a small rump set of services that were set up by the nosh-bundles package. This is now no longer the case. The nosh-bundles package now presets and starts no services at all. *All* running of services must be achieved with the nosh-run-* packages or some other sets of scripts and presets.

To this end, there are now two new packages, nosh-run-freebsd-desktop-base and nosh-run-freebsd-server-base. These parallel the already existing nosh-run-trueos-desktop-base and nosh-run-trueos-server-base packages; except that they do not start any of the services that exist in TrueOS but do not exist in FreeBSD, such as the various pc-* services.

You must install, for a working fully-nosh-managed system, exactly one of these four packages. If you are running nosh service management under Mewburn rc, you can of course run as many or as few services under the nosh service manager as you care to switch over from Mewburn rc. But if you are running a fully-nosh-managed system these packages will arrange to run the various fundamentals that one pretty much cannot do without, such as mounting/unmounting volumes, running devd and ldconfig, and initializing the PRNG.



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