← Feed

Posts

• Post #4201036

  Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing^W^Worder a few tonnes of timber that needs transporting to the back garden. We're currently experiencing a heatwave in the UK. I'm sure many of you would laugh at the "that sounds like a normal Tuesday to me" temperatures, but I am definitely not built for it. I sweat when I go running in minus celsius conditions. (If you do not support Net Zero, or are a climate change denier, then you're an idiot an...

• Post #4201035

  A hydration break 2 minutes after a lengthy stoppage where all the players had a drink. America, you absolute joke.

• Post #4201034

  First half of new shed floor built. Starting to regret not buying a first fix nail gun, hammering 100mm nails by hand isn't much fun, especially at the start when there's nothing to drive against. #woodworking #diy

• Post #4201033

  Almost watertight now, will be a lot less stressful once the rubber roof is on and given a chance to relax a bit, don't want wet OSB! Hopefully the rain will hold off for another couple of days. Managed to fit most of the roof from inside, up a step ladder. Trying to avoid working from heights as much as possible. Good fun though, and all done with basically a hammer, impact driver, and a circular saw. The tennis elbow is perhaps telling me that a nail gun might be worth it next time....

• Post #4201032

  Early next week I'll be updating the SmartOS trunk package sets to be built on 20250612, as per announcement to smartos-discuss: https://smartos.topicbox.com/groups/smartos-discuss/T4d2e6741534082c1-M55c62305fa736b387d1fd04f/bumping-the-minimum-pi-requirement-for-trunk-packages This also migrates them over to bob, and an improved build host configuration that will result in much faster and more reliable builds. No need to do anything other than ensure you're running at least 2...

• Post #3987107

  Decided to dig into what I initially suspected was hardware issues on a host performing "pkgin upgrade" very slowly. No, turns out it's legitimate requests hammering the disks, with pkg_delete performing an MD5 check on every file it is about to forcibly remove anyway. Eventually it'd be nice to add a flag for this, but for now I've removed it for my builds: https://github.com/TritonDataCenter/pkgsrc/commit/87055e3a0c53f409a0cf1efa887a3cb96afe0757 This will be in macOS...

• Post #3802703

  Fable dishing out the compliments that those of us running these systems for decades have always known and advocated for. "That DTrace trace was the whole game, by the way — owner identity from mdb plus lock/unlock pairing found one orphaned acquisition in 55k events and its exact stack. Nice platform to debug on." #illumos #dtrace #smartos

• Post #2357329

  Probably my favourite Half Marathon so far, and all because I finally paced it properly with a decent negative split! Run Gatwick was pretty cool. #running

• Post #2333182

  I have many, many issues with #IPv6, but at least there was always the confidence that the address space was never going to run out, because nobody would be dumb enough to repeat the mistakes learned from IPv4 allocation, right? https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET6-2630-2 Oh.

• Post #2147604

  pkgin 25.10.0 released. Fixes an issue where changes to the pkgdb outside of pkgin operations (e.g. manually running pkg_add) could affect subsequent upgrades and lose autoremove information. I'll get this into the SmartOS and macOS trunk builds over the weekend. #pkgin #pkgsrc

• Post #2120862

  Bob now automatically reports on, and links to, commits made to packages that fail to build since the previous attempt. https://reports.pkgci.org/Darwin/14.5/arm64/20260413T215911Z/report.html This is really helpful for showing regressions, and I hope will be useful to developers who want to check whether their updates caused problems on platforms they do not have access to. #pkgsrc #bob

• Post #2120861

  I'm considering bumping the macOS requirements for my binary package repository available at https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/install-on-macos/ again. There's already a bunch of packages missing because they have newer C++ requirements than Xcode 15.4 supports. What OS are folks running? #pkgsrc #macos

• Post #2120860

  Oh FFS Mastodon. Poll completely wiped out because I made a tiny edit to the text portion of the post. That's not only completely and utterly useless, there was absolutely no warning it was going to happen, and now I can't even see what the previous results were. #mastodon

• Post #2120859

  First time parkwalking at parkrun today (screw you Nike!), as I have the Reverse London Marathon at midnight. Beautiful bluebells still out around Priory Park. #parkrun

• Post #2120858

  Very disappointed to see Anthropic have dropped support for alternative platforms. I spent a lot of time using claude on SmartOS helping to do a lot of the grunt work debugging thorny issues. Yet another reason why I cannot wait for viable local LLMs. #llm #claude #illumos

• Post #2120857

  I wrote up a quick howto for getting bob up and running on OmniOS for someone, but figured it might be useful for others who want to play too. https://gist.github.com/jperkin/72075147e330b35eb4869898207e828e Quite a minimal, stripped-back config, so doesn't have dynamic jobs configured. Easy to add though if you want to push your system to the max. #pkgsrc #illumos #omnios

• Post #1641781

  If you've ever built a non-trivial amount of software on Solaris / illumos you've almost certainly hit math function errors like this: error: call of overloaded 'log(int)' is ambiguous I got fed up of adding patches to pkgsrc, and I believe I have a patch that fixes this once and for all. https://www.illumos.org/issues/15209#note-4 I'd appreciate wider testing. I've already tested it in a full ~28,000 package bulk build, but changes like this terrify me, and you can&#...

• Post #1111181

  Upgraded to Ghostty 1.3.0, some nice improvements but didn't fix my biggest bug-bear, so have ended up raising a discussion about it. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/11298 Don't know if anyone else notices the same. Feels like such an obvious bug it makes me nervous that I'm doing something fundamentally wrong.

• Post #1111180

  I realise the "blazing fast" meme is getting very old at this point, but it's genuinely so much fun making Rust code even faster. You often end up with simpler, cleaner, more idiomatic code too. The original C pbulk presolve code takes: real 0m35.686s user 0m35.229s sys 0m0.163s Bob was already much faster: real 0m2.115s user 0m1.677s sys 0m0.174s But the new code is ridiculously (some might say blazing) fast: real 0m0.506s user 0m0.396s...

• Post #1111179

  Are you LLM curious, but don't feel you are getting the end results that other people claim? Try starting your initial prompt with two simple words: "Let's discuss ..." My experience is that it produces far better results. Clarify up-front what the goals are, deep dive into any technical aspects that affect codegen, and reason through any tradeoffs. Basically the same as if you were asking a real person to do work for you.

• Post #1111178

  bob v0.9.0 now available! https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2026/03/25/msg042765.html I'm really proud of this one. Dynamic MAKE_JOBS and WRKOBJDIR in particular will save me a significant amount of time, and ensure my builds automatically stay optimal. As always please let me know if you run into any issues or have suggestions for the next release. #pkgsrc #bob #rustlang

• Post #1111177

  Yesterday we won parkrun bingo. It was my 100th, Natasha's 50th, also her 25th volunteer, and she brought along a friend who ran her 1st. Oh and it was her birthday. #parkrun #running

• Post #1111175

  First full pkgsrc build completed with bob using the new publishing feature. All looking good! https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-bulk/2026/04/02/msg028397.html #pkgsrc #bob

• Post #1111174

  bob v0.99.x now available, as well as a wip/bob package for testing. These are release candidates in preparation for v1.0 which will be considered fully production ready. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, then now is the time to raise them as once v1.0 lands I will not be allowing any incompatible changes. https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2026/04/08/msg042818.html Happy building! #pkgsrc #bob

• Post #1111173

  gnulib adding bogus "Solaris 12" code that breaks illumos, which gets embedded into loads of upstream releases, which all require manual patching. Happy Thursday. Well, at least I get to fully exercise bob development sandboxes... #pkgsrc #illumos #solaris

• Post #1111172

  Currently testing a couple of Claude-inspired improvements to bmake and mksh, providing a decent speedup on macOS. https://github.com/TritonDataCenter/pkgsrc/commit/2fb7d262707d40aa1db31599eaf9c0b952d15bd4 https://github.com/TritonDataCenter/pkgsrc/commit/3bd175884bb65350b24f442f8e3e9fcd45e695ce Saw a 30% improvement spawning commands in a tight loop when using posix_spawn(), and avoids creating temporary /tmp/make* files for the vast majority of make commands. Both of which also help to red...

• Post #1111171

  In other news, boy am I glad I do not have to write python for a living. https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-changes/2026/04/10/msg343920.html Single missing comma causing completely different behaviour.

• Post #1111170

  Volunteered to be the 26 minute pacer at parkrun this morning. Mission accomplished. Also enjoyed an absolutely stunning long run home along the North Downs Way, bluebells for miles. #parkrun #running

• Post #933018

  Now that I've switched the daily SmartOS pkgsrc bulk builds fully over to bob, I figured it might be interesting to also publish the exact config file I'm using to do so. https://github.com/jperkin/bob/blob/main/examples/smartos-trunk.lua No more complicated and fragile sandbox scripts, patches to pbulk, convoluted build infrastructure, etc. Just a single binary installed using cargo, and a single configuration file. Next release will be 0.99.0, we're almost ready for...