With the latest edition of MirOS #10-current’s snapshot (read the announcement for more details), we have trumped OpenBSD once more. While being dual-arch is nothing new (to them), and being runnable as Live-HDD, Live-CF-Card, etc. is nothing new (to us), we haven’t yet had a dual-arch Live-CD/DVD (or HDD or CF/SD/MMC/… Card or USB stick) yet. Well, only one of the two architectures has Live CD capability, but we neither have baselive image capability for sparc yet (though that would be possible, even if somewhat kludgy) nor would it have fit on the ISO 9660 image within the boundaries of a CD-R. And DVDs don’t match well with SPARCstation 20s ☻

Coming to that, I recently recherched if gcc 3.4.6, which we currently use as system compiler, can be used to build gcc 4.3 (with special care on the Ada part). Looks like you can even use gcc 2.95 for that, lucky us. This means I should somehow discover the Ada patch for gdb 6.3, which — again, luckily — we use, and apply it. I had talked with Benny about the compiler issue… originally I wanted to strip down the system compiler to the bare minimum once a more recent gcc (and possibly, LLVM, SUNWcc, pcc, etc.) are in ports and usable, but with the proposals to rewrite gcc in dreaded C++, C++ API issues, licencing issues, Ada bootstrapping, etc. we will probably continue to require GNU make for building the base compiler (the bad part) and be able to announce we’re good for developing (the good part of keeping the full-featured gcc near base). Just the Java™ part will not be re-enabled in near future, as it isn’t used for bootstrapping Iced Tea anyway. (It can be used for simple things though.)

With all the friendly fire, OpenBSD bashing, etc. aside, I would like to use this place to thank a few OpenBSD developers for helping me out with a bug in mksh as well as the issue with sshd(8) on sparc (and probably i386 even if it didn’t show up) I had (which even was my own fault). While you guys still don’t have an mksh port in your tree, some of you are really helpful (also hi Miod) sometimes, and I hope we can drink a few beer together at the next FOSDEM etc. and FrOSCon of course. (Which I hope we will also be able to use to discuss the state of our X11 tree.) To Linus: while OpenBSD developers may be masturbating monkeys, at least they’re able to design stable APIs, drink beer, and use sane version control systems with central quality control while being annoyed by humppa.

The usual unrelated news: Basel, ich komme! Schon mal GRÜẞE im Voraus an die Schweizer, die dies lesen.

mksh side notes: some older versions of SunC 5.9 fail on ({ stuff in acomp, use env HAVE_EXPSTMT=0 to build then. nwcc also has issues.

MirBSD side notes: We build for V8 CPUs on sparc, but still only V7 are emulated by tme. And while V9 CPUs in V8+ mode shouldn’t be a problem, there’s no interest from the OpenBSD camp to run the sparc (not sparc64) port on sun4u or even sun4v machines, so no fast build machines yet… *snief*