FreeBSD Project Quarterly Status Report - Second Quarter 2020
Introduction
This report will be covering FreeBSD related projects between April and
June, and covers a diverse set of topics ranging from kernel updates
over userland and ports, as well to third-party work.
Some hilights picked with the roll of a d100 include, but are not
limited to, the ability to forcibly unmounting UFS when the underlying
media becomes inaccessible, added preliminary support for Bluetooth Low
Energy, a introduction to the FreeBSD Office Hours, and a repository of
software collections called potluck to be installed with the pot
utility, as well as many many more things.
As a little treat, readers can also get a rare report from the
quarterly team.
Finally, on behalf of the quarterly team, I would like to extend my
deepest appreciation and thank you to salvadore@, who decided to take
down his shingle. His contributions not just the quarterly reports
themselves, but also the surrounding tooling to many-fold ease the
work, are immeassurable.
We hope you find the report as interesting as we have,
Daniel Ebdrup Jensen (debdrup@), on behalf of the quarterly team.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
* FreeBSD Foundation
* FreeBSD Core Team
* FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
* Cluster Administration Team
* Continuous Integration
* Ports Collection
* FreeBSD Office Hours
* Quarterly Status Reports Team
Projects
* FreeBSD on Microsoft HyperV and Azure
* Git Migration Working Group
* Lua Usage in FreeBSD
* Linux compatibility layer update
* NFS over TLS implementation
Kernel
* SoC audio framework and more audio drivers
* bhyve - NVMe emulation improvements
* Bluetooth Support
* DRM Drivers Update
* DTS Update
* ENA FreeBSD Driver Update
* Forcible Unmount of UFS/FFS Filesystems on Disk Failure
* i.MX 8M support
* Intel wireless and 11ac update
* amd64 5-Level Paging Structures support
* Not-transparent superpages
* NXP ARM64 SoC support
* amd64 pmap Fine-grained pv lists locking
* Lockless routing lookups and scalable multipath
* ZSTD Compression in ZFS
* CheriBSD 2020 Q2
Architectures
* Continuous Integration on !x86
* FreeBSD/RISC-V Project
Userland Programs
* Import of new implementation of bc and dc
* Binutils Retirement
* Run-Time Dynamic Linker improvements
* VHDX support in mkimg(1)
Ports
* Bastille
* KDE on FreeBSD
* Haskell on FreeBSD
* rtsx - Porting driver for Realtek SD card reader from OpenBSD
* Valgrind updates
Documentation
* FreeBSD Translations on Weblate
Miscellaneous
* FreshPorts
* PCI passthrough with bhyve on Intel and for OpenBSD guests
* SageMath
Third-Party Projects
* chaifi - a tool to simplify joining public WiFi networks
* MixerTUI
* Potluck - Flavour & Image Repository for pot
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Team Reports
Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in
the Administration Page.
FreeBSD Foundation
Contact: Deb Goodkin <
deb@FreeBSDFoundation.org>
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated
to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community
worldwide. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations and is
used to fund and manage software development projects, conferences and
developer summits, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD contributors.
The Foundation purchases and supports hardware to improve and maintain
FreeBSD infrastructure and provides resources to improve security,
quality assurance, and release engineering efforts; publishes marketing
material to promote, educate, and advocate for the FreeBSD Project;
facilitates collaboration between commercial vendors and FreeBSD
developers; and finally, represents the FreeBSD Project in executing
contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that
require a recognized legal entity.
Here are some highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:
COVID-19 Impact to the Foundation
Like other organizations, we put policies in place for all of our staff
members to work from home. We also put a temporary ban on travel for
staff members. We are continuing our work supporting the community and
Project, but some of our work and responses may be delayed because of
changes in some of our priorities and the impact of limited childcare
for a few of our staff members.
Partnerships and Commercial User Support
We help facilitate collaboration between commercial users and FreeBSD
developers. We also meet with companies to discuss their needs and
bring that information back to the Project. Not surprisingly, the stay
at home orders, combined with our company ban on travel during Q2 made
in-person meetings non-existent. However, the team was able to continue
meeting with our partners and commercial users virtually. These
meetings help us understand some of the applications where FreeBSD is
used.
Fundraising Efforts
Last quarter we raised $268,400! Thank you to the individuals and
organizations that stepped in to help fund our efforts. We'd like to
thank Netflix, employees of Nginx, Beckhoff Automation, and Mozilla
Foundation for their large contributions last quarter, which helped
bring our 2020 fundraising effort to $339k. We hope other organizations
will follow their lead and give back to help us continue supporting
FreeBSD.
These are trying times, and we deeply appreciate every donation that
has come in from $5 to $150,000. We're still here giving 110% to
supporting FreeBSD!
We are 100% funded by donations, and those funds go towards software
development work to improve FreeBSD, FreeBSD advocacy around the world,
keeping FreeBSD secure, continuous integration improvements, sponsoring
BSD-related and computing conferences (even the virtual events!), legal
support for the Project, and many other areas.
Please consider making a donation to help us continue and increase our
support for FreeBSD.
We also have the Partnership Program, to provide more benefits for our
larger commercial donors. Find out more information about the
partnership program and share with your companies!
OS Improvements
A number of FreeBSD Foundation grant recipients started, continued
working on, or completed projects during the second quarter. These
include:
* WiFi improvements
* Linuxulator application compatibility
* DRM / Graphics driver updates
* Zstd compression for OpenZFS
* Online RAID-Z expansion
* if_bridge performance improvements
You can find more details about most of these projects in other
quarterly reports.
Staff members also worked on a number of larger projects, including:
* Run-Time Dynamic Linker (rtld) improvements
* Improved FreeBSD support on Microsoft HyperV and Azure
* Fine-grained locking for amd64 pmap
* 5-level paging structures for amd64
* Non-transparent superpages
* Migration to a Git repository
* Tool chain modernization
Many of these projects also have detailed entries in other quarterly
report entries.
Staff members also put in significant effort in many ways other than
larger, individual projects. These include assisting with code reviews,
bug report triage, security report triage and advisory handling,
addressing syzkaller reports, and ongoing maintenance and bug fixes in
functional areas such as the tool chain, developer tools, virtual
memory kernel subsystem, low-level x86 infrastructure, sockets and
protocols, and others.
University of Waterloo Co-op
Foundation co-op students Colin, Tiger, and Yang completed their winter
2020 work term during the second quarter, and continued on with the
next school term in their respective programs. Although COVID-19
presented a unique challenge and prompted an abrupt transition to
remote work just over half way through the term, all three learned a
lot and provided positive contributions to the FreeBSD Project and to
the Foundation.
A few projects that were in progress or completed during the work term
were committed to the FreeBSD tree in the second quarter.
Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance
The Foundation provides a full-time staff member who is working on
improving continuous integration, automated testing, and overall
quality assurance efforts for the FreeBSD project.
During the second quarter of 2020, Foundation staff continued improving
the Project's CI infrastructure, monitoring regressions and working
with contributors to fix the failing build and test cases. The setting
up of VM host for CI jobs and staging environment is in progress. We
are also working with other teams in the Project for their testing
needs. For example, we added jobs for running full tests on non-x86
architectures. We are also working with many external projects and
companies to improve their support of FreeBSD.
See the FreeBSD CI section of this report for completed work items and
detailed information.
Supporting FreeBSD Infrastructure
The Foundation provides hardware and support to improve FreeBSD
infrastructure. Last quarter, we continued supporting FreeBSD hardware
located around the world. We started working on getting the new NYI
Chicago colocation facility prepared for some of the new FreeBSD
hardware we are planning on purchasing. NYI generously provides this
for free to the Project.
FreeBSD Advocacy and Education
A large part of our efforts are dedicated to advocating for the
Project. This includes promoting work being done by others with
FreeBSD; producing advocacy literature to teach people about FreeBSD
and help make the path to starting using FreeBSD or contributing to the
Project easier; and attending and getting other FreeBSD contributors to
volunteer to run FreeBSD events, staff FreeBSD tables, and give FreeBSD
presentations.
The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits
around the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or
technology events geared towards underrepresented groups. We support
the FreeBSD-focused events to help provide a venue for sharing
knowledge, to work together on projects, and to facilitate
collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps
provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to
promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD
in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the
Project. As is the case for most of us in this industry, COVID-19 has
put our in-person events on hold. In addition to attending virtual
events, we are continually working on new training initiatives and
updating our selection of how-to guides to facilitate getting more
folks to try out FreeBSD.
Check out some of the advocacy and education work we did last quarter:
* Silver sponsor of BSDCan 2020. The event was held virtually, June
2-6, 2020
* Community Sponsor of Rootconf 2020. The event was held virtually,
June 19-20, 2020
* Annual FreeBSD Day, June 19. This year's celebration was postponed
in support of Juneteeth. However the activities surrounding FreeBSD
Day have been transformed into an ongoing series of online
sessions. See FreeBSD Fridays below for more information.
* Presented 27 Years of FreeBSD and Why You Should Get Involved as
part of a Linux Professional Institute series of webinars on June
24, 2020.
* Attended and presented at the virtual Open Source Summit 2020.
* Announced FreeBSD Fridays: A series of 101 classes designed to get
you started with FreeBSD. Find out more in the announcement
* Participated as an Admin for Google Summer of Code 2020
* Participated in the new FreeBSD Office Hours series including
holding our own Foundation led office hours. Videos from the one
hour sessions can be found on the Project's YouTube Channel. You
can watch ours here.
In addition to the information found in the Development Projects update
section of this report, take a minute to check out the latest update
blogs:
* 5x if_bridge Performance Improvement
* My Experience as a FreeBSD Foundation Co-Op Student
Keep up to date with our latest work in our Bi-Monthly newsletters.
Mellanox provided an update on how and why they use FreeBSD in our
latest Contributor Case Study.
We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the
professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. As we mentioned previously,
the FreeBSD Journal is now a free publication. Find out more and access
the latest issues on the Journal site.
You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events.
We have continued our work with a new website developer to help us
improve our website. Work is nearly complete to make it easier for
community members to find information more easily and to make the site
more efficient. We look forward to unveiling the refreshed site in Q3.
Foundation Board Meeting
Our annual board meeting was held on Tuesday June 2, 2020. We normally
hold this meeting the Tuesday before BSDCan, in Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada, but with the company travel ban, and the conference going
virtual, our meeting went virtual for the first time. The purpose of
the annual board meeting is to hold our board director and officer
elections, review work accomplished over the past year, and put
together strategic goals for the upcoming 12 months.
The board generally has two all-day board meetings each year, this one,
and a more informal one in January, typically held in Berkeley. Both
meetings allow us to connect, reevaluate and discuss new ideas, while
assessing what we should do to help the Project.
Some of our longer-term goals include Growing User and Developer
Communities, Developing Training and OS Course Content, Improving
desktop/laptop experience, Promoting FreeBSD (as you can see in all the
advocacy work listed above), and Improving Testing Capabilities.
Results of the director and officer elections were:
* Justin Gibbs (President)
* Benedict Reuschling (Vice President)
* Kirk McKusick (Treasurer)
* Philip Paeps (Secretary)
* Deb Goodkin (Assistant Secretary)
* Robert Watson (Director)
* Hiroki Sato (Director)
* George Neville-Neil (Director)
Find out more about the FreeBSD Foundation Board of Directors on our
website.
Legal/FreeBSD IP
The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our
responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the
core team to investigate questions that arise.
Go to the FreeBSD Foundation's web site to find out how we support
FreeBSD and how we can help you!
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Core Team
Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <
core@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.
The Core Team held 10 meetings during the second quarter of 2020,
including a 2020-05-21 joint meeting with members of the FreeBSD
Foundation. Here are some highlights from that meeting:
* Deb requested guidance on how the Foundation can support the
community. Core and Foundation members believe that more developer
support is necessary to fill gaps in areas where commercial
customers do not provide backing. The clearest example of such a
gap is the desktop experience, including graphics and wireless
support. What makes this request different from past requests is
that rather than support for one-time projects, ongoing positions
are necessary for a consistently high-quality desktop experience.
"FreeBSD not being able to run on your laptop is the first step to
irrelevance." Ed Maste
* Both teams discussed topics for upcoming sessions of FreeBSD Office
Hours, informal FreeBSD video conferences that anyone can attend.
Everyone agreed that the Office Hours have been a useful way for
different parts of the Project to engage with each other and with
the wider community. Kudos to Allan Jude for initiating the Office
Hours and for everyone who has helped make them a success by
hosting or attending sessions.
* Both teams agreed that they should meet once per quarter.
The second annual community survey closed on 2020-06-16. The purpose of
the survey is to collect data from the public to help guide the
Project's efforts and priorities. As an example, last year's survey
results helped initiate the Project's conversion to Git. Thank you to
all who took the time to respond. The results will be released soon.
The Core-initiated Git Working Group continued to make progress, but
there are still some remaining issues to be worked out with the
translation from Subversion. Hopefully the new Git src repository will
be ready for use this summer. A beta version has been published for
people to test and a preliminary version of a Using Git for FreeBSD
Development primer will soon be ready to share. Core, the Git Working
Group, and Release Engineering are working towards the goal of
releasing 12.2 from the new Git repository.
Following the results of a Core-initiated developer survey, The FreeBSD
Project has adopted a new LLVM-derived [code of
conduct](
https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code-of-conduct.html).
The eleventh FreeBSD Core Team was elected by active developers. From a
pool of 23, the 9 successful candidates for core.11 are:
* Sean Chittenden (seanc, incumbent)
* Baptiste Daroussin (bapt)
* Kyle Evans (kevans)
* Mark Johnston (markj)
* Scott Long (scottl)
* Warner Losh (imp, incumbent)
* Ed Maste (emaste)
* George V. Neville-Neil (gnn)
* Hiroki Sato (hrs, incumbent)
A new Core Team secretary, Muhammad Moinur Rahman (bofh), was
unanimously approved by core.11. The outgoing core team met three times
with the new core team to help with the transition. Core.10 wishes
core.11 a successful term.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
Links
FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE announcement
URL:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.4R/announce.html
FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE schedule
URL:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.4R/schedule.html
FreeBSD development snapshots
URL:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/
Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team <
re@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and
publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD,
announcing code slushes, and maintaining the respective branches, among
other things.
During the second quarter of 2020, the Release Engineering Team started
work on the 11.4-RELEASE cycle, the fifth release from the stable/11
branch. The release cycle went quite smoothly, with both BETA3 and RC3
removed from the schedule. This allowed the final release to occur one
week earlier than originally scheduled, which was announced June 16.
FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE is expected to be the final 11.x release.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team would like to thank everyone
involved in this cycle for their hard work.
Additionally throughout the quarter, several development snapshots
builds were released for the head, stable/12, and stable/11 branches.
Much of this work was sponsored by Rubicon Communications, LLC
(netgate.com) and the FreeBSD Foundation.
__________________________________________________________________
Cluster Administration Team
Links
Cluster Administration Team members
URL:
https://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-clusteradm
Contact: Cluster Administration Team <
clusteradm@FreeBSD.org>
The FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team consists of the people
responsible for administering the machines that the Project relies on
for its distributed work and communications to be synchronised. In this
quarter, the team has worked on the following:
* Upgrade all x86 ref- and universe-machines
* Setup Amsterdam (PKT) mirror
* Solve hardware issue for bugzilla and svnweb backend
* Setup public beta git server
* Decommission CyberOne Data (CYB) mirror
* Ongoing systems administration work:
+ Accounts management for committers.
+ Backups of critical infrastructure.
+ Keeping up with security updates in 3rd party software.
Work in progress:
* Setup Malaysia (KUL) mirror
* Setup Brazil (BRA) mirror
* Review the service jails and service administrators operation.
* Infrastructure of building aarch64 and powerpc64 packages
+ NVME issues on PowerPC64 Power9 blocking dual socket machine
from being used as pkg builder.
+ Drive upgrade test for pkg builders (SSDs) courtesy of the
FreeBSD Foundation.
+ Boot issues with Aarch64 reference machines.
* New NYI.net sponsored colocation space in Chicago-land area.
* Work with git working group
* Check new hardware requirement from other teams
* Searching for more providers that can fit the requirements for a
generic mirrored layout or a tiny mirror
__________________________________________________________________
Continuous Integration
Links
FreeBSD Jenkins Instance
URL:
https://ci.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD Hardware Testing Lab
URL:
https://ci.FreeBSD.org/hwlab
FreeBSD CI artifact archive
URL:
https://artifact.ci.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD CI weekly report
URL:
https://hackmd.io/@FreeBSD-CI
FreeBSD Jenkins wiki
URL:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Jenkins
Hosted CI wiki
URL:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/HostedCI
3rd Party Software CI
URL:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/3rdPartySoftwareCI
Tickets related to freebsd-testing@
URL:
https://preview.tinyurl.com/y9maauwg
FreeBSD CI Repository
URL:
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ci
Contact: Jenkins Admin <
jenkins-admin@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Li-Wen Hsu <
lwhsu@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: freebsd-testing Mailing List
Contact: IRC #freebsd-ci channel on EFNet
The FreeBSD CI team maintains the continuous integration system for the
FreeBSD project. The CI system firstly checks the committed changes can
be successfully built, then performs various tests and analysis over
the newly built results. The artifacts from the build jobs are archived
in the artifact server for further testing and debugging needs. The CI
team members examine the failing builds and unstable tests and work
with the experts in that area to fix the codes or adjust test
infrastructure. The details of these efforts are available in the
weekly CI reports.
During the second quarter of 2020, we continue working with the
contributors and developers in the project for their testing needs and
also keep working with external projects and companies to improve their
support of FreeBSD.
Important changes:
* All -test jobs will run tests under /usr/tests, previously only x86
architectures doing this. See the Continuous Integration on !x86
section in this report for more information.
* Compression algorithm of disk images on the artifact server has
been changed to zstd to speed up compression and decompression.
* The build and test results will be sent to the dev-ci mailing list
soon. Feedback and help with analysis is very appreciated!
New jobs added:
*
https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-armv7-test/
*
https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-aarch64-test/
*
https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-mips64-test/
*
https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-powerpc64-test/
Work in progress:
* Collecting and sorting CI tasks and ideas here
* Testing and merging pull requests in the the FreeBSD-ci repo
* Setting up a builder dedicated to run jobs using provisioned VMs.
* Setting up the CI stage environment and putting the experimental
jobs on it
* Implementing automatic tests on bare metal hardware
* Adding drm ports building tests against -CURRENT
* Planning to run ztest and network stack tests
* Adding external toolchain related jobs
* Improving the hardware lab to be more mature and adding more
hardware
* Helping more 3rd software get CI on FreeBSD through a hosted CI
solution
* Working with hosted CI providers to have better FreeBSD support
Please see freebsd-testing@ related tickets for more WIP information,
and don't hesistate to join the effort!
Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation
__________________________________________________________________
Ports Collection
Links
About FreeBSD Ports
URL:
https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
Contributing to Ports
URL:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing/ports-contributing.html
FreeBSD Ports Monitoring
URL:
http://portsmon.freebsd.org/index.html
Ports Management Team
URL:
https://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/index.html
Contact: Renι Ladan <
portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <
portmgr@FreeBSD.org>
The Ports Management Team is responsible for overseeing the overall
direction of the Ports Tree, building packages, and personnel matters.
Below is what happened in the last quarter.
There are currently 2,373 open ports PRs of which 526 are unassigned,
for a total of 39,628 ports. In the last quarter there were 10,315
commits to HEAD and 476 to the quarterly branch by respectively 178 and
65 committers. Compared to the quarter before, this means a significant
increase in commits and also a slight decrease in open PRs.
During the last quarter, we welcomed Hiroki Tagato (tagattie@). We said
goodbye to seanc@, zleslie@, gnn@ and salvadore@.
A few default versions got bumped:
* Java (new) at 8
* Lazarus to 2.0.8
It is now possible to write pkg scripts in Lua instead of sh.
They have two advantages over their sh versions:
* they run in a Capsicum sandbox
* they respect rootdir, the directory which pkg will use as the
starting point to install all packages under.
Some user-facing packages were also updated:
* pkg to 1.14.6
* Firefox to 78.0.1
* Thunderbird to 68.10.0
* Chromium to 83.0.4103.116
* Ruby to 2.5.8, 2.6.6, and 2.7.1
* Qt5 to 5.14.2
During the last quarter, antoine@ ran 55 exp-runs to test port version
updates, make liblzma use libmd, flavor devel/scons and Lua ports, add
and update library functions in the base system, make malloc.h usable
again, remove as(1) from the base system, and augment sed(1) with -f.
__________________________________________________________________
FreeBSD Office Hours
Links
Office Hours on the FreeBSD Wiki
URL:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/OfficeHours
Poll: What time would you prefer Office Hours be at
URL:
https://forms.gle/3HjjRx9KMcM3SL4H7
live.FreeBSD.org: Aggregation of Live streams
URL:
https://live.freebsd.org/
Contact: Allan Jude <
allanjude@freebsd.org>
Starting on the first of April 2020, the FreeBSD project has started
hosting regular video streams to foster greater communication within
the wider FreeBSD community. The first of these sessions took the form
of a public question and answer session, which drew over 60
participants. A second session was held two weeks later at a time more
appropriate for those in Asia, but only drew 20 participants. With the
help of the FreeBSD Foundation, we ran a poll to discover what times
worked best for the greatest number of people.
On May 13th the FreeBSD Foundation hosted a session where the community
could ask questions of or about the foundation. On May 27th many of the
candidates for the new FreeBSD Core Team joined an office hours session
to answer questions from the community. Finally on June 24th another
general question and answer office hours was held.
Each office hours session consists of a video meeting of some FreeBSD
developers or other subject matter experts, live streamed along with an
IRC chat room for viewers to pose questions to the panel. The stream is
recorded and posted to the official FreeBSD youtube channel.
If you would like to host an office hours session, please contact:
* Allan Jude
* Anne Dickison
Sponsor: ScaleEngine Inc. (video streaming)
__________________________________________________________________
Quarterly Status Reports Team
Links
Quarterly status reports
URL:
https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/
Git repository
URL:
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-quarterly
Contact: Quarterly Status Reports <
quarterly@FreBSD.org>
Contact: Daniel Ebdrup Jensen <
debdrup@FreeBSD.org>
The Quarterly Status Reports Team collects and publish the reports that
you are reading right now.
Many improvements have been done recently and thus we believe it is
useful that the Quarterly Status Reports Team submits a report. Not all
the changes below are specific to the last quarter, but we list them
here anyway since we did not write an entry for earlier reports.
* Reports are now built using Makefiles. Among the many advantages,
this allows us to easily sort reports logically. Indeed, starting
with 2019Q4, all reports are sorted logically, while before they
were sorted alphabetically within each category.
* The conversion from markdown to docbook was performed using a
python script, with some known bugs. Salvadore has rewritten the
script using perl fixing most of the bugs. Some features are
missing and many improvements are possible, but the script is very
unlikely to receive any change since it will become obsolete as
soon as the conversion to Hugo/AsciiDoctor is completed.
* Another perl script to ease the preparation of the mail version of
the reports was written.
* One more perl script has been written to allow the quarterly team
to send quarterly calls automatically using a cron job. We used it
this quarter for the first time.
* As you might have noticed, last quarterly calls have been sent to
freebsd-quarterly-calls@: this is a new mailing list to which you
can subscribe to receive calls for quarterly reports. Please note
this is a moderated list, with very low traffic and a high signal
to noise ratio.
* If you read carefully the last quarterly calls, you should have
noticed that we now ask you to send reports to
quarterly-submissions@ instead of quarterly@. This was done to help
the quarterly team distinguishing internal discussions from
submissions. Please keep in mind however that the quarterly team
prefers receiving pull requests, as they ease the administrative
work.
We would like to thank philip@, from the postmaster team, for having
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