I keep a copy of the FreeBSD source and ports repository locally on disk so its possible for me to work offline and still be able to review the revision history of a file or views diffs. I have been running csup from the root crontab at night to keep my local copy fairly up to date. However, I rewrote the script to be a job that is executed by periodic and then have the output of csup included with the daily run output emails I get each morning so I can quickly see the changes to the ports tree.…

Today marks my 1 year anniversary as a FreeBSD developer. I opened my first Problem Report in 2006 and after roughly three years of hacking on the ports system, wxs@ offered to mentor me and on March 11th, 2009 I received an email saying that the port-mgr@ team approved his request for a commit bit for me. I happened to be on vacation in Mexico when I got the email, and just like that a good day turned even better.…

Thanks to a generous donation by Nathan Whitehorn, a Sun SunFire v210 is sitting on the floor of my office waiting to have FreeBSD installed on it. Since this is the fastest sparc64 machine we have, Mark Linimon and I are planning on using it as a package building machine. However, if there is any other developer who would like to use it as a reference platform, please get in touch with me and I will set you up with access.…