i summon one kim

I was surprised to see a new version of the old IceS client — after all, it wasn’t supposedly developed anymore. The reason I’ve packaged it is that it supports streaming of MP3 data. My Audiotron doesn’t handle Ogg Vorbis, which is the only format supported by the new IceS client.

So, to stay current on the version, I’ve upgraded the ices-mp3 package to version 0.4. It adds FLAC support, actually, so that might be a reason to upgrade. Note that it transcodes the data, though, so you’ll need the CPU power to decode FLAC and encode it to MP3 (using LAME).

I recently had some time to go through all the packages I maintain to see what version upgrades would be needed. One long overdue one was www/wml.

It wasn’t an easy upgrade, though. Since the software apparently hasn’t been maintained for a couple of years, it took some work to make it work with the pkgsrc framework. It seems that we expect more recent behaviour from configure scripts than what was available 3-4 years ago.

I got the software to compile, finally. I just hope I didn’t break any functionality. I don’t have a wml-based website to test with anymore.

I have new versions of Firefox running on my computers, and I was busy adding block images rules on each one. I thought this was less than ideal, so I decided to give Privoxy a new try. I saw that a new version is out, so I updated the www/privoxy package as well. Apart from getting more up-to-date filters, there’s a memory leak fix and I could also enable threads for parallel request handling.

Christos implemented statvfs on NetBSD (see his proposal when he was planning the work). I just upgraded to 2.0F and found out that rdist6 (a.k.a. freerdist, whatever you wanna call it) no longer compiles, as it expects to use statfs instead.

I use rdist6 to distribute centrally mastered files around on my systems, so I was too impatient to wait for an “official” fix, so I patched something together in pkgsrc to make rdist6 work again.

I took some time today to release tcsh 6.13, allowing Christos to spend his time on code enhancements rather than the release procedure. The latest beta had already been out for a couple of months, and I had been using it every day for over a month without problems. This combined with no complaints on the beta testers list would seem to indicate it was an excellent release candidate. The previous release was from July of 2002, so it was about time to get a new release out.

Christos has promptly committed new patches into the code repository, so I’m thinking I’ll try to pick another beta 6 months from now and see if I could push the next release out soon after.

I hadn’t kept an eye on new developments in my favorite PostScript converter, mp for a while. Last I remember, I tracked down its home when I added it to pkgsrc as print/mp. It does a great job at printing mail, news and other documents. It also comes with templates to use with various day-runner formats.

A couple of days ago Hubert relayed a message from Rich Burridge, the author of mpdist, that the version in pkgsrc is really old. He had included the URL to its new home, so I spent some time bringing us up to the latest and greatest.

One upgrade down, a gazillion to go…