April has shown some steady progress, but it is slowing due to personal commitments, namely a 2nd part-time job I've taken.Life is rather hectic right now, but I am trying to keep an eye on the mailing list and my email.

The number of target definitions has been reduced. Several non-service definitions were found in the list that is used, and removed. This brings the target number down to ~1,100, so technically I am approaching the 0.1 release candidate. With luck, this will be announced next month.

PHK (a FreeBSD dev) is working on a replacment for the venerable ntpd daemon. The initial work has appeared as ntimed-client. I was able to build, run, and confirm it as working, despite that it is not production ready. A definition is now available.

Lastly, there is a change in strategy. In past months, I have taken the time to ensure that each service definition is tested as best I can, but the shear number of them makes this time prohibitive. The existing run.sh script has proven itself reliable and I think I can safely reduce the amount of testing to random samples and key services. So there will be an increase in the number of definitions made that have the "untested" marker, but the velocity of new definitions will start to increase. Yes, this is why there are suddenly several untested definitions in alphabetical sequence this month. :)

Done:
- - - -
+ Added new definitions: pidentd, xtelld, NetworkManager, ntimed-client, bcron-update, bcron-sched, bcron-spool

+ Added new untested definitions: gdm, avahi-dnsconfd, aiccu, ajaxterm, all-knowing-dns, amavisd-new, amule-daemon, anacron, anon-proxy (aka mix), autolog, arpalert.

+ Fixes: added a missing ./needs to console-kit-daemon.

+ Revised README, SETUP and FEATURE documents.


Contributions:
- - - - - - - -

+ Fixed a bug in the definition for bind, based on a report from [email protected].

The following were implemented suggestions passed by [email protected]:
+ run-user-service.sh: Revamped to spawn fewer subshells.
+ run-user-service.sh: Fixed a bug that would cause the runit variant to crash. + run.sh: Removed two calls to pwd, instead using the shell's environment variable.
+ run.sh: Removed two spawned subshells, replaced with programs

Both contributors are greatly appreciated.


In Progress:
- - - - - - -
+ Held in the patch queue needing work: arpon, krb5kdc, krb5-admin-server, dropbear, cpufreqd, rpc.nfsd, rpc.svcgssd, rpc.gssd, rpc.idmapd, rpc.mountd

+ Conversion of bind to envdir format

+ Additional patches from [email protected] that could not be cleanly integrated. The largest one would remove sed and awk, and use cut, reducing the number of external dependencies.



To Do:
- - - -
+ Finish perp support. Because of how sv/.run/run works, this can easily be done by creating a new run-perp.sh script that supports perp's requirements. This will also involve a use-perp support script.

+ I need to think through a kernel-neutral method of handling driver loading. There are a handful of services that require this to succesfully launch. For example, cpufreqd requires kernel modules to load first, but this is linux-specific. Does FreeBSD have any requirements like this? Or are these services so tied to the kernel platform that it doesn't really matter? (i.e. cpufreqd won't run on FreeBSD so there is no concern about incompatible module loading)

+ Re-think instance support. Attempting to encode a sane default isn't possible because the naming conventions aren't consistent, so the systems administrator needs to intervene. For example, there are a number of services that want to listen to "a specific network adaptor". Compounding this problem is that the device names of network adaptors not only changes between kernels (think FreeBSD device names vs. Linux device names), but also in the same kernel as well (due to systemd's new "network device names").

+ I need to wrestle with the new crop of init-startup-oriented projects, as well as existing ones. I've read over some of anopa and even runit-for-lfs, but I haven't had time to really digest all of the designs, and the init for s6 hasn't even been released - yet. While supervision-scripts is not meant to provide startup/shutdown support, it is meant to wedge into these environments and work within them, so having a passing knowledge of them is essential. I've also wanted to interject a few thoughts and notes on "towards a universal startup/shutdown".

+ Everything else from last month.

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