mksh

I was planning to do an mksh R56 release and then a full MirBSD snapshot (i386, sparc — due to actual user request — and possibly even a Live CD or at least baselive) but this got stones on my way. I’m not quite finished with what I originally had ... [More] planned for R56 (basically, the Debian postfix package’s maintainer scripts started using character classes in bracket expressions, and this required not only careful planning and design but also quite some rewriting and thinking, fixing other bugs, reading the specs, and considering EBCDIC) which led to me asking the EBCDIC porter some things again, which led to trying to merge his outstanding patches and make R56 the Mainframe Korn Shell release (also mksh ;-) but we’re not quite there yet. The MirBSD snapshot was planned to be started from CVS as of Beltane (Walpurgis) 2017 except the latest and greatest mksh is also kinda a requirement, and CVE fixes are tricking in, to add insult to injury for stuff I had just updated. I’d also love to have the latest sendmail and lynx in it but that’ll have to wait. I’ll also do a new CVS snapshot tarball at the same time, so keep your eyes open for the new rolling MirBSD snapshot.(read more…) [Less]

The MirBSD Korn Shell R52c was published today as bugfix-accumulating release of low upto medium importance. Thanks to everyone who helped squashing all those bugs; this includes our bug reporters who always include reproducer testcases; you’re ... [More] wonderful! MirCPIO was also resynchronised from OpenBSD, to address the CVE-2015-{1193,1194} test cases, after a downstream (wow there are so many?) reminded us of it; thanks!This is mostly to prevent extracting ../foo – either directly or from a symlink(7) – from actually ending up being placed in the parent directory. As such the severity is medium-high. And it has a page now – initially just a landing page / stub; will be fleshed out later. Uploads for both should make their way into Debian very soon (these are the packages mksh and pax). Uploading backports for mksh (jessie and wheezy-sloppy) have been requested by several users, but none of the four(?) DDs asked about sponsoring them even answered at all, and the regular (current) sponsors don’t have experience with bpo, so… SOL ☹ I’ve also tweaked a bug in sed(1), in MirBSD. Unfortunately, this means it now comes with the GNUism -i too: don’t use it, use ed(1) (much nicer anyway) or perlrun(1) -p/-n… Finally, our PDF manpages now use the PA4 paper size instead of DIN ISO A4, meaning they can be printed without cropping or scaling on both A4 and US-american “letter” paper. And a Бодун from the last announcement: we now use Gentium and Inconsolata as body text and monospace fonts, respectively. (And à propos, the website ought to be more legible due to text justification and better line spacing now.) I managed to hack this up in GNU groff and Ghostscript, thankfully. (LaTeX too) Currently there are PDF manpages for joe (jupp), mksh, and cpio/pax/tar. And we had Grünkohl today! Also, new console-setup package in the “WTF” APT repository since upstream managed to do actual work on it (even fixed some bugs). Read its feed if interested, as its news will not be repeated here usually. (That means, subscribe as there won’t be many future reminders in this place.) The netboot.me service appears to be gone. I’ll not remove our images, but if someone knows what became of it drop us a message (IRC or mailing list will work just fine). PS: This was originally written on 20160304 but opax refused to be merged in time… Happy Birthday, gecko2! In the meantime, the Street Food festival weekend provided wonderful food at BaseCamp, and headache prevented this from being finished on the fifth. Update 06.03.2016: The pax changes were too intrusive, so I decided to only backport the fixes OpenBSD did (both those they mentioned and those silently included), well, the applicable parts of them, anyway, instead. There will be a MirCPIO release completely rebased later after all changes are merged and, more importantly, tested. Another release although not set for immediate future should bring a more sensible (and mksh-like) buildsystem for improved portability (and thus some more changes we had to exclude at first). I’ve also cloned the halfwidth part of the FixedMisc [MirOS] font as FixedMiscHW for use with Qt5 applications, xfonts-base in the “WTF” APT repo. (Debian #809979) tl;dr: mksh R52c (bugfix-only, low-medium); mircpio 20160306 (security backport; high) with future complete rebase (medium) upstream and in Debian. No mksh backports due to lacking a bpo capable sponsor. New console-setup in “WTF” APT repo, and mksh there as usual. xfonts-base too. netboot.me gone? [Less]