webrev almost ported to Mercurial on FreeBSD

More good news on the Mercurial on FreeBSD front.

I’ve almost finished porting “webrev” from Solaris to work on FreeBSD, using “shells/mksh”. The “webrev” script is several hundred lines of ksh shell code, so I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to rewrite the lot of it in /bin/sh. It’s fairly trivial to install shells/mksh on FreeBSD, and this makes it easier to keep pulling changes from OpenSolaris when “webrev” itself is updated.

A trivial webrev output example for a FreeBSD src/ commit is now online at:

http://people.freebsd.org/~keramida/webrev/loader-prompt/

Almost everything seems to work in the generated pages, except the bottom frame in the “Frames” diff review page.

I haven’t found out yet why this works on Solaris with /usr/bin/ksh but it fails with /usr/local/bin/mksh on FreeBSD, but it’s amazing how far things have gone already with pretty minimal “webrev.sh” and “wdiff.pl” changes :-)

Flash Support for BSD, step #1

Press Release Newswire hosts a press release of iXsystems about the PC-BSD system which is absolutely marvellous news.

The next version of PC-BSD will include a Flash-enabled web browser by default.

This is a great step forward, and very good news for all BSD systems. The Linux compatibility layer of FreeBSD will be used for the initial PC-BSD Flash support, but now that the ball is rolling there may also be hope for a full, native port of Flash on the BSD systems too. Kudos to iXsystems, for playing such an important role in this :-)