I spent the night fixing a few things here and there for Gentoo/FreeBSD, looking at what has to be done and stuff like that.. oh, thanks to Jeffrey, now the new stage is on the mirrors, I'll also look forward for providing an update VMX possibly.

But what I started doing this morning was a masochistic decision most likely. I tried fixing PAM bugs, starting from the infamous PAM 0.99 bump.
Well I have to say the build system is drastically improved since last time I tried (especially since it was completely broken that time), although there are still a few issues to solve.
I decided that this time we won't be applying a full load of RedHat patches to add this and that, I'd rather see more ebuilds for things like pam_console that are needed by utopia for instance.

Big fat warning: sys-libs/pam-0.99.* at this point in time is not supported as stable nor ~arch. It _will_ break your system most likely. vixie-cron stopped working for me until I rebuilt pam a second time for instance. There are less modules, as there are less patches. Everything still using pam_stack.so is going to break as we don't (and probably won't) ship that any further.

That said, I can use some test on this. I know that the userdb module links to libdb1.so in /usr, I'm going to move that out on its own ebuild actually, it's pretty obnoxious as it is now. I'll do that in the next days. I won't revbump it every time or we'll end up having a -r300 sooner or later, so you'll have to take a look at the ChangeLog or to my CIA stats page.

Also, I was able to nail down the list of PAM related bugs to 20, of which 11 are requests for new packages and 2 are version bump. Not bad at all for a mostly 1-man team. But of course I _do_ need some help. Also because most of those 11 new packages are interesting, but I can't manage all of them by myself.

I've also committed another --as-needed fix. I'm considering dropping -hashvals and -Bdirect in favour of using 2.16.92 binutils, as that should allow me to use --as-needed with wxGTK (and thus to write a check for ld version so that I can filter those only on older versions). I still have to decide on that. Update: I started wondering a bit, and I checked, binutils 2.16.92 already have support for -Bdirect, while the hashvals patch still applies, so I'll go with that now :) Update 2: more coffee, thanks, -Bdirect is not supported, I just checked the wrong binutils-config...

Ah, at the end, I ordered the two books from Amazon, €60 and shipping the first week of june... quite an ass of shipping but well, I can't find anything better. I hope at least that the work I'm going to do will compensate these costs. I was hoping also to use the $5 gift certificate that I got some time ago for answering an IBM's survey.. too bad it only works on the American Amazon.com and not to .co.uk, of course using that is no-go for me, too high the costs, would be paying more than $5 for the shipping :)

Do anybody remember that xine-lib makes amaroK and any other frontend crash when trying to play/access an mp3 file when mad is not enabled?
Well, this behaviour is gone. xine-lib will just refuse to play it.

How did I fix that? Well with a big help from Ian Monroe of the amaroK team who gave me the backtrace to work on. Now is really fixed, yeeeee! :)

Again many thanks to Ian, and now I can be happy for today.

Update: seems like today is really xine-lib's day. Another big thanks then, this time to Mark Kretschmann, also from amaroK team ;) He reported to me (some time ago actually) that xine-lib wasn't playing authenticated HTTP streams, and helped nailing down the problem, today I had time to try the patch and it does really work now, xine-lib-1.1.2_pre20060328-r1 plays authenticated HTTP streams just fine.

First of all, new version of vlc: 0.8.5_beta3, or rather test3, that's another prerelease of 0.8.5 version; unfortunately no patches dropped, which means no new fix for things I was fixing myself are fixed yet. It could have been worse tho. Also, DirectFB support is now fixed, with a newer patchset to add a missing AC_ARG_WITH in the configure.ac that seems to have been overseen by upstream in both test2 and test3.

To fix DirectFB support in VLC I had to actually merge DirectFB, which came down to fix libmpeg3 that was badly broken. It was one of the worse makefiles I ever seen in my life. It builds, it's not pretty, it's hackish, but it builds fine, that's enough for me, brr. I'll be glad of removing directfb and libmpeg3 from my system soon.

I merged a patch I had for tvtime to disable xinerama extension into main portage, as Obz seems to be away and upstream sleeping. It's not much of a change anyway.

Old rtorrent/libtorrent versions are gone, live happy with a smaller tree. I also cleaned up my overlay for the ones using it, it now has quite a few packages less, as they are all more or less fixed in main portage tree.

For the cycle "I'm the only one playing FloboPuyo?" ( ;) ), I've added my patch to install a .desktop file with an icon to games-puzzle/flobopuyo, now if you're in games group you'll find it directly on your menu (if you aren't, TryExec will prevent you from seeing the entry anyway).

I bumped KScope as now the legal concerns are fixed. But this is not the usual ebuild that builds and install as it is the sources, you'll get additional value by your friendly neighborhood ebuild maintainer: it moves the .desktop in the right directory to figure on stuff like enlightenment and it installs a sample kscoperc configuration file that already has the paths to the programs it uses, no need to run the autodetection code at all! :P

For the Gentoo/FreeBSD side of the things, I have fixed the clock init.d script so that it actually runs adjkerntz instead of using hwclock, so from next freebsd-baselayout release it will be an actual init.d script rather than a dummy script. Yuppie! :) Also a big thanks to swegener who suggested me to use /etc/cron.d to put the crontab needed by adjkerntz -s to work correctly.

As I was there, I also noted that kerberos support, although present in sys-freebsd ebuilds, too, is untested, and I have actually no clue how to test it, so I've masked the use flag until someone can finally test it, knowing what it does and how.

8:26 local time and I haven't slept. Good, eh?

I was able anyway to provide a few updates for my beloved users :P
The first that can be seen is the presence of ALSA 1.0.11 final in portage, and dropping the whole list of release candidates that had to be added to portage just because of the kernel needing them. They are likely to be marked stable soon as they are needed for 2.6.16 to be marked stable, too, so if anyone feels daring to help me, please try them on a stable system. Many thanks, really.

Now from the Gentoo/FreeBSD side I continued my work to get the crosscompile environment, but I'm afraid this will take a while. For instance I'm probably going to merge, for 6.1 version at least, freebsd-lib and freebsd-headers as they don't make much sense divided as they are right now.
Unfortunately this will require fixes to crossdev as we won't have the same two-packages setup as Linux has with linux-headers and glibc.

I'm also going to fix the clock setup sooner or later, I'm getting tired of having it out of sync with my main system, one CEST and one UTC. This will go in a baselayout update I'm going to roll out with a new stage next week, as I found quite a bit of problems in the old stage when I installed it on farragut.

By the way, for who was wondering what I am keywording ~x86-fbsd on the tree, it's mostly what I use, either because I test with that or I'm using the box for. Farragut is going to be my testbed for Ruby-on-Rails so that's why I keyworded it, and I use PostgreSQL as my database of choice.

And last but not least, for who's wondering the fate of pam-0.99... Azarah is having little if any time lately, so he's probably not going to wokr on that soon. Myself, I think I'd need at least two to three days to get pam in a shape to be p.masked in tree, mainly because there are plently of minor glitches and gentoo-specific patches that needs to be ported and possibly fixed to be merged upstream. So I suppose unless someone else steps up, it will have to wait till I get time to hack at it, which means after my current job is finished and before the next one is started.
It's in my TODO list, but not in my priority list, as I'm focusing as much as I can on Gentoo/FreeBSD lately, until I can get a few more devs to help, and to sound/video applications and libraries as they needed a lot of fixes. Joking bit: oh you can of course always bribe me to change the priority of pam ;)

This time, I'm trying to fix all the stuff up so that I can actually have a decent crosscompiler that can be installed by the usual crossdev actions.

Up to now, I messed with freebsd-headers and partially freebsd-lib, freebsd-mk-defs and a few more stuff. It's not yet straightforward to fix it up, and lots of stuff had to be changed and edited and conditioned, but the results are promising.

I do have FreeBSD's headers merged fine using sys-freebsd/freebsd-headers ebuild, and that's fine. I have a stage1 compiler, that means I can actually build c programs with it. I'm trying to fix freebsd-lib so that it actually merges in crosscompile.

Right now you still need at least sys-devel/pmake and sys-apps/mtree installed manually (a huge thanks to tigger for mtree, or I should have tinkered to add that myself) before running crossdev, and also freebsd-mk-defs are needed for the headers to be installed correctly. The latters has to be keyworded via package.keywords, too.

I'd actually like to be sleeping right now, but I'm waiting for freebsd-lib to at least start to _try_ to build something...

Oh and for those who followed my little rant about shipping costs, I'm probably going to buy the two books from Amazon, as one commenter suggested. The shipping aren't low but they aren't too high, either. Buying only the Agile Web Development with Rails book from Amazon with their shipping costs I'm still paying less than buying the same book (in English) from an Italian e-bookshop.
Still, I'm considering what to do, as it's still €60 to pay now for two books I'm going to receive no idea when :/

Today while I was thinking over the code I wrote for my programmer's job I iterated over the whole list of bugs for sound@ to try to nail it down a bit. This allowed me to cut my own list off 39 bugs. Some of them closed, some of them reassigned, some of them renamed to "bump/stable request" so they are off my radar.

I'll spend some more time tomorrow on a similar note for media-tv bugs.

This happened while farragut is building the system, as now I can build on Gentoo/FreeBSD without making my system go starving because of VMware. And this is really good for me.
Now there are a few things that i need to fix in the baselayout, then I'll probably roll out a new updated snapshot the next week, as I found quite a few problems while building out of that stage.

Anyway, now I'm waiting for a friend to submit a bug for ALSA on PowerPC that I have to fix, and then I'll see to spend some more time on fixing stuff.. damn I should get a life!

Oh by the way... for the first time for what concerns me, I was able to get a fix for a security bug 9 months before the advisory is released ;) You can be safe with xine-ui on Gentoo :)

When I bought the new monitor, I bought one which had a dual input, to use the DVI with my GeForce card for a dual-monitor configuration. This has the side effect that the VGA analog input is not used... and I just never used that before, until now.

I connected the VGA input to the box I used to work with Gentoo/FreeBSD on, and now I just have to press the source button on the monitor to get its output, without need to detach and reattach the connections every time.

Now it's just matter of burning a new LiveCD and re-install Gentoo/FreeBSD on it, from scratch.

I'll do that tomorrow for sure, as I'm probably going to have not much time in the future, if I'm going to find a job that I won't do from home as I'm working right now. From one point of view that's going to take much of my time, but at least I'll be learning how to work as a helper sysadmin in a real environment :)

I'm trying to use all the time I have lately to fix the last issues with Gentoo/FreeBSD and with video and sound and so on. Today I fixed all the bugs for video I could think of. There are still a few that requires a long work, like xine-ui's freeze with horizontal scrollbars on 64-bit systems, but for that I really need more work.

I'll try to fix also a few sounds bugs tomorrow, but mostly there are bugs for jack and professional audio/music production software that I don't have an idea of at all.

Anyway, I hope to be able to help users this way, but I'm not sure how much I can do in these limited days :|