Gentoo News

The Gentoo Council held a meeting on April 9, 2009. The items put up for discussion were:

Technical issues:

• Migration of KEYWORDS out of ebuilds: There was initial discussion on this idea. The council requested that Ned Ludd post a draft proposal of his idea to one of the lists for discussion, since the idea interested the council and they wish to get an idea of its pros and cons.
• EAPI 3 features block: To make sure that there is enough discussion on all EAPI 3 features a block on new features for consideration into EAPI 3 was considered. A vote was taken to:
  A. block features to those already discussed
  B. 'A' with mtime preservation
  C. no block for features
  Choice 'A' won with 4 votes. This block doesn't affect discussion of the implementation of the features, only new features.
• EAPI 3 updates: Zac Medico commented that while he hadn't worked on [use(+/-)] yet it shouldn't take more than a week or two to complete.

The Gentoo Council held a meeting on March 12, 2009. The items discussed were:

EAPI-3 Proposals:

Note: The following two proposals were discussed before it was realized that there was not sufficient time to discuss all of them. At that point a call for objections to any of the proposals was asked for, and none were made. A full list of proposals for EAPI 3 follow.

• New phase (pkg_pretend): This phase is most useful for displaying conflicting USE flags at dependency resolution time (pretend), though it has various other uses so that errors about installing the package can be displayed before installation of packages begin.
  Conclusion: Approved for the draft.
• [flag(+/-)] USE dependencies: This may be needed when one wishes to depend on a package with a certain USE flag but if the USE flag is not present in that package assume it is on or off (+ and - respectively).
  Conclusion: Approved for the draft.
• Multislot Dependency Specifications: This allows ebuilds to tell the package manager that runtime dependencies are not swappable (:1 installed at runtime can't be removed even though :2 'satisfies' the dependency).
• PROPERTIES mandatory in cache: Some information provided by this variable is useful at --pretend time (interactive packages).
• DEFINED_PHASES mandatory in cache: Same reasons as for PROPERTIES, but is also useful for determining the phases a package provides with just the cache.
• Provide a default src_install prototype: Get rid of the need for the src_install functions with just emake install in them. Some discussion is needed to clear up issues with a DOCS variable for extra documentation and a list of docs to automatically get installed.
• Provide a docompress function: This function serves as a replacement for prepalldocs. docompress can optionally compress files in /usr/share/doc according to a set of inclusion and exclusion lists.
• Provide an '-r' option to dodoc: Providing a way to put dodoc in recursive mode is widely accepted.
• Make doins preserve symlinks: This obsoletes the cp -R constructs frequently seen and is easy to implement.
• Limit values in $USE to those in $IUSE: Certain USE_EXPAND flags may be in USE even if they aren't specifically set in IUSE. Eliminate this.

The Council agreed to have portage implement as many of these as possible in a month and then make that EAPI 3.

Technical issues:

• GLEP 54: Thomas Anderson sent out a comparison of GLEP 54 and the liveebuild proposals. Among those discussing GLEP 54 there was a general consensus that there was nothing wrong with it as a first step to get correct ordering. Luca Barbato commented that all he was concerned about was that there was not enough 'meat' to the GLEP.
  Conclusion: Doug Goldstein and Luca Barbato intend to write a GLEP to handle the second part of the problem, making the revision available to ebuilds/package manager/users.
• GLEP 55: Petteri Räty, Zac, and Ciaran were supposed to benchmark the various proposals and report back. Zac Medico did not write the code for portage so Petteri Räty had nothing to report on this issue. Ciaran commented that the solutions other than GLEP 55 had a 50% slowdown in the valid cache situation compared to GLEP55, but did not post the raw numbers or the patches used.
  Conclusion: Zac Medico needs to benchmark the proposals in portage.

Open floor:

• Migration of KEYWORDS from ebuilds to profiles: Ned Ludd brought this up, but it came up in the middle of agenda items so was not talked about much. Some points were made that such a scheme would require a git conversion, but nothing was agreed upon.

The Gentoo Council held a meeting on February 26, 2009. The items discussed were:

Nontechnical issues:

• Open council spot: Should Mart Raudsepp fill the empty council spot? Since Mark Loeser resigned from the council there is an empty spot. Since Mart Raudsepp is ranked next from the last election, he is eligible to fill the spot.
  Conclusion: Mart Raudsepp is unanimously approved for the council.

Technical issues:

• GLEP 55: There had been quite a bit of discussion on this topic recently. Within hours of the council meeting new proposals were being proposed and discussion was ongoing.
  Conclusion: No decision as of yet. Ciaran McCreesh (ciaranm) and Zac Medico volunteered to benchmark the various proposals on the package managers they maintain (paludis and portage respectively). Petteri Räty will assist with the portage benchmarks. Tiziano Müller and Alec Warner will write up a comparison of the various proposals and their various advantages and disadvantages within a week.
• GLEP 54: There had been some discussion on gentoo-dev since last meeting, though no consensus or agreement had been reached.
  Conclusion: Thomas Anderson and Luca Barbato will write up a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the two proposals (-scm and _live). This will be completed within a week.
• Overlay Masking in Repositories: Brian Harring (ferringb) asked for discussion for when overlays attempted to unmask packages provided by the master repository (gentoo-x86). Because this is only available in portage (it is contrary to PMS), Brian thought it should not be allowed. Numerous suggestions were made to the effect that if a standardized set format was agreed upon for repositories and package.unmask was allowed to contain sets, then this problem would be fixed.
  Conclusion: No decision, as only discussion was requested. Mart Raudsepp will follow up on this with discussion on gentoo-dev.

Note: the original announcement was made on March 31 by Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto.

Hello fellow devs, users and Gentoo community,

in this election we received 80 valid ballots from a total of 208 voters, which means we had a 38.46% turnout. Without much ado, here is the list of new members of the 2009 Trustees Board:

• Robin H. Johnson
• Matthew Summers

The master ballot and the full result sheet are accessible under the elections project space. The personal confirmation emails will follow soon. Thanks to Shyam Mani for the technical support and to my fellow election officials Łukasz Damentko and Alec Warner for running another election.

Congratulations to the new trustees, to all that ran for office, to those that nominated and or were nominated and to everyone that voted in this election.

For reference, the complete ranked list is:

• Robin H. Johnson
• Matthew Summers
• Christina Fullam
• Patrick Lauer

The KDE team held a meeting on April 1, 2009. The items put up for discussion were:

• Removing kdeprefix for apps not in kde-base: reavertm explained that the goal was to drop the kdeprefix USE flag for all apps outside of kde-base/ and that he already started the work for it (including a rewriteof the eclasses) in the dropped-kdeprefix-on-non-kde-base branch in the kde-testing overlay. This means deprecating NEED_KDE in favor of KDE_REQUIRED and KDE_MINIMAL, so that packages are built not against the newest available KDE (when there's more than 1 version) but instead to the oldest - respecting KDE_MINIMAL. There was a long discussion about kdeprefix, its purpose, benefits and alternatives. The final consensus was to follow reavertm's solution. kdeprefix has been removed from all apps not in kde-base/.
• KDE3 state: Theo Chatzimichos explained the eclasses are ready to move all packages under /usr/kde/3.5/. He's still testing ebuilds and could use the help of 2 people to test kde-misc/ apps. wired and Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto offered to help. Theo Chatzimichos will prepare a list of packages and we're going to search for people through the page and a mail to the dev ml. To start the work on getting KDE4 marked stable, we agreed to get this work done by the end of the month - we'll be masking 3.5.9 monos as soon as we get 3.5.10 marked stable.
• Moving Plasmoids to the tree: Plasmoids were moved to the kde-misc/ category and will be added when they're tested with +kdeprefix.
• Adding printing packages to the tree: We've decided to hold this until KDE-4.3.
• Upstream response to the packaging snapshots mail: No reply again. As we're being ignored, we've decided to repackage the snapshots.
• Removing dead members: Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto went over the retirement bugs and sent emails to the members that are MIA. He will get the team membership cleaned before next meeting.
• pykde fixing: There are some problems with having more than one pykde version with +kdeprefix as it installs files outside the prefix. The solution might be to "unprefix" it or to have a new package just with the python files. In any case, Patrick Lauer was "nominated" to work on this.
• handling kdeprefix for base ... eselect: After some discussion we agreed eselect was not the solution.
• koffice status: Tomas Chvatal informed the team that koffice-2.0 is going to be released at the end of the month and asked what we should do about it. He decided not to add the RCs in the tree and will instead add the final release hard masked as the RCs weren't considered worthy.
• Moving meeting to another date: We decided to have KDE meetings at the 3rd Thursday of the month.
• As a final note, Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto reminded people that we still have a *few* open bugs and that we should all try to help get that number down.

The complete meeting log is also available.

This month, xorg-server-1.5.3 has been marked stable. X11 is the core of your graphical desktop experience, and this upgrade requires some significant changes to be made. Gentoo's X11 team has published an upgrade guide. Make sure to read it before and after your upgrade, to avoid losing important system functionality.

In addition, there are several helpful tip threads in the Gentoo Forums. Be sure to read the sticky threads; chances are your question has already been answered. If need additional help with the upgrade, the Desktop forum and #gentoo on IRC are excellent places to ask.