Reflections

Today one of my biggest dreams got shattered by technical deficiencies.

Phreak helped me to experiment with the virtuals in my new experimental toy profile on miranda chroots. I learned alot about catalyst and finally found out about my mistake that you need to roll up the portage tree (where you have added the created test profiles) into a portage-XXX.tar.bz2 and give this XXX name to the catalyst specs file before building the stages.

Otherwise it cannot find the profile in portage snapshot and print out an erroneous message about your profile being broken, simply because it cannot find it in the portage snapshot that was unpacked.

So, while experimenting with stage building and seeing to it that it works to create a masking of sys-libs/glibc and a virtual/libc mapping to my own testing version of sys-libs/hardened-glibc, for covering my future wanted changes for SSPx and AT_ENTROPY without touching the holy sys-libs/glibc grail of our toolchain team, it suddenly turns into a full fledged uphill battle that is impossible to win.

I am talking about reworking all affected packages in the tree to not depend on sys-devel/gcc any more but on virtual/cc or something like that- because we currently don't have a virtual for gcc. Good job, team.

Short spoken: our toolchain is currently maintained by a single person, happily monolithically aimed at glibc (and a bit of uclibc) and gcc.

Which in turn gives all the power of control over the base system, the standard lib and the compiler into the hands of one or two people without users or other devs being able to plug in or attach another modular approach to it.

Which basically means you don't have another choice but to use the glibc and gcc provided by our distribution. A distribution that was about choice, at least the last time i read it on our homepage.

I still remember the support and the backup of our gcc and glibc hackers when in 2002 and 2003 the hardened toolchain was still a young project compared to the other projects of Gentoo and how we were all working together on a shared vision... all gone.

Today it's about software quality and keeping your hands on your packages which in turn control the behaviour of a complete GNU/Linux distribution.

Thank you very much.

Alex