Month: December 2012

Gnome 3.6

We had a marathon with Alexandre (tetromino) in the last 2 weeks to get Gnome 3.6 ebuilds using python-r1 eclasses variants, EAPI=5 and gstreamer-1. And now it is finally in gentoo-x86, unmasked.

You probably read, heard or have seen stuff about EAPI=5 and new python eclasses before but, in short, here is what it will give you:

  • package manager will finally know for real what python version is used by which package and be able to act on it accordingly (no more python-updater when all ebuilds are migrated)
  • EAPI=5 subslots will hopefully put an end to revdep-rebuild usage. I already saw it in action while bumping some of the telepathy packages to discover that empathy was now automatically being rebuilt without further action than emerge -1 telepathy-logger.

No doubt lots of people are going to love this.

Gnome 3.6 probably still has a few rough edges so please, check bugzilla before filing new reports.

gstreamer 1.0

It has been a while since I have last written here but I am not dead and I still somehow manage to contribute to Gentoo.

In the past weeks, I have been working on making Gnome 3.6 ready for inclusion in portage. It rapidly appeared that Gnome 3.6 would have to use both gstreamer 0.10 and gstreamer 1.0 however gstreamer team is badly understaffed and only Alexandre (tetromino) who is not even a gstreamer team member had tried to start bumping ebuilds to gstreamer 1.0.

But then Alexandre got busy and this development stalled a bit. After I finished bumping the overlay to Gnome 3.6.1, I took the challenge to rewrite the gstreamer eclasses to make them easier to use and understand. They were, in my opinion, quite scary with version checks everywhere and I think it is one of the reason that so few people wants to work in gstreamer team 🙂

If you do not follow gentoo-dev, most of the code moved to gst-plugins10.eclass which received some magic touches that basically makes 99% of the version dependant code go away. As an added bonus, the eclasses are now documented and support EAPI 1 to 5. EAPI 0 support got dropped because of missing slot operators which is really annoying right now with gstreamer.

So if you hit some gstreamer compilation problems in the last few days, please forgive me, upgrade road was a bit bumpy but, overall, it was not so bad. And now, I am happy to say that gstreamer 1.0 is in portage which clears the road for gnome 3.6 inclusion.

On a final note, I also continued Alexandre’s work of bumping last 0.10 releases and so we are up-to-date on that front as well.

Happy compiling !