Gnome 2.26 mostly complete

Just a word to let you know gnome 2.26.2 is mostly completely in tree. Notable exceptions are the few packages that I haven’t had time to bump from 2.26.1 and the ones that still requires some work before being allowed to touch the tree, of which you fill find anjuta and glade 3.6.3. gnome-power-manager and it’s devicekit friends will probably enter the tree later but masked since they fail really bad at doing any kind of sensible power managment on my laptop, some of those issues were reported upstream but ignored for the moment.

Gnome 2.26 is moving to the tree

In case you were wondering what the hell is happening with gnome 2.26 still sitting in the overlay, well, we started moving it to the tree. It’s going to take a while before everything is in tree but it is on its way. Don’t forget to fill bugs if you find one that is really new so we can write a nice upgrade guide if needs be. For now the only issue is the gnome-desktop upgrade that needs a nice message for non-portage-2.2 users but we are not there yet.

Wireless network on Macbook 3,1

For those owning a laptop with a bitten apple on it and everyone else that is afflicted with a Broadcom 43xx chipset that is not supported by in-kernel drivers, you might be interested in the following facts:

  • gentoo has net-wireless/broadcom-sta which I happily discovered just after writing a sucky ebuild for it.
  • you absolutely need to disable SSB and b43 or blacklist them if you compiled these as modules because it will interfere very badly with wl driver (as in eth1 won’t show up at all). For some reason it worked just fine in 2.6.24-gentoo-r8 and that’s why I was stuck with it until today but in 2.6.28 and 2.6.29, it just silently failed and I was left with no wireless interface at all.

Reviewing gnome 2.26 ebuilds

Since someone asked on the #gentoo-desktop again when will gnome 2.26 hit the tree, I’ll repeat that this isn’t for today nor for tomorrow but it’ll be soon I promise. I’m nearly finished with reviewing ebuilds. I’m around totem in the status page for gnome 2.26 not counting the items in red, issues from status/TODO in the overlay and split python bindings which should be quick to review.

I have been playing a bit with git hooks and those two files are updated each time I commit something in my reviewing branch. If you are interested in how I do that, you can check the git hook folder in my dev space. I’m planning to add pybugz actions there as soon as possible so I don’t have to open a web browser anymore when working on ebuilds :D.

That’s all for today.

Helping with development

Since everyone’s in a hurry to get gnome 2.26 in the tree as soon as possible, you might ask what you can do to help ?

Until now, working on the overlay meant that most of the information was available to those hanging in #gentoo-desktop but even with summing things for everyone once in a while and sending recap mails or throwing notes in our devspaces, it always felt like somebody was missing the information. So we bite the bullet and imported some README and status/ files in the overlay so the information is directly available without having to search or wait for one of us to show up.

So if you want to participate, please have a look at those files and the clean patches notes from vapier. Look at other patches in the overlay to get an idea of how I like them and don’t hesitate to open new reports (after searching) especially if you have patches. Also don’t hesitate to visit us on #gentoo-desktop if you have any question but please avoid the “when will it hit the tree” as I’ve already answered that my last post about gnome 2.26 status.

Gnome 2.26 status update

In case you are wondering weither Gnome 2.26 time to stable will be as catastrophic as Gnome 2.24, well I still have no idea but for the people out there that just can’t wait, just give a shot at the overlay or monitor bug #263083. Nirbheek‘s been doing an awesome work about keeping everything relatively up to date in the overlay but it still requires a second pair of eyes. That’s what I’m currently doing and it takes some time but doing that in previous releases proved to be really valuable for ~arch users that had the patience to wait for things to enter the tree. So if anything is broken, it’s ok, it’s overlay, we’ll get to it. You open fill new bug reports and make them blocker of the tracker bug, but please search for duplicates first.

In other news, I’ve updated a bit gnome’s herd project page. It now lists a project that is greatly missing from gentoo, a “codec buddy” for our dear gstreamer packages. If you are interested don’t hesitate to come and see us on irc on #gentoo-desktop channel.

Hello world and Gnome 2.24

This is the ritual hello world post since I’ve bothered beandog enough to finally get one. Thanks very much (again) btw, I will now be able to spam the universe with my futile speech and go on with my plan to conquer the world.

Hello world, check. If any of you didn’t know yet, I’m the bastard that sticks a comment in nearly every bug report you opened about gnome in the last months. Please excuse me if I sometimes sound rude, people knowning me IRL always tell me that I feel grumpy but words cannot conway has much as I’d wish them to.

So I’ve heard gentoo is dying – why do I keep hearing that ? we should really be dead if the guys that said that were true the first time, or the second time, or … – but guess what we are not really :). I’ve seen KDE folks doing a crazy job at getting 4.2 out quickly and so I decided gnome had to move on and stop waiting for regression fixes that will never come when we have good and tested workarounds. That means you won’t get all Gnome 2.24 but only the pieces that work well together. Gnome 2.24 is coming near you as soon as our all-mighty arch teams process bug #260063. Be kind and don’t report your own personal problems there but please do fill your own reports if they haven’t been filled yet. For those that cannot find ekiga-3 in tree, I’m sorry but we didn’t have time to review the ebuilds so it’s still in bugzilla (or rather I had a look and got scared by the libs).

There is probably more to say but I’ll keep that for another day.