Category: Gentoo

Back blogging here

Thanks to Theo I have the blog at gentoo working again =)
In the past time I used my company blog as fallback.

Now I’m reading this and I wonder if we, as distribution did help or not to maintain things as lean as possible giving enough feedback to upstream and proposing tools that work fine.
Diego is probably doing his best even if from time he gets frustrated since things might not move as fast as should.

I do hope we won’t end up unleashing strange beasts like systemd and upstart (those are missing from that abstract but for me those are the most immature technologies around nowadays) or equivalents before they behave.

CMake vs autotools: poppler

Poppler has a CMake ebuild now. Given how poppler is used it seems to me quite a bad move, poppler is small and used in system that may not have cmake already installed.

I run some numbers when wesnoth moved to cmake and claimed that it took about twice for me to build wesnoth+cmake on a phenom and building wesnoth alone took nearly the same time. Later a friend of mine wanted to play with me with wesnoth and given her pc is a _bit_ old, took ages to build an up to date wesnoth, about twice the time you may consider bearable thanks to the cmake switch.

Let’s see what means switching poppler to CMake now, after the previous post I got some news of nice improvements, hopefully it improved even more while I wasn’t watching.

Now some numbers:

I have my system in need to update poppler, still the phenom I used the other time, it is doing nothing right now:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep model_name
model name : AMD Phenom(tm) 9500 Quad-Core Processor

first: I need cmake

cmake ebuild tell me that I need xmlrpc-c with curl and curl with a kind of ssl support. I don’t see the point of having an xmlrpc library and two xml libraries for a make system, well let’s set the right useflags and trigger emerge cmake

time says

real 8m9.854s
user 13m8.121s
sys 3m7.664s

qlop on the cut down emerge.log says

domino ~ # qlop -t cmake -f mylog
cmake: 207 seconds average for 1 merges
domino ~ # qlop -t curl -f mylog
curl: 233 seconds average for 1 merges
domino ~ # qlop -t xmlrpc-c -f mylog
xmlrpc-c: 40 seconds average for 1 merges

So cmake is taking about the time of curl and it’s indeed faster to build that before (it alone), still autoconf+autotools take less than 60s here, and if we factor in the deps then we still have large margin for improvements (please make xmlrpc-c, curl, libxml and expat optional)

app-text/poppler

takes about 37-40 seconds

Hacking a bare ebuild w/out touching poppler configure.ac makes it take about 60-66 seconds

So if you are having cmake already installed this poppler ebuild is _quite_ an huge improvement. If you are wondering why that happens I could guess that given that poppler is quite small the cmake quicker configure step gives this large boost, probably not having libtool in the way helps as well.

To sum up:
– the cmake poppler builds quite faster than autotools poppler.
– CMake improved a lot its build time, yet is largely bloated and could enjoy a trim.
– Poppler configure.ac probably could be improved to be in line with the cmake times.

New Council – Expectations?

Ok, we got a new council, I’m still there so thank you for renewing the trust on me =)

Looks like that less people found me or what I did that compelling to make me into the council, so surely I did something wrong. Solar got the first place so his cleanly cut ways are perceived better.

I started polling people about what they feel about Gentoo and what they’d like. The first thing I noticed is that people are sick of endless discussions on marginal stuff and even more sick of outside projects trying to push it’s agenda on Gentoo using the shovel-in-throat way.

Second item is about trying to make the place nicer for everybody and better involve our large userbase. We used to be the nicest distribution regarding attitude towards newcomers and slow learner, now other distributions are better. We could re-learn from them.

That’s what I perceived so far. As I said before I see the council just as the last resort to get something decided if we, developers, cannot find a large agreement. Solar likes more to be proactive in my opinion. You liked him so I guess we as council should try to push people express themselves and get new&interesting stuff done instead of discussing which is the new way to define a quantity next to infinity or why embedding information somewhere is right or wrong in theory.

That said, how wrong I am so far and how we could get Gentoo to improve even more?

LinuxTag – day after

I’m eventually back home, I’m dead tired, the c-base party was great in many ways (people, food, place) and ending the night (actually starting the morning) playing Go with beer and music was _quite_ fun (thanks again for the games =))

I’ll try to wrap up everything in a short post before falling asleep completely: the LinuxTag had been a wonderful experience I had been more there as FFmpeg developer and less as Gentoo developer (mostly because I had to man the FFmpeg booth mostly since we aren’t that many and that I failed to chat in a proficuous with the gentoo people even if we spent the evening in the same place most of the time =| In the end I had a refreshing conversation about Gentoo with rbu luckily and I managed to chat a bit more with fauli just before he was leaving…)

Was quite fun going at the end of the event to the fsfe stand to do explain the FFmpeg stance about patents, Theora (more will follow) and why, in our humble opinion at least, isn’t correct to propose^Wactually shove down to the web users throat such codec just because of some claims that are yet to be validated…

The discussion was quite pleasant mostly because to my surprise fsfe people there weren’t zealots, so the whole discussion discussion even evolved to touch more interesting topics, like reverse engineering, making sure our license is respected and actually multimedia, with a brief discussion on containers, codec and streaming (that part actually started from an explanation why Theora isn’t that perfect fruit of opensource that is claimed and why Ogg has many
shortcomings as container and why in multimedia you do not have one-size-fit-all solutions… )

LinuxTag – day 1

After about 4 years I eventually managed to get there! Today is the first day and I’m actually sort of manning the FFmpeg Booth and from time to time I could happen to be in the Gentoo one as well.

In the FFmpeg stand we are showing BBB high res in a big LCD screen from a small beagleboard. The operating system image is obviously Gentoo as well the other system present showing some jumpy Japanese idol video (not my idea).

See you! (Pictures will come later)

Random ideas about changes, their value, their impact

During the last month we got many arguments about how fundamental was one or another change to portage and how this or that had been a life change for many users.

I’m talking about the whole discussion about glep54 and the following one.

When it was first proposed I found the glep lacking details and given that some people were vehemently against it I asked to have it updated. Since some other people found the idea of improving our support for live ebuilds as whole (not just the versioning) interesting I tried to gather ideas and put them all into a draft. The thing got quite big and covered many steps needed, most of them not detailed yet.

Basically the live template draft aims to have portage do the following:

– let you automatically merge from a specific live branch
– have emerge –fetch work as supposed introducing a phase just for that
– let you track what you installed and possibly re-install as is
– have a way to generate automatically snapshot ebuilds and binpkgs in a non ambiguous way
– some more (like have portage show you which revision and from which branch comes what you installed on emerge -upv)

Glep 54 just aim to make sure versioning is theoretically and thoroughly correct, no matter how crazy overlays, upstream and package maintainer could be. To make an example, right now if someone wants to provide a live ebuild he could prepare an ebuild with a large version value (say 9999) and assume nothing bigger would appear, version usually are small values like 1.2.3.
Now, nothing forbids to have a version that is, say, 10000, making invalid the assumption cat/pkg-9999 is the higher value. The glep54 comes with a solution for this issue, have a new prefix to state that he ebuild is live, thus has to be considered above all the others within it’s range. This change has to be folded within a EAPI change or even better to a file extension change as stated in glep55 since it’s as simple to state as radical: older portage, not knowing anything about what this prefix is, will issue a warning.

Installing from live sources is completely unsupported thus those ebuild are rightfully p.masked and their use is quite specific. The current amount of them is scarce: 90 on 26130 ebuilds are live.

So, if you got the question about if you’d approve this proposal and consider implementing that and all the changes due that would follow or just put it on hold till it would be more useful what would you do?

A pragmatic approach would either be either reject it since does pretty much nothing in the big scheme (0.003 is nearly nothing) a less pragmatic approach, due the tendency to thinker, would be just try to make it more useful so it could be of appeal to a wider interest…

Probably the same time would have been better spent on things that are more interesting like have a better way to state what a dependency is (if it is something I’ll need to link to, something that I need to run) to ease the life of our embedded arches (say ppc, arm, sh, mips) or to fully support multislot and multiabi so we can avoid emul-linux on amd64 and have ppc64 being able to run xlc w/out many annoyances *cough*, or start thinking about how to enable pgo as widely as possible since it appears to make the difference in certain situations (e.g. firefox).

Alive again

During August I was supposed to prepare something new for the LScube project.
I was supposed to do a bit more for the Summer of Code (Sorry Keiji and Seraphim) and the FFmpeg project (libswscale isn’t yet in shape I know).

Sadly I spent about a month with a bad pneumonia and just now I’m starting to catch up really. (I hoped to stay better before but, as my 2 miss on council meetings shown, wasn’t ok yet)

Diego is doing a wonderful job rationalizing LScube suite, Ale almost finished his Flux (started as a way to show me that C++ isn’t the problem, just people misusing it), Michael decided to make libswscale the default in FFmpeg forcing more people taking care about it.

What now?

Well first I’ll try to not miss new council meetings (and I’ll ask Chrissy and Diego to back me up when happens I cannot be there).

I have some pending stuff about libswscale that will end up having a better structure to provide arch specific optimizations, once they hit I’ll try to do again a witch hunt over ffmpeg using applications to provide the new libavcodec in portage.

Hopefully the next feng (and friends) release will hit portage and the stale fenice and libnemesi will be replaced accordingly ^^;

There is plenty of new stuff on the CELL land to be tried and provided (like mars)

I’ll try to take some time to merge the openmoko patches to the new (and gcc-4 building) qemu so I won’t have to provide an qemu-openmoko to help people interested in getting Gentoo on the freerunner (openrc could help a bit the boot time possibly and bitbake is a bit annoying from time to time)

Last but not least Syoyo is getting his blazing fast renderer Lucille to be usable even by common people.

Lots is happening (with and without me) =)

Alternatives…

Here some ideas about alternatives and gentoo possible alternative implementation (refer to Diego’s post):

– implemented as an eselect module, possibly with an alternatives interface for those who like it
– will work just on executables you directly run
– it will be backed by an eclass to handle post-inst/post-uninst (registration and removal to the alternatives list)
– it will use the environment, a separate config dir, a C wrapper [pick one or all]
– the wrapper will check his argv[0], look at the config dir for the string to call and run it.

Probably even those 5 lines have conceptual bugs but I guess that’s enough for a draft.

lu

Japan!

I’ll stay for about a month in Japan, till the latest I was too busy and not so sure I’d make it so I avoided blogging about this till I were sure.

Hopefully I’ll have another great time hurrying from a city to another (Hiroshima and Sapporo will be the southern and northern cities I plan to visit) and I’m looking forward to meet the local gentoo community again (I never thanked you enough).

I’m not sure how I’ll be able to get a reliable network link, but I think I’ll find a way ^^.

Alternatives, part II

You may already know that I have some complaints about pidgin:
– its developers use a brain damaged dvcs (yes monotone sucks, yet another application written in C++ that sucks after cmake)
– The ability to listen to the user feedback is severely reduced.

Since we are talking about alternatives looks like somebody tried to make things a little nicer and forked the code so far and made something fun out of that.

Seems promising, I hope it works well enough to be put on Gentoo soon if the pidgin devs don’t come to their senses =P