Category: Ebuild writing

I’ve recently written a thin wrapper over emerge that I use in my development environment. It does the following:

1. set tmux pane title to the first package argument (so you can roughly see what’s emerging on every pane)
2. beep meaningfully when emerge finishes (two beeps for success, three for failure),
3. run pip check after successful run to check for mismatched Python dependencies.

Continue reading “My thin wrapper for emerge(1)”

Here’s a bunch of handy commands that I’ve conceived to semi-automatically remove old versions of packages that do not have stable keywords (and therefore are not subject to post-stabilization cleanups that I do normally).

Continue reading “Handy commands to clean up old ~arch-only packages”

Three years ago, I had the pleasure of announcing EAPI 7 as a major step forward in our ebuild language. It introduced preliminary support for cross-compilation, it finally provided good replacements for the last Portagisms in ebuilds and it included many small changes that made ebuilds simpler.

Only a year and a half later, I have started working on the initial EAPI 8 feature set. Similarly to EAPI 6, EAPI 8 was supposed to focus on small changes and improvements. The two killer features listed below were already proposed at the time. I have prepared a few patches to the specification, as well as the initial implementation of the respective features for Portage. Unfortunately, the work stalled at the time.

Finally, as a result of surplus of free time last month, I was able to resume the work. Along with Ulrich Müller, we have quickly prepared the EAPI 8 feature set, got it pre-approved, prepared the specification and implemented all the features in Portage and pkgcore. Last Sunday, the Council has approved EAPI 8 and it’s now ready for ~arch use.

What’s there in EAPI 8? Well, for a start we have install-time dependencies (IDEPEND) that fill a gap in our cross-compilation design. Then, selective fetch/mirror restriction make it easier to combine proprietary and free distfiles in a single package. PROPERTIES and RESTRICT are now accumulated across eclasses reducing confusion for eclass writers. There’s dosym -r to create relative symlinks conveniently from dynamic paths. Plus bunch of other improvements, updates and cleanups.

Read the full article

Update: the information provided in this post is out of date. As of today, Python 3.7 is no longer relevant from DISTUTILS_USE_SETUPTOOLS perspective, and ‘rdepend’ is no longer valid when when entry points are used.

I suppose that most of the Gentoo developers have seen at least one of the ‘uses a probably incorrect DISTUTILS_USE_SETUPTOOLS value’ bugs by now. Over 350 have been filed so far, and new ones are filed practically daily. The truth is, I’ve never intended for this QA check to result in bugs being filed against packages, and certainly not that many bugs.

This is not an important problem to be fixed immediately. The vast majority of Python packages depend on setuptools at build time (this is why the build-time dependency is the eclass’ default), and being able to unmerge setuptools is not a likely scenario. The underlying idea was that the QA check would make it easier to update DISTUTILS_USE_SETUPTOOLS when bumping packages.

Nobody has asked me for my opinion, and now we have hundreds of bugs that are not very helpful. In fact, the effort involved in going through all the bugmail, updating packages and closing the bugs greatly exceeds the negligible gain. Nevertheless, some people actually did it. I have bad news for them: setuptools upstream has changed entry point mechanism, and most of the values will have to change again. Let me elaborate on that.
Continue reading “DISTUTILS_USE_SETUPTOOLS, QA spam and… more QA spam?”