Retroactively fixing the world
Since GLEP 67 was approved, bug assignment became easier. However, there were still many metadata.xml files which made this suboptimal. Today, I have fixed most of them and I would like to provide this short guide on how to write good metadata.xml files.
Continue reading “On good metadata.xml maintainer descriptions”
Since time does not permit me to write in more extent, just a short note: yesterday, I have published a Gentoo Bugzilla bug assignment UserJS. When enabled, it automatically tries to find package names in bug summary, fetches maintainers for them (from packages.g.o) and displays them in a table with quick assignment/CC checkboxes.
Note that it’s still early work. If you find any bugs, please let me know. Patches will be welcome too. And some redesign, since it looks pretty bad, standard Bugzilla style applied to plain HTML.
Update: now on GitHub as bug-assign-user-js
The LINGUAS environment variable serves two purposes in Gentoo. On one hand, it’s the USE_EXPAND flag group for USE flags controlling installation of localizations. On the other, it’s a gettext-specfic environment variable controlling installation of localizations in some of build systems supporting gettext. Fun fact is, both uses are simply wrong.
Those of you who use my Gentoo repository mirrors may have noticed that the repositories are constructed of original repository commits automatically merged with cache updates. While the original commits are signed (at least in the official Gentoo repository), the automated cache updates and merge commits are not. Why?
Actually, I was wondering about signing them more than once, even discussed it a bit with Kristian. However, each time I decided against it. I was seriously concerned that those automatic signatures would not be able to provide sufficient security level — and could cause the users to believe the commits are authentic even if they were not. I think it would be useful to explain why.
Continue reading “Why automated gentoo-mirror commits are not signed and how to verify them”
While at first shebangs may seem pretty obvious and well supported, there is a number of not-so-well-known portability issues affecting them. Only during my recent development work, I have hit more than one of them. For this reason, I’d like to write a quick note summarizing how to stay on the safe side and keep your scripts working across various systems.
Please note I will only cover the basic solution to the most important portability issues. If you’d like to know more about shebang handling in various systems, I’d like to recommend you an excellent article ‘The #! magic, details about the shebang/hash-bang mechanism on various Unix flavours’ by Sven Mascheck.