Did you ever have had Croaker shout at you because you removed an old version that just happened to be still required by some other package? Did you have to run your cleanups past (slow-ish) CI just to avoid that? If you did, I have just released app-portage/mgorny-dev-scripts, version 6 that has a tool just for that!
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Category: Gentoo
Is an umbrella organization a good choice for Gentoo?
The talk of joining an umbrella organization and disbanding the Gentoo Foundation (GF) has been recurring over the last years. To the best of my knowledge, even some unofficial talks have been had earlier. However, so far our major obstacle for joining one was the bad standing of the Gentoo Foundation with the IRS. Now that that is hopefully out of the way, we can start actively working towards it.
But why would we want to join an umbrella in the first place? Isn’t having our own dedicated Foundation better? I believe that an umbrella is better for three reasons:
- Long-term sustainability. A dedicated professional entity that supports multiple projects has better chances than a small body run by volunteers from the developer community.
- Cost efficiency. Less money spent on organizational support, more money for what really matters to Gentoo.
- Added value. Umbrellas can offer us services and status that we currently haven’t been able to achieve.
I’ll expand on all three points.
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Why proactively clean Python 2 up?
It seems a recurring complaint that we’re too aggressive on cleaning Python 2 up from packages. Why remove it if (package’s) upstream still supports py2? Why remove it when it still works? Why remove it when somebody’s ready to put some work to keep it working?
I’m pretty sure that you’re aware that Python 2 has finally reached its end-of-life. It’s past its last release, and the current version is most likely vulnerable. We know we can’t remove it entirely just yet (but the clock is ticking!), so why remove its support here and there instead of keeping it some more?
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Gentoo Python Guide
Gentoo provides one of the best frameworks for providing Python support in packages among operating systems. This includes support for running multiple versions of Python (while most other distributions avoid going beyond simultaneous support for Python 2 and one version of Python 3), alternative implementations of Python, reliable tests, deep QA checks. While we aim to keep things simple, this is not always possible.
At the same time, the available documentation is limited and not always up-to-date. Both the built-in eclass documentation and Python project wiki page provide bits of documentation but they are mostly in reference form and not very suitable for beginners nor people who do not actively follow the developments within the ecosystem. This results in suboptimal ebuilds, improper dependencies, missing tests.
Gentoo Python Guide aims to fill the gap by providing a good, complete, by-topic (rather than reference-style) documentation for the ecosystem in Gentoo and the relevant eclasses. Combined with examples, it should help you write good ebuilds and solve common problems as simply as possible.
Gentoo Python Guide sources are available on GitHub. Suggestions and improvements are welcome.
No more PYTHON_TARGETS in single-r1
Since its inception in 2012, python-single-r1 has been haunting users with two sets of USE flags: PYTHON_TARGETS and PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET. While this initially seemed a necessary part of the grand design, today I know we could have done better. Today this chymera is disappearing for real, and python-single-r1 are going to use PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET flags only.
I would like to take this opportunity to explain why the eclass has been designed this way in the first place, and what has been done to change that.
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