A better ebuild workflow with pure git and pkgcheck

Many developers today continue using repoman commit as their primary way of committing to Gentoo. While this tool was quite helpful, if not indispensable in times of CVS, today it’s a burden. The workflow using a single serial tool to check your packages and commit to them is not very efficient. Not only it wastes your time and slows you down — it discourages you from splitting your changes into more atomic commits.

Upon hearing the pkgcheck advocacy, many developers ask whether it can commit for you. It won’t do that, that’s not its purpose. Not only it’s waste of time to implement that — it would actually make it a worse tool. With its parallel engine pkgcheck really shines when dealing with multiple packages — forcing it to work on one package is a waste of its potential.

Rather than trying to proliferate your bad old habits, you should learn how to use git and pkgcheck efficiently. This post aims to give you a few advices.

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Improving distfile mirror structure

The Gentoo distfile mirror network is essential in distributing sources to our users. It offloads upstream download locations, improves throughput and reliability, guarantees distfile persistency.

The current structure of distfile mirrors dates back to 2002. It might have worked well back when we mirrored around 2500 files but it proved not to scale well. Today, mirrors hold almost 70 000 files, and this number has been causing problems for mirror admins.

The most recent discussion on restructuring mirrors started in January 2015. I have started the preliminary research in January 2017, and it resulted in GLEP 75 being created in January 2018. With the actual implementation effort starting in October 2019, I’d like to summarize all the data and update it with fresh statistics.

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The gruesome MediaWiki API

I have recently needed to work with MediaWiki API. I wanted to create a trivial script to update UID/GID assignment table from its text counterpart. Sounds trivial? Well, it was not, as update-wiki-table script proves.

MediaWiki API really feels like someone took the webpage and replaced HTML templates with JSON, preserving all the silly aspects that do not make any sense. In this short article, I would like to summarize my experience by pointing out what is wrong with it, why and how it could be done much better.

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Verifying Gentoo election results via Votrify

Gentoo elections are conducted using a custom software called votify. During the voting period, the developers place their votes in their respective home directories on one of the Gentoo servers. Afterwards, the election officials collect the votes, count them, compare their results and finally announce them.

The simplified description stated above suggests two weak points. Firstly, we rely on honesty of election officials. If they chose to conspire, they could fake the result. Secondly, we rely on honesty of all Infrastructure members, as they could use root access to manipulate the votes (or the collection process).

To protect against possible fraud, we make the elections transparent (but pseudonymous). This means that all votes cast are public, so everyone can count them and verify the result. Furthermore, developers can verify whether their personal vote has been included. Ideally, all developers would do that and therefore confirm that no votes were manipulated.

Currently, we are pretty much implicitly relying on developers doing that, and assuming that no protest implies successful verification. However, this is not really reliable, and given the unfriendly nature of our scripts I have reasons to doubt that the majority of developers actually verify the election results. In this post, I would like to shortly explain how Gentoo elections work, how they could be manipulated and introduce Votrify — a tool to explicitly verify election results.

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