Over the time, a number of developers have had problems following the Gentoo OpenPGP key policy (GLEP 63. In particular, the key expiration requirements have resulted in many developers wanting to replace their key unnecessarily. I’ve been asked to write some instructions on managing your OpenPGP key, and I’ve decided to go for a full blog post with some less-known tips. I won’t be getting into detailed explanations how to use GnuPG though — you may still need to read the documentation after all.
Copyright 101 for Gentoo contributors
While the work on new Gentoo copyright policy is still in progress, I think it would be reasonable to write a short article on copyright in general, for the benefit of Gentoo developers and contributors (proxied maintainers, in particular). There are some common misconceptions regarding copyright, and I would like to specifically focus on correcting them. Hopefully, this will reduce the risk of users submitting ebuilds and other files in violation of copyrights of other parties.
The ultimate guide to EAPI 7
Back when EAPI 6 was approved and ready for deployment, I have written a blog post entitled the Ultimate Guide to EAPI 6. Now that EAPI 7 is ready, it is time to publish a similar guide to it.
Of all EAPIs approved so far, EAPI 7 brings the largest number of changes. It follows the path established by EAPI 6. It focuses on integrating features that are either commonly used or that can not be properly implemented in eclasses, and removing those that are either deemed unnecessary or too complex to support. However, the circumstances of its creation are entirely different.
EAPI 6 was more like a minor release. It was formed around the time when Portage development has been practically stalled. It aimed to collect some old requests into an EAPI that would be easy to implement by people with little knowledge of Portage codebase. Therefore, the majority of features oscillated around bash parts of the package manager.
EAPI 7 is closer to a proper major release. It included some explicit planning ahead of specification, and the specification has been mostly completed even before the implementation work started. We did not initially skip features that were hard to implement, even though the hardest of them were eventually postponed.
I will attempt to explain all the changes in EAPI 7 in this guide, including the rationale and ebuild code examples.
Optimizing ccache using per-package caches
ccache can be of great assistance to Gentoo developers and users who frequently end up rebuilding similar versions of packages. By providing a caching compiler frontend, it can speed up builds by removing the need to build files that have not changed again. However, it uses a single common cache directory by default which can be suboptimal even if you are explicitly enabling ccache only for a subset of packages needing that.
The likeliness of cross-package ccache hits is pretty low — majority of the hits occurs within a single package. If you use a single cache directory for all affected packages, it grows pretty quick. Besides a possible performance hit from having a lot of files in every directory, this means that packages built later can shift earlier packages out of the cache, resulting in meaninglessly lost cache hits. A simple way to avoid both of the problems is to use separate ccache directories.
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GLEP 73 check results explained
The pkgcheck instance run for the Repo mirror&CI project has finished gaining a full support for GLEP 73 REQUIRED_USE validation and verification today. As a result, it can report 5 new issues defined by that GLEP. In this article, I’d like to shortly summarize them and explain how to interpret and solve the reports.