Month: February 2007

I must admit, I’ve been experimenting with Ruby on Rails with increased frequency of late. Being heavily invested both in Java on the Gentoo and professional fronts, this seems almost like… treachery :>

I must say, it has been quite refreshing. It is quite a lovely development platform. I won’t go into details about a comparison to developing on the typical Java platform, as I’m sure there are plenty of those on the interblarg already 🙂

I decided this past weekend that would try to help out with Ruby on Gentoo, and so joined the ruby herd.

My first act was to bump dev-ruby/rails from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2. If you happen to be using it in any projects, you’ll likely want to update RAILS_GEM_VERSION to 1.2.2 in your config/environment.rb.

Lastly, pingu and I are trying to get some interest in #gentoo-ruby going. According to Flameeyes, people have tried in the past, but apparently it didn’t quite stick. Let’s give it another try, shall we? If you’re working with Ruby on Gentoo, feel free to stop by #gentoo-ruby on irc.freenode.net.

To follow up my previous post about unmasking Xfce 4.4…

Since then, I went through the process of upgrading from 4.2 to 4.4. Found a few kinks, mostly with files collisions caused by files moving from one package to another. These have been since worked out.

The major roadblock now is a number of broken dependencies for a few archs. These issues were conveniently glossed over while things are masked, but making repoman pretty upset the second they are unmasked.

So right now, all these issues have bugs filed for them, and now we play the waiting game. See the tracker for the latest breaking news.

The question of when Xfce 4.4 will be unmasked has been coming up with increasing frequency.

The default answer is… wait, for it, when it’s ready :>>

A more elaborate answer follows:

We have established a ‘tracker’ bug here. The team has been pretty good about keeping on top of bugs that come up with it, as in, there are no known issues currently.

So that means it’s ready, right? Not quite. Below are the outstanding issues I see:

In making haste to get a 0-day release of 4.4, some corners may have been cut. In particular, some of the xfce-extra packages are lacking the appropriate keywords, even though xfce-base/xfce4-extras depend on them. This is only for new xfce-extra packages, which have been added only relatively recently.

Icons seemed to have moved around a bit, as in, which packages owns them. This is a bit problematic, as it causes file collisions (enabled by FEATURES=”collision-protect”). While not critical to unmasking, it is pretty key for stabilizing, and the sooner it can be fixed the better.

The other things I’m concerned about is the upgrade path from 4.2 to 4.4. Some things that were extras in 4.2 are now part of 4.4. As a result, some xfce-extra packages have blockers against them. In other cases, xfce-extra packages haven’t been updated for 4.4, or otherwise are no longer maintained. These xfce-extra packages have blockers against them as well. The consequence of these point is that you will have to unmerge the packages that are reported as being blocked.