Month: December 2009

Beware : non-Gentoo post ahead, feel free to skip if you don’t care, I won’t hold a grudge against you.

By all measures, I can safely say I’m not really a Christmas-y fellow. I hate Christmas shopping because I’m really bad at it (or is it the other way around?), I give the rest of my family a hard time at Christmas since I never know what I want and I’m really hard to shop for (took me 3 years to find an MP3 player that matched with my needs).

And usually, just a few days before Christmas, I’ll turn into the Grinch: people on the subway carry even bigger bags than usual, people on the streets are way more careless than usual, ads and commercials everywhere overload my senses with Christmas references, etc.

So there, Christmas is not my favorite time of year.

However, there is something I love about Christmas: food. Point in case, I just had left-over foie gras along with a glass of Sauternes.

I’ll just say that after my light lunch, I positively love Christmas.

Edit: To all the people who are trying to ruin my Christmas left-overs by trying to make me feel guilty about how foie gras is produced: take a step to realize that all industrialized agriculture works like this (especially eggs), not just foie gras. So unless you are 100% vegan, don’t even try. If you are vegan, then just forget I even talked about the foie gras and have a glass of Sauternes, I’ll happily share the rest of my bottle.

Gilles had me promise to write a follow up to a post of his, and since I don’t want him to call me a liar, here goes.

The Gnome Team (of which I’m officially a member, but I guess it’s mostly honorary these days) is looking for fresh blood. Between our day jobs, the growing size of Gnome and slacking recruits (/me waves at Arun, Nirbheek and Romain :>> I’m just kidding, you guys rock!), we’re having a hell of a time making proper releases. You may not realize, but a full Gnome release is something like 60+ packages to bump, build and test.

So if you’re a Gnome user, here’s how you can help us.

First of all, the Gnome overlay. That’s where upstream’s odd-numbered releases go before we put them in portage. As of today, that’s Gnome 2.29. If you want to start helping, then grab the overlay with layman and start testing. Update the overlay every day and report bugs. First to us on IRC, then upstream if needs be.

Second way to help us, the Gnome overlay. Yeah, like #1. Except this time, you can pitch in by doing bumps as they come in. The best way to check new releases is Gnome’s ftp mailing list. You can do bumps locally and then push your changes to github or send us git-formatted patches.

Of course, come talk to us so that we can better explain how our ebuilds are supposed to work and how we do commits. Aside from me, no one has swine flu so the chances of getting sick are close to none.

Like most projects, if we like your work, we’ll gladly grant you commit privs to the overlay. That’s how Gilles and I first started.

Third way to help, bugzilla. That one’s easy. Pick a bug, help us close it. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve coding. A message telling us that you can still reproduce this bug several months after it was reported is good, forwarding bugs upstream is good, sending us a patch is good, closing a bug as a dupe of another bug is good, any help is good.

The big problem we (Gnome team) have with bugzilla is that we just have too many bugs and we just can’t keep up.

So any help with the “easy” bugs means the other Gnomers can spend time on the harder bugs.

If you want to help or if you have any questions, come see us on #gentoo-desktop on FreeNode.

Cheers