Category: Gentoo

Thanks, torkel, for your comment. You’re right about krb5-config that both mit- and heimdal provide. That binary (or script) just tells the CFLAGS and/or LDFLAGS that this specific krb5 was compiled with and needs to link to, etc, for programmes building against it. That make any sense? So anyway, as part of the kerberos-config script that I’ve referred to before (though I might have inadvertantly and VERY VERY wrongly called it krb5-config. Actually, I just checked and I didn’t, but I also wasn’t clear on the name of the kerberos switcher script. So it is officially going to be kerberos-config.

At this stage of the game, the way I envision (yes, I will test test test and have ebuilds available for you all to test) it is that mit and heimdal will both install renamed binaries (mit-krb5-config and so on) and then kerberos-config will install symlinks with the expected names for typical kerberos install to the specific implementation. If anyone has better ideas etc please do leave me a comment.

Yeah, ok, so if there is a top ten, I nominate this one to be in the top 5. It’s at least in the top 3 of the ones I’ve mentioned on these pages, doncha think?

So here’s an interesting challenge. Where I work, I had to put together a server that converts word .doc format files to .pdf files for some of our documents. After quite a bit of searching around (doc2pdf type programmes and scripts), I’d settled on linbox converter. Basically it’s a daemon that runs on a windows machine that has MS Office installed as well as ghostscript and python. A client sends a doc with a request for conversion into, for example, PDF format. The daemon receives, runs office and prints to, for example, a PDF file which it then sends back to the client.

The problem I’ve experienced is with this one document that has jpg pictures in it. Linbox-converter (and even printing to PDF from word itself) seem to fail utterly and completely. The result is some garbled 1.5K long file full of nonsense. Here’s the magic: openoffice (2.01) will do the conversion just fine.

Now the question: anyone out there know how one might send cmd line args to oowriter2 to do the conversion for me? That way I can write a daemon (kinda like linbox converter I guess) that’ll just wrap around ooffice2 for the conversions. Thoughts, suggestions? Note: it has to be programmatic/automatic/system addict- yeah.

As you know, KarlTK was in Boston this weekend. We had a truly great time talking. Karl’s been one of my Gentoo heroes for a long time, so it was especially cool for me. Boston’s weather showed karl quite a bit of its repertoire as well. From the unseasonably warm temperatures on Saturday to the blizzard like will-my-flight-be-cancelled conditions of Monday before he left, he got to see quite the range. No doubt he is impressed. Oh there was also the Harvard, and Freedom trail stuff, though we neglected to wow him with the Citgo sign. I guess he’ll have to return to Boston for that gem.

The only Gentoo dev missing from all these proceedings was rajiv, and hopefully he’ll be able to join next time. We have quite a little troupe of Gentoo people in the area, hopefully we can all meet in person a little more often.

Yeah, I’m installing on this flashy turion laptop from hp, and can’t get the audio to work. I just wasted Diego’s and Dan’s times with this.

The solution? Add myself to the friggin audio group!!

I’m going away for 2 weeks, bye.

I’ve been having trouble with xterm since version 201. Those of you that follow xterm in portage noticed 201, and 202 both in the tree, and then 202 (or basically everything above 200) got masked because of severe issues all around. Well, as of an hour or so ago, xterm-204 is now officially in portage (having gotten released by Thomas Dickey yesterday).

It works for me!! So I’ve left it in package mask, because I need people to test and report. Either leave me a comment or file me a bug or something.

Thanks everyone.

I blog so rarely these days. So, in the beginning (100 000 bugs ago) there was Daniel Robbins who got all the incoming bugs and he assigned them. Then Gentoo grew to 15-20 developers and I came along and we created bug-wranglers to handle the majority of incoming bugs (that are not recruiters, devrel or infrastructure related). As of a few weeks ago we created two new aliases: maintainer-wanted and maintainer-needed. The first is to put all the “this is a new package, I want it in portage, and optionally I’ve attached an ebuild” bugs. The second is for packages that are pretty much orphaned and unloved in the portage tree. Among the second list was openAFS. Then along came Stefaan De Roeck (don’t click, you probably can’t see that bug anyway). And he spent a few weeks combing through all the openAFS issues, and came up with two brand new ebuilds (no packages.gentoo link yet because I just finished committing them to portage for him) to fix all those issues.

A few things of note about the new openafs stuff (1.2.13 for the 2.4 kernel users and 1.3.85 for the sexy users (2.4 or 2.6, doesn’t matter). There are now three packages. That’s right, I said 3. We have openafs-kernel, which serves the purpose of not having to recompile openafs everytime you install a new kernel. Now, you have a much smaller compile of just the kernel module. Additionally, openafs itself now installs into FHS-correct locations (instead of crap like /usr/afs and /usr/visi or whatever that was). There are those who vehemently disagree with any sort of fhs-correctness for packages like heimdal and openafs, but I personally am not totally convinced. I’d rather see patches and correct ebuilds and problems with current ebuilds — like actual problems caused by current ebuilds.

So, that brings us to this: what about those legacy binary-only type programmes that expect openafs in its old locations???? Well, that’s easy: Stefaan created openafs-legacy to install all sorts of symlinks to bugger your filesystem up with /usr/afs and the like.

In sum, please test, please report.

Hey curtis! Nice to see you as part of gentoo. I’m looking forward to the redesign stuff with which you’re involved.

But I could be with your vote!! All kidding aside, Gentoo’s organisational structure is undergoing a change. This is the culmination of a lot of proposals from a lot of different people. The old TLP management structure simply did not scale well enough to retain its effectivity. It’s no secret that the Gentoo project has grown: very large very fast. It’s been doing this for about 3 years now, with no real signs of letting up.

Now, slarti did nominate me to be on the council. I’d like to thank him for thinking of me. I was a part of the initial metastructure: I believe I headed up devrel and qa and something else at the time. Devrel was quickly handed off to avenj who had been my parter-in-crime in being devrel before it officially existed. The QA project never really took off, despite my best efforts. Let me put that into perspective. I was heading up base, x11, and devrel which took most of my time. I took on QA with the express purpose of getting someone else to take it over. I tried a bunch of people (some of whom already actually _do_ qa), but nobody wanted it. Finally, out of the blue, Sven approached me and qa exists and is in process. The page I’ve linked to is just a placeholder, so don’t take it too seriously. In the next week watch for massive updates!

As for devrel, we did some things right and some things wrong. The wrongs are being fixed currently and I believe that the new and improved devrel under Deedra’s leadership will be a stronger and better one. It’ll probably never be a popular one though (at least not for the right reasons).

I’ll take QA as my failure to build a team. However, that’s been my strong point and the recurring theme throughout my time as a Gentoo developer. It’s what I do, it’s my M.O.: find what’s broken, find someone who can fix, put the two together, back away slowly.

Also, I’m the head (once again) of bug-wranglers, heading a team of two! Jakub of course is the primary bug-wrangler currently. So anyway, without getting too long winded — I’m not *highly* technical in the coding sense, but I have some pretty good ideas (cascading profiles, runlevels etc) and I can put together teams to make them come to pass (even if it’s two years after the fact).

May the force..

OK, so the devrel team just gained a couple of new recruiters. Kloeri is one of them. About time, I think, since he’s been doing BugDay since forever, and has a handle on the more talented users.

Speaking of being added to teams. A couple of months ago, as I was cleaning out bug-wranglers, I noticed that Jakub.Moc was helping me out on bugzilla with wrangling bugs, finding dupes, etc. You’ll recall (no you won’t, but I will) that that’s how I found vapier/Spanky and also mholzer/svrmarty. Vapier has since become the stuff of legend. Either that, or he transformed into a cyborg that never sleeps, somehow. So, anyway, as of yesterday, Jakub Moc is now an official bug-wrangler for Gentoo. Will he become a package maintainer, etc someday? Let’s wait and see while this unfolds.

Suka, the shots of openoffice look so incredibly enticing. I can hardly wait to try them out for myself (the gnome integration especially, as that is what I have rolled out at work). I hope ooo2 works on amd64 this time, though, without the -bin packages. Also, what’s ximian doing with ooo2?