New XTerm. Yay!

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.

OpenAFS gets a much needed face lift

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.

This is why the lefties keep losing

Because they would do the same things as their counterparts on the right. Yep, they’d even sell their souls for the right price. Honestly, what do you do in a situation like this?

Here’s a guy (Brian’s ex-friend) who claims to be anti-establishment and wanting others to tell the truth, but he is unwilling and completely unable to do exactly that his own self. He can’t even write as himself (follow the links in Brian’s post, I’m not giving the faker any direct publicity, sorry). It’s exactly the sort of behaviour that Pete rants on about and then turns around and does. Which makes him what? A money-grubbing hypocrite in my book. It’s apparently not about the truth. It’s about advertising. And you know what else? It gives him as much credibility as the idiot commenters.

I am not a Jedi.

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..

Simon of Space

Now, back when I was in school, I’d read a a couple of Sue Townsend’s books. The unique thing was that those books are written like diaries or journal entries. While I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong with the first person perspective in a novel, it has to be done right, which is exactly not the way that at least one author I’ve read does it.

But, Cheeseburger Brown certainly does it right. Not only in his fiction, but also in his own journal entries, which come off like a story and suck you in (how voyeuristic of me), but also, and mainly in his new jourvel (how else would you combine novel and journal? oh, I guess you can call it blognovel, like CBB does), Simon of Space. Now, here is a piece of writing, an unfolding story, a live journal, that I’m hopelessly addicted to.

New Devs

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?

Evangelicals?

So, there’s a knock at the door, and your 7 year old child answers the door to be greeted by two finely dressed gentlement carrying a leaflet. So, when you come to the door to see who your young innocent is talking to, you chase them away in anger. They drop a pamphlet as they run (like girls) away.

And the title of the pamphlet? “Discover Your True Gay Nature”, and it talks about how great the gay lifestyle is, and shouldn’t they consider it now, while they are young.

Yeah, didn’t think so. I dare you, I defy you, I almost beg of you to find me ONE FUCKING example of ” the children who are being zealously evangelized by radical homosexuals.” Please somebody. What kind of delusions is the moral right coming under these days? Don’t even get me started about that stone thing, which seems to be completely forgotten.

Xterm, and um, kerberos, kinda

This past week, we released security updates for xterm. Kerberos got a bit of a clean up, and 1.4 finally got unmasked. That was fun. OK, so I need a favour. Can the people who’ve tried to use xterm-202 please report as to what went wrong with it? Like, the different behaviour in Gentoo, as compared to xterm-200. Please report in your comments to the blog, rather than bugzilla. The reason I ask this is that xterm-202 behaves really badly for me. And Thomas asked me to send him debugging output for both 200 and 202 weeks ago, but I haven’t had the time.

The nice thing is that at work, I’ve been learning how to deploy subversion and trac for a specific subset of our developers. Maybe we’ll get to show off how nice it is (I really like them both so far!), and the main development stuff can move over to those as well in the future? Here’s hoping. Also, started deploying OpenVPN. The first guinea pigs are trying this weekend. Well, we got some USB keys this past week, so I was able to generate certificates for people and then have them take those home on the keys (after they entered passphrases). I also generated some ssh keypairs for some people to remotely log in. Now, we can have remote access capabilities start to come back up.

More this week.

Finally, the end of Star Wars!

So, this weekend we hadn’t actually planned on going to see Episode III. We had, instead, planned on going to Charlestown and Faneuil Hall and stuff. Then the weather happened: it poured and oozed heat/moisture. Really uncomfortable stuff! As it turns out, three of us hated the weather, one of us did not. So the one who did not relented and we all went somewhere air conditioned: the theatre.

As fate would have it, I’d been reading Darth Vader’s Blog all week, so the timing was pretty perfect. Let me tell you, Cheeseburger/MFDH (the Darth Side’s author) has it right. He knows how a tale is to be weaved. And he reminded me of how much I loved Star Wars as a kid. And he did almost exactly the way that Episode 1 did not. Episode 1, in fact, made me avoid Episode 2. Moral, George Lucas is still a fucking hack, but Episode III was really good. I don’t know — maybe it was the darkness (relatively speaking) of the movie with respect to The Phantom Episode — kinda like how Empire was the best of the first 3 (and Jedi arguably the worst — gimme Pigs in Space if you want to give me muppets). Or, maybe it was the fact that now, finally, no more Star Wars movies! That’s a relief in itself, because we can collectively move on.

Hmm, no I’m not negative about it. Episode III definitely had a lot of moments. Some that I liked were:

  • Padme’s comment during Palpatine’s congressional speech — where she comments on liberty being lost to the sound of thunderous applause
  • yoda — so that is what all you all have been talking about in Episode II
  • Chewy
  • The 1 second of Millenium Falcon earlier on in the movie

Things I didn’t get (or at least, things which don’t really connect to the first trilogy):

  • Wherefore art thou, Han Solo?
  • How did Chewy and Han Solo hook up and become partners?
  • Actually, that’s all I can think of

Acting wise, Ewan MacGregor was great. I like him, and he did well in this movie. The kid who plays Anakin: can’t act. That’s not so bad I guess, coz the kid who played Luke couldn’t act either.

So that’s about it, for now. Epi 3, all in all, was not a bad movie at all.