Hartwork Blog

Without further ado… the change log:

• Fixed: Catch keyboard interrupts (Ctrl+C) while running child processes properly
• Fixed: doctest error in tar overlay code (bug #327491)
  Thanks to David Abbott for reporting!

Simplified, Layman’s main job is to make calls to version control utilities. A larger portion of that invocation code has been rewritten: no more os.system(), no more shell interpretation in between. Here’s the change log since 1.3.4:

• Handle command line calls “layman” and “layman foo” better. Former now shows a usage summary while latter now reports an error.  Both of them kept quiet before.
• Replace os.system() by subprocess.Popen()
• Close stdin of child processes when run in quiet mode to avoid running into infinite and blindly interactive sessions.

Please report bugs for it.  Thank you!

By now my voice has almost recovered: I’m looking back on four days of non-stop explaining USE flags, summarizing a Gentoo installation, selling 28 shirts in total, coordinating this and that: LinuxTag 2010 Berlin/Germany is over.  All kinds of visitors accepted flyers — we were rather proactive on distributing them — and asked questions: young and old, with wheelchair and without, hobbyists and professionals, men and women.  Especially to meet three female Gentoo users was a welcome surprise: With less-than-we-wish-for female developers in Gentoo I didn’t expect to meet any; interestingly they didn’t seem to know that they were even wanted to join as developers.  I hope all of them will get in touch with us.

We took the opportunity to participate with the Projects Fast Forward — a collection of talks, 2 slides in 2 minutes each — on all four days, teasing visitors to find out more at our booth.  Florian Streibelt did great at the talks and the slides itself. On Friday the Förderverein Gentoo e.V. had a two hour meeting on fairgrounds. This German initiative — which has conceptual similarities to the US-based Gentoo Foundation — is funding flyers from member fees and provides other background services for the European community. Four new members joined during LinuxTag.  On Saturday rbu and I teamed up for an interview with RadioTux introducing Gentoo hosting of user overlays, the upcoming Git migration and changes in tone on communication mediums.  You’ll hear more on that soon.  Also Saturday was the day that a Swedish consultant who is part of upstream of the free Linux-based BIOS replacement Coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS) approached me articulating interest in joining as a developer in close-to-native German. He would be the fourth Swedish developer and I am optimistic he could be that soon.  His overlay “stuge” hit Layman earlier today.

On the non-Gentoo front I had a chance to shake hands with the new Debian project leader Stefano Zacchiroli, and to learn about QA processes in Debian from Jan Hauke Rahm.  The Kernel report talk was interesting, too.  Also part of my time explaining things went to Free Software, not just Gentoo.

Back to Gentoo.  As Gentoo is about choice we had a few visitors choose what flavor of sweets to re-fill the sweet distribution plate with: they will never forget the sweet taste of choice in Gentoo.  Also, the Gentoo badge compiling machine served demonstrating choice and compilation again, operated by Daniel Sturm most of the time.  Chithanh participated in the distro contest for us and also was part of the team winning the hacking contest. I assume with his Gentoo shirt on in that moment. The hopefully complete list of current developers who I met on LinuxTag is: lu_zero, idl0r, polynomial-c, dertobi123, amne, rbu, hollow, chithanh, a3li, vorlon, hanno.  Current Gentoo-GSoC student Andreas Nüsslein (rewriting webapp-config) also came by, Timo Antweiler said hello, too.  Thanks for the chocolate to lu_zero, thanks to the helpful and friendly LinuxTag team (especially Jacqueline), thanks to everyone helping out, especially to Sebastian Dyroff for joining with setup on Tuesday evening.  See you again next year!

Fotos in this post were taken by Florian Streibelt, license is CC-BY-NC-SA.

The mail below reached the PR team today. I felt like sharing it with you.

Dear Gentoo Team,

As a Linux user for the past 5 years, I’ve been messing around with running Linux as a server and desktop at home, as I have always appreciated what is in my opinion a superior outlook on computing by the open source community. Over this time, I have bounced from distro to distro, trying to find a system that didn’t hold my hand, and let me do whatever I needed to do. Only now that I’ve acheived a working installation of Gentoo have I found what I’ve been searching for. Your distribution allowed me to get only what I need, without any waste. Compiling everything from source, while counterproductive to my air conditioner, is truly the way to go (again, just my opinion). I also realized your team probably doesn’t get any messages that aren’t asking for help on some obvious mistake, or to address a bug. I’d like to take this moment to express my sincere gratitude, not only for the Gentoo, but for all the people who make it possible. I wish you well, you have my sincere gratitude and appreciation.

Sincerely,
Capri Gomez

I had a few minutes time to finally fix funtoo-ripper, the tool extracting Funtoo-only ebuilds from Daniel’s Funtoo tree into a dedicated overlay: pure-funtoo. Syncing has been disabled for quite some time due to errors I didn’t have time to fix previously. Should be running smoothly now.

In this report:

Quick summary
Bump count per person
Packages by person
Packages bumped

Quick summary

First place goes to chainsaw with 6 bumps.
Second place goes to tove with 5 bumps.
Third place goes to arfrever with 4 bumps.
34 packages have been bumped in total.

This analysis is referring to bumpday 2010-04-17.

Bump count per person

Packages per person

Packages bumped

PS: Yes, the code which generated this report is available.

Patent Absurdity — How Software Patents Broke the System

Your Gentoo overlay hosted on Gentoo machines like this one – wouldn’t that be sexy?

Just send a mail to overlays@gentoo.org providing

• Overlay Name (matching "^user/[A-Za-z0-9_][A-Za-z0-9_-]*$")
• An extra-short description
• Owner name and e-mail (that’s you)
• SSH pubkey you’ll be pushing with

That’s it. Once you’re running we can get you into the layman registry, too.

Intro

Besides writing ebuilds itself being a Gentoo developer is about quite a few other things: it’s never just configure-make-make-install. It’s actually true not only for Gentoo but for other distros, too. Read on.

So what is it?

So if you are still wondering what distro developers (sometimes called “packagers”) are doing I can recommend watching How to Build Applications Linux Distributions will Package (audio from 1:40 on) of PyCon 2009 by Toshio Kuratomi of Fedora.

As a result of all these other aspects there is a lot of room for challenge, interaction, and — dependening of your definition of that word — beauty. If you’re thinking by now: wow, cool, I want to join with this: please contact us! Drop by in #gentoo on Freenode for instance and say hello.

Besides…

The Gentoo tool mentioned in the end by someone from the audience is g-pypi, I suppose.
There’s a related Summer of Code task related to g-pypi, if you’re a student looking for paid fun in the summer.

One month is over, here’s an updated graph:

PS: The source code producing above graph is available.