Your Gentoo overlay hosted on Gentoo machines like this one — wouldn't that be sexy? Just click here to open a bug (already set to product "Gentoo Infrastructure" component "Gentoo overlays") 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.

Songbird Singing A New Tune without support for GNU/Linux

I recently found myself with repeated use of quote environments like this:

\begin{quote}{\sl
  To call two elements ``independent'' is to say the chances
  of one failing are not linked in any way to the chances of
  the other failing.
}\\\hspace*\fill\citep{downer-failure}
\end{quote}

So it's an ordinary quote plus

• slanted style around the actual citation
• a note on the author

By creating my own custom environment fancyquote I could reduce duplication and at the same time make it more readable. I wanted to be able to write it like this, instead:

\begin{fancyquote}[\citep{downer-failure}]
  To call two elements ``independent'' is to say the chances
  of one failing are not linked in any way to the chances of
  the other failing.
\end{fancyquote}

If it had worked I would had stopped at this:

\newenvironment{fancyquote}[1][]{%
  \begin{quote}%
    \begingroup\sl%
}{%
    \endgroup\\
    \hspace*\fill#1%
  \end{quote}%
}

What's the problem here? Arguments (#1) cannot be used in the second half of environment definitions.

It may not contain any argument parameters. [1]

What? No really. Now that I know that an environment definition makes two commands \begin envname and \end envname it even makes a bit of sense to me. On a side note: \begingroup and \endgroup are replacement for curly brackets that work in syntactically unbalanced manner. So still, I wanted that environment. In the end I came to using a savebox to give the second half access to my original value of #1:

\newsavebox{\fancyquotesavebox}
\newenvironment{fancyquote}[1][]{%
  \savebox{\fancyquotesavebox}{#1}
  \begin{quote}%
    \begingroup\sl%
}{%
    \endgroup\\
    \hspace*\fill\usebox{\fancyquotesavebox}%
  \end{quote}%
}

In contrast to the first approach now this does work.. as longs as you don't run into a need to nest it. If you know how to use a proper stack for this I'd be interested to hear.

Introduction

Today, April 3rd, 2010 is bugday again. If you didn't know what bugs to work on last month — not this time!. A few developers have taken the time to mark 117 bugs as candidates for bugday using the bugday flag in Bugzilla — thank you! Below is what they marked, presented from three different points of view.

Please keep in mind that for now the tables below are static snapshots , live stats may be ready next month: consider this as a preview. You can always get a Bugzilla-style live listing from http://tinyurl.com/bugday-candidates, though. Thanks for taking part in bugday!

Bugs to start with:

• By class
• By package
• By herd

Bugs by class

Bugs by package

Bugs by herd

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

.. WHAT?

Next bugday is around the corner: Saturday, April 3rd 2010. As previous bugdays have been suffering from the bad selection of bugs for bugday I want to ask you to help select bugs for bugday not that we have technical means to, please read on. If you have editbugs permission on bugs.gentoo.org you can marks bugs for bugday by now. Thanks Robin!

Requirements for a bugday bug

Just one thing: The task behind it must be solvable without developer access (excluding the final commit)

Good candidates

A bug is a good candidate if it belongs to any of these classes:

• any kind of easy fixes
• compile errors
• documentation bugs (smaller ones)
• requests for ebuilds (maybe point user to Project Sunrise)
• typos, SRC_URI/HOMEPAGE changes
• sandbox violations
• segfault and crash bugs
• bugs in need for working/non-working confirmation

If you can do a better list please make me replace it ;-)

Marking bugs for bugday

There's a new flag called "bugday". For each bug you can set it to one of four states:

• + — Yes, good candidate for bugday
• - — No, please keep this bug of bugday
• ? — Decision requested (good choice if you're unsure)
• — Unknown (a space)

Bugs in so far

To see what bugs have made it into the bugday so far you can have a look at either

• http://tinyurl.com/bugday-candidates (usual web view)
• http://tinyurl.com/bugday-candidates-ctype-rdf (XML for scripts)

Thanks for reading.

First: There are several tools called svn2git: this is about the svn2git of KDE up on Gitorious. So you're about to convert a larger SVN repository to Git, say 15,000 revisions. You check out the latest revision, run some find command or fire up a file browser to get a better view of file hierarchy in there. Then it strikes you:

• What if the layout didn't look like that all the time?
• Are there any sub projects hidden in there that you want to ignore or extract to a separate repository?

You may end up using "svn ls" or something peeping in here and there not being really sure until you've seen it all. What a nightmare. When converting the repository of Gentoo's Portage I wrote a simple tool in Python to do that work for me in automated fashion: I called it svneverever. It runs through all history collecting additions of directories. In the end it presents a tree of all directories ever having existed in the repository. Let's do a quick example. First we create tiny but suitable sample repository:

# Create and checkout dummy SVN repo
svnadmin create example-store
svn co file://$PWD/example-store example-workdir
cd example-workdir

# Make revision #1 for /trunk
mkdir trunk
touch trunk/readme.txt
svn add trunk
svn ci -m 'Add /trunk'

# Make revision #2 for /project7/trunk
mkdir project7
svn add project7/
svn mv trunk project7/
svn ci -m 'Move /trunk to /project7/trunk'

Let's feed that to svneverever:

svneverever file://$PWD/../example-store

Its output will be:

Analyzing 2 revisions.... 50% (r1)... 100% (r2).

/project7
    /trunk
/trunk

(The output for Portage was more complex, have a look at all-portage-repo- dirs-ever.txt if you're curious.) With that information at hand it's easy to write a svn2git rules file for it:

create repository project7
end repository

match /project7/trunk/
  repository project7
  branch master
end match

match /trunk/
  repository project7
  branch master
end match

or this one after unification of the matchers into one:

create repository project7
end repository

match (?:/project7)?/trunk/
  repository project7
  branch master
end match

(For Portage we ended up with these rules (v3).) On one hand svneverever is a working tool already, on the other some of you will want more from it. As of now I just won't be able to handle potential feature request but I hope to have time to review and accept sets of clean patches. So if you have patches for me: please contact me. Last but not least a big THANK YOU to the authors of svn2git. It's powerful and fast: 110 minutes faster than git-svn on the history of Portage over here. Thank you (in order of current commit count, descending):

• Thiago Macieira
• Thomas Zander
• Torgny Nyblom
• Anders Kaseorg

One last time: here's the link to svneverever.

Yannick/Ycarus has been running a very usefull website for some time (http://gpo.zugaina.org/; GPO = Gentoo Portage Overlays) allowing you to browse and search ebuilds from all overlays known to the layman registry. Recently he added the trees gentoo and funtoo to the database. So while there may still be ebuilds flying around on the net or on bugs.gentoo.org that website finally allows access to the majority of ebuilds in one place. Awesome!

First of all thanks to everyone participating in this bumpday!

In this report:

• Quick summary
• Bump count per person
• Packages by person
• Packages bumped

Quick summary

• First place goes to betelgeuse with 9 bumps.

• Second place goes to jlec and tove with 3 bumps each.

• Third place goes to armin76, caster, matsuu, nirbheek, spatz, ssuominen, vapier with 2 bumps each.

• 37 packages have been bumped in total.

This analysis is referring to bumpday 2010-03-20.

Bump count per person

Packages per person

Packages bumped

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