Advancing Qt on Gentoo: qting-edge
1 Feb 09 at 16:34 | 
gentoo, overlay, qt | 
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Lately I’ve been very busy mainly with Qt related issues on Gentoo. We managed to resolve a good number of open bug reports, and finally came around to marking the split ebuilds for Qt 4.4.2 stable. This was quite a complicated issue, but has been made a lot easier with the recent improvements in dependency resolving in portage.
I also made an appeal for new staff members wanting to help out maintaining Qt and related packages in Gentoo. That got a lot more response than I expected, and as a result I started mentoring a few guys to become new Gentoo developers. Coincidentally there are several Greeks among them — it seems they can’t leave me alone! (FYI: I have lived in Greece for 6 years, did my university degree there, and had a long serious relationship with a Greek girl.) It is nice tho, to reminiscence about the good times I had in Greece, their whacky language and delicious food!
I want to make a special mentioning of Markos Chandras, who has become a very valuable member of the Qt team, and is now on the verge of becoming a full developer. He is a great help in squashing bugs and thinking about how to improve things. We have started a new overlay, called qting-edge
(a name that collaborator Christian Franke came up with), in which we develop new Qt ebuilds and eclasses. We also have ebuilds for the “live” git development version of Qt, and KDE’s patched qt-copy. And we add new applications using Qt4 to the overlay for testing.
It is still my ideal to assemble a light-weight Qt4 desktop, and this overlay is another step into that direction. The overlay contains x11-wm/antico, and while that is a promising project, it certainly isn’t ready for daily use yet. I’m hoping qlwm works better (it certainly is more mature), so that will be my next target. If you know a Qt4 project that you think is interesting for the overlay, or even portage, give me a shout!
Supporting Songbird
18 Dec 08 at 01:46 | gentoo, overlay, xulrunner | Add your comment
One of the Songbird developers wrote a good blogpost about the problems that distros meet when trying to support Songbird, an open source iTunes competitor. The post concentrates on Ubuntu, as one of the most popular distros, but the concerns raised there in essence are the same for all distros. We have our own bug open for this new package, and it’s not really going anywhere. For us a similar compromise as for other distros exists: we do have a songbird-bin ebuild in Sunrise overlay.
But nobody wants to maintain an extra copy of xulrunner, or backport Songbird’s patches to the system xulrunner (which is used by Firefox among other packages). The whole idea seems very Windows-like to me: take existing packages, patch them to bits, mash it together with your own application into one big binary package. This is certainly not the way things are normally done on the Linux side of things.
I would urge the Songbird developers to work with upstream (Mozilla in the case of Xulrunner) to get their patches accepted, or some other kind of solution to make Songbird and vanilla Xulrunner to work together nicely. That would make it a lot easier for us, and any other Linux distro, as well as the BSDs, to import this package into our official repositories and give it proper support.
In the comments to that post you can read that OpenSuse and Fedora have the exact same problems. With such a unanimous voice from the distributions, I would say the ball is now in Songbird’s court, if they care about Linux support.
To twitter or not to twitter?
20 Oct 08 at 20:08 | personal, social media | Add your comment
That’s the question.
I am an avid blog reader and IRC user (hello #gentoo-* !), and I dabble in my share of social media (Last.fm, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, YouTube), but not as serious. Now Twitter is all the rage, and so far I have not jumped on the bandwagon. But now I’m wondering if I’m missing anything. So to my readers that are using Twitter, and those that have tried it, I want to pose the question: is it worth it, or merely a huge waste of time? Is there anything to gain for someone like me, interested in free software, the blogosphere, and “alternative” music (mainly post-rock and prog-rock/metal currently)? Let me know your thoughts and experiences!
KDE 4.1 unleashed
10 Oct 08 at 19:40 | gentoo, kde | Add your comment
First of all I want to say kudos to everyone who worked on getting KDE 4.1 into the portage tree and ironing out issues. Just lurking (mostly) in #gentoo-kde, I have seen how people have worked hard to bring the best possible KDE-4 experience to Gentoo users. The past months have been a stressful time for our KDE team, and they deserve to be rewarded, now that all that has led to good results.
Even so, and notwithstanding the excellent work done by our devs and helpful users, I am of the opinion that KDE 4 is not yet up to the task of replacing the 3.5 version, both in terms of features and stability. I will keep using KDE 3.5 (and LXDE) for now. But I’ll give it another shot when 4.2 comes out.
For the time being, I’m masking kde-4.1 and related packages. Other people that are running an ~arch box, and want to keep just kde-3.5 and not also install the “upgrade” to 4.1, may be interested in my kde-4.1 mask file, that can be dropped in /etc/portage/package.mask/ (that’s why it is handy to have that as a directory, not a file).
It’s a penguin!
1 Oct 08 at 21:25 | gentoo, pinguins | Add your comment
image by Chris Pearson
Gentoo Linux is named after a penguin species. And Chris Pearson has a nice set of photographs of Gentoo penguins on the Falklands, over at Flickr. More info and pictures can be found in the corresponding wikipedia article. But being a good geek, you probably knew that already…
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RedHat developer Nick Clifton has started a series of monthly blogposts on changes in the GNU toolchain (mainly gcc and binutils). Interesting stuff!
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Berkano overlay starts using EAPI-2 and drops mpd
27 Sep 08 at 15:46 | gentoo, overlay | Add your comment
SMPlayer 0.6.3 was released the other day, and when I updated the ebuild I adapted it to use the newly approved EAPI-2 (this regulates what features ebuilds can use). To stay in sync with the portage ebuild I have updated the live ebuild in berkano overlay to do the same. Now what good does EAPI-2 do for you as user? The main feature that should immediately impact you, is use dependencies. This means the developer can specify in the ebuild the useflags a dependency needs to have. This is then taken into account when portage calculates the dependencies. You should get a message from portage right then, if you need to change your useflags. So, you will be informed immediately, instead of a package failing after all dependencies have been compiled.
This also means that for those new ebuilds that use EAPI-2, you will need to have a sufficiently up-to-date version of portage (>=2.2_rc11). If you are interested in learning more about the new features, or about the ebuild format in general, I have put a copy of the eapi-2 tagged PMS in my devspace, in both PDF and HTML format.
I have also dropped MPD and related ebuilds. Instead of berkano, you can use the mpd overlay, which has live ebuilds for a good number of mpd-related packages. In the meantime the latest release of ncmpcpp (an improved ncmpc fork) has been added to portage. If you need a commandline mpd client, you really should give ncmpcpp a go!
Arora and other additions to portage
8 Jul 08 at 00:14 | arora, gentoo, juffed | 5
As some of you may have noticed, I recently added a few more packages to portage. First of all I want to mention Arora, the Qt4 WebKit browser for which I already have a live git ebuild in berkano overlay. I am making snapshot ebuilds now, about twice a month, to make it easy for Gentoo users to keep up to date with its development. These ebuilds are hardmasked in portage at the moment, as Arora depends on Qt-4.4 which is currently still hardmasked. As soon as Arora makes an official release and Qt-4.4 will be unmasked, I will make an ebuild available for ~arch users. We’ll have to wait till Qt-4.5 though to use plugins like flash. (Users prefering GTK+ might want to take a look at Midori.)
I also added a few other Qt4 applications: QtScrobbler, a GUI for easily submitting a scrobbler log from your portable media player to Last.fm; and JuffEd, a nice editor with tabs and syntax hilighting, based on QScintilla. Lastly, I added SubtitleComposer, a KDE3 application for working with text-based subtitles (srt or ssa for example).
If there are any more applications hiding in our bugzilla, or in obscure corners of the ‘net, that you believe deserve to be in Gentoo’s portage tree, let me or another developer know. Personally my interests lie in the fields of sound, video, fonts and miscellaneous desktop apps (and, as you may have noticed, a growing preference for Qt4 based programs).
The joy of updates
13 Jun 08 at 00:47 | gcc, gentoo, glibc, libtool, pixman, updates | 14
Glibc-2.8 and gcc-4.3.1 were let loose on ~arch the other day, and this —as expected— caused some fuss. While gcc-4.3.0 had been sitting in p.mask, a lot of packages were tested and patches were applied, so this did not cause too much trouble. You can check bug 198121 to see that many issues are resolved, but a few remain open at this time. (The obpager one reported by me.)
We had no such advance warning for glibc-2.8 though, and this is more troubling because there is no going back after upgrading glibc. Fortunately there were not many issues, as can be seen in the tracker bug, with 12 of the 23 reported now fixed. I myself ran into netkit-rsh, consolekit, acpid and gamin. I got the go-ahead to commit the gamin fix proposed in the bugreport, so that one is taken care of. The other three I mentioned are still unresolved, although fixes do exist. I have therefore committed these fixes to berkano overlay, until the maintainers find the time and inclination to fix these packages properly.
Another, but more troublesome update was pixman-0.11.4. Seems innocent enough on the face of it, but it resulted in Xorg leaking humongous amounts of memory, eventually crashing, because the kernel would kill the out-of-memory process. Luckily I ran into someone on #gentoo who had pinned down pixman as the culprit, so I could do a quick downgrade. In the meantime the bug has been fixed, so the pixman upgrade is now safe.
And then there is also libtool-2.2, which has been let loose on ~arch a couple of times before, but been remasked because of too many bugs cropping up. There are still some packages not working with libtool-2.2, such as evince, proftpd and courier-imap. So if you use any of the apps that have a problem with this version, you would probably want to put =sys-devel/libtool-2.2* in your package.mask. Personally, I have updated, because all the issues that touched me are fixed.
While not strictly necessary, I did an emerge -e system && emerge -e world. And with the issues I ran into fixed, I am now content with a freshly updated and consistent ~x86 desktop system. (I had to “downgrade” my amd64 system earlier because ndiswrapper refused to work with 64-bits drivers, and I need wifi.)
And you? Did you have any interesting adventures with these updates? Is there anything still broken for you, or anything you would have liked advance warning about? Let’s hear it!
Berkano overlay news
14 May 08 at 10:46 | arora, overlay, qt, webkit | 4
Recent changes in berkano overlay:
- I cleaned out some cruft, packages that in my opinion weren’t useful anymore
- I removed the older versions of hitchhiker-sources, because the kernel devs recommend using only the latest, for security reasons
- I added a live git ebuild for Arora, the new Qt4 WebKit browser
Arora needs >=qt-4.4.0, which you can get here as a tarball for use in your local overlay (if it breaks anything, you get to keep the pieces), or from one of the other overlays that provide up-to-date or development snapshots of Qt4. I’ve been told qt-4.4.0 release should be added (as hardmasked) to portage later this week.
I’m actually looking into adding more Qt4 based applications, either to the overlay or portage. My goal would be to get together an as complete as possible desktop using just (or mainly at least) Qt4 programs. The most obvious missing part is a Window Manager. Cutebox was a promising project, but has been abandoned even before its first release. Anyone that would resurrect it and bring it to a useful form, would win a guaranteed spot in my personal Hall of Heroes.
