[gentoo-dev] Re: /etc/udev/rules.d nightmare - orphaned files in /etc
Sven Köhler skoehler at upb.de writes: Hi, i had some orphaned files in /etc/udev/rules.d. Namely 40-fuse.rules and 60-fuse.rules. The files were never removed, since they are protected - aren't they? So that is _very_, _very_ unpractical, because the older your gentoo gets, the more of such orphaned files you get. Something similar (orphaned HAL policy preventing USB automounting) already has bitten some users recently, including me: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-518094.html BTW, I really like the pace of changes in udev and hal. At least one can see that the projects are live and kicking :-) That said, it would be nice if portage/whatever took care of this so users wouldn't be forced to mess with the udev and/or hal policies... Regards -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
Richard Fish wrote: I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders, developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision? I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places? The problem I see is that for Gentoo the releases are not really useful milestones for most projects. A release is really significant for a few core packages, but what is the real downside for users if Xorg 7.2 is stabilized one week after a release? Outside of the fact that they have to compile it themselves instead of using the GRP package...not much that I see. After using Gentoo for a good while I appreaciate very much the constant development policy, which prevents the need to upgrade my system to new releases. I've seen one Ubuntu user dist-upgrading its installation - it went with some problems, and they were substantially bigger than I'm having doing occasionally emerge -avuD world. But to be honest, stabilization of packages was not my point. ((BTW, stable X.org, KDE or GNOME would IMO delay the release for a week, so users wouldn't need to upgrade in such a short time frame - but that's what I think)) I was rather thinking about bigger, user-visible changes. Obviously a big version bump of widely known and used package would fit this category, too. Good news could include, for example, new stable kernel + udev (with better support for [many-nice-features]), GNOME/KDE/XFCE/etc, even easier installer, Gentoo-branded themes (Grub, splash, gdm theme, wallpaper, icons, colors (?)), stable porthole, improved portage... These are the things people are looking for - better, faster, easier. Opportunistic? Yes. Drugery for developers to come up with such a list and then hold their word in time? Yes. Is it needed at all? IMO, yes. For a distro like Ubuntu, a release is very significant, as it is the platform that users will be running for the next 6-18 months. And for Gentoo it's about 6 next months where new blood, umm.. new users /the beloved newbies ;)/ come to the project based on the reviews in news sites. I, for example, got to know about Gentoo after reading a good review on the site I was visiting quite often (linuxnews.pl). When I took a look at the Handbook by the first time I was sold immediately. I was thinking for a long time about installing LFS and only the time was an issue. Then here came Gentoo and my world changed... for better. Having said that, releases are targeted mostly for new users. Release media become more and more filled with features and are more user-friendly than ever (GNOME running from LiveCD, graphical installer, and so on). Lots of *visible* changes (even though they are minor or trivial) buy new hearts and minds for Gentoo. Do you now see what I've meant? I'm not imposing that Gentoo development should depend on a time-based milestones but new releases of installation media do happen and are needed. It would be easier for journalists, newbies, etc. to compare Gentoo against other distros if some kind of list of features that would-be-nice-to-have before every release existed. Do you think Ubuntu roadmaps would be useful without being tied to a release? Of course not. But that's exactly why people know beforehand that Dapper would contain one list of features and be stable, while Edgy (advertised as developers' dream) can be somewhat rough but most probably will contain another list of new and exciting features. Example [1]. Or could project status reports (as discussed here recently) fit the same bill? Thanks for pointing this out. Need to re-read the archives. With best regards, Wiktor Wandachowicz [1] Upstart in Universe http://www.netsplit.com/blog/work/canonical/upstart.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: The Age of the Universe
Simon Stelling wrote: Edgar Hucek wrote: I know my tools but not necessarly the normal user who wanna use gentoo and is ending frustrated. If the users are too lazy to read the documentation, why should we care about them? Because we risk that Gentoo may receive the user-UN-friendly label and become irrelevant in the long run? I know it ain't gonna happen, but still. Both Edgar and you have some valid points. He refers mostly to the out-of-box experience, which includes compiling GNOME and its dependencies at the install time. With USE=accessibility enabled, which makes perfect sense for people with disabilities. And then the first-ever Gentoo installation breaks on the speech-tools and festival. How would *you* feel in such case? You OTOH bring to the table a fact that developers shouldn't be that much concerned with the stabilization/testing of packages before new release of installation media. But new releases *ARE* targeted specifically at new users and it's them who suffer the most. Next to it is the reputation of Gentoo and its developers. Edgar's call was targeted mostly at releng and QA teams, who should poke developers to decrease number of similar problems. I maintain a bunch of Debian/sparc, Debian/i386, Gentoo/amd64, Gentoo/x86, Solaris/sparc, Ubuntu/i686 boxes and mind you, out-of-box experience at install time means A LOT. More respect to the users = more respect to Gentoo. Regards, Wiktor Wandachowicz PS. I'm already on the CC list of bug #116030 for the same reasons, but I've been mostly quiet because I do know my tools ;) But OTOH I've been already running Gentoo for a while -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: Democracy: No silver bullet
Donnie Berkholz wrote: When I think about where Gentoo was when we turned into a democracy years ago, and where Gentoo is now, I don't see much of a difference on the large scale. We lack any global vision for where Gentoo is going, we can't agree on who our audience is, and everyone's just working on pretty much whatever they feel like. When I joined, Daniel Robbins was in charge, period. Seemant Kulleen and Jon Portnoy were basically his lieutenants. What Daniel said was what happened, and woe to anyone who angered him. This generally worked out pretty well, but _as Gentoo grew, it didn't scale_. Everything significant still had to go through Daniel for personal approval. While I'm not a developer, I was thinking along similar lines some time ago. Or make it like a year ago? Good leadership is important in many undertakings of the real life, including (but not limited to) open-source projects. After some time spent using Gentoo some comparisons against other known projects naturally came to my mind. Linux kernel, Debian, PCLinuxOS - they were first to think about. From these I concluded that in some brilliant cases a project with a strong leadership, not fearing to make unpopular decisions sometimes, progresses ahead nicely in the long run. From the aforementioned three, Debian with its social contract, goals and the way it is maintained is an exceptional phenomenon. It seems to me that the key to a success lies in a good, respectful leadership, trust and good communication. I'm sure that at least some of you read kerneltrap, but this recent topic concerning NetBSD future (or lack thereof?) has some sad truths in it [1]. While I do not fear end of the Gentoo project (far from it!) I too sense some lack of a general vision of where is it going now. Not delving into philosophical considerations of democracy vs dictatorship I feel that the current democracy approach Gentoo utilizes makes sense. But there are many examples of healthy democracies, where citizens are seriously involved in the process (western Europe countries, in general) as well as weak democracies, where even though the process exists citizens feel powerless (like in some new democracies in eastern Europe countries). I suppose that there is a way that Gentoo can follow, only that its leaders, developers and users need to see it clearly. Is there a publicly visible page that contains current goals for new releases? Where all sub-project leaders could add their own goals, coherent with the general vision? I couldn't find it, but maybe I haven't looked in the right places? And if it doesnt' exist I am convinced that it should be created, say, for 2007.0 release at least. Ubuntu has such plans, for one, so all developers and users are able to learn what to expect from the upcoming release. It also serves as a check list of what the expected goals were and what the outcome was. Maybe I should raise such concerns to the User Representatives first, but the overall flow of ideas was IMO rather worth to be sent to the mailing list in a complete form. If you feel otherwise, I apologize. With best regards, Wiktor Wandachowicz [1] NetBSD: Founder Fears End Of Project http://kerneltrap.org/node/7061 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: GPL and Source code providing
Mivz mivz at alpha.spugium.net writes: Then I have got this one question, I don't need a answer too. How free is free software if you need a lawyer and a expensive server just to be able to publish your addition under your own name? This is free as in *freedom*. GPL says that you cannot restrict the freedom of other people. So, ditributing the modified, GPL-ed programs without the access to the source code with said modifications restrict others from seeing how it was achieved and tinkering with the code (i.e. improving it more). Sorry, but there's no free lunch (as in *beer). If you build upon the work of others and it happens that this work is under GPL, then you either must behave (give access to the source code) or write your own version of the software from the ground. And compiling a distro from the source code and creating a binary download, CDs, upgrades, etc. *is* a derivative work IMHO. The same is for single packages that are under GPL. I mean, if someone is able to create its own web page and put a binary download(s) of its work, then how hard is it to comply with the GPL license and just put some more links to the source code? It's like the (old?/new?) Decalogue: You shall not steal. Read this: Richard Stallman, interviewed at GPLv3 Conference in Barcelona, by Sean Daly http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060625001523547 The interesting thing starts at 07:36 of the transcript. Also read this, if you haven't done so before: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html Cheers, Wiktor Wandachowicz (SirYes) PS. Sorry for the noise, but I thought this issue needed clarification. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: GPL and Source code providing
Mivz mivz at alpha.spugium.net writes: But if your modification is on top of the Gentoo system and your build your own Live cd, like Kororaa, do you have to provide all the sources of all the program's on the live cd? Well, if you *modify* programs that you want to put on said live cd (like adding your own patches, different from the official ones found in portage) then IMO you should at least give access to the patches. If you aim to create a completely separate distribution, thus using your own repository, web site and portage tree (for example), then it makes perfect sense to provide a full source code as well. But in the case of Gentoo offshot which intends to use existing Gentoo infrastucture (mirrors, sources, etc.) I'd suggest to consult the original copyright (copyleft?) holders, that means Gentoo officials. Just in case. Cheers, Wiktor Wandachowicz PS. I'll stop posting now as IANAL and the above are only my own opinions. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: GWN Comments
Patrick Lauer patrick at gentoo.org writes: I'd like to propose some form of ability to post user comments to GWN stories. I suppose a full blown CMS system would work, (Ab)using a blog for that might work Well, the Gentoo Forums users are already used to its commenting system. Especially with the BBCode in place, which allows a nice formatting of the messages. Blog is a different thing with different rules. Who would like to administer that? but for the ease of time I'm suggesting that perhaps we open up a GWN section on the forums and post the text of the GWN (or perhaps each section) in a new thread each week and allow users to write comments. Sounds like a good idea. This is a COOL idea! A global forum with a text-only copy of current GWN would enable more users to actually read it. And adding comments would be even more beneficial. I think that it would be best to place it near the top of forums listing, like this: - Assistance - News Announcements Read this before submitting your first post to any forum - Gentoo Weekly News The GWN summarizes the key events in the Gentoo project each week. This forum contains a copy of - ... Adding a sticky thread that explains what GWN is, where it is located [1] and where to get an RSS feed for GWN [2] would be quite fine too. The only problem could be to prevent creating topics in this forum by regular users, and giving the ability to post comments only. Additionally, a script for automatically converting GWN to the forums BBCode format, with a link to the original version (with pictures, mostly) would probably be needed as well. This would be similar to the existing GLSA announcements [3] (GLSA's are both sent via e-mail and posted to the forums right now). I'm positively sure that it wouldn't be that much work, with the obvious benefit for the users. More forum posters would definitely read GWN this way, because, frankly, not every Gentoo user is subscribed to the GWN newsletter. But OTOH they do visit forums more frequently. Best regards, Wiktor Wandachowicz [1] http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/gwn.xml [2] http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/rss.xml [3] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewforum-f-16.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] UTF-8 encoding and file format of manuals
Respectful Gentoo developers, I would like to ask what do you think about UTF-8 encoded manual pages? I mean, the files like ls.1.gz, which are used by honorable man program. Recently I attacked the problem a little and before submitting any patches/proposals to Gentoo bugzilla I'd like to know your opinions first. Disclaimer: for daily use I have LANG=pl_PL.UTF-8 and LC_ALL=pl_PL.UTF-8, but the original issue is of a more universal nature. Back on subject. ISO-8859-* 8-bit encodings are fine and most localized manuals use them. However, there are some examples where UTF-8 manuals are installed as well. Namely, newest portage uses linguas_pl by this means: $ emerge -pv portage [ebuild R ] sys-apps/portage-2.1_rc3-r3 USE=-build -doc LINGUAS=pl In effect, a translated manual pages are added to the system. The problem is that they use UTF-8 encoding. Having both man-pages-pl and this version of portage installed gives unexpected results. This way man ls prints all the letters with correct encoding, but man emerge does not. On the other hand, if man is configured to display UTF-8 encoded manuals correctly, all the other manuals print funny characters instead of desired output. I wrote a simple script [1] which checks all installed Polish manuals by using file program. For pl locale it produces currently about ~70kB of text, and for default locale it's about 458kB. After grepping for all occurences of UTF I've found out that only the newest portage's manuals are in UTF-8 (pl), plus: flow.1, gnome-keyring-manager.1, ImageMagick.1, Encode::Unicode::UTF7.3pm (but I think they are false positives, anyway). While it's easy to contact Polish translators of the portage's manuals so they could correct them, the problem will have to be solved sooner or later. UTF-8 encoded manuals will probably occur with higher frequency, and some general resolution should be made. After some discussion on the Polish forum [2] I've learnt about groff deficiencies with UTF-8 handling. However, a wrapper exists [3] that helps somewhat in that matter. But it also requires that all manuals be unified wrt. encoding: *all* ISO-8859-* or *all* UTF-8, no compromise. So I don't know what course to take. Summing up: * UTF-8 manuals: good or bad? * how to handle mixed encodings of manuals? * should man and/or groff handle UTF-8 better? * should an eclass function be created to aid in correcting the encoding of manual pages while installing them? Any constructive comments are more than welcome! Best regards, Wiktor Wandachowicz (SirYes) [1] http://ics.p.lodz.pl/~wiktorw/gentoo/checkman [2] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3352287.html [3] http://hoth.amu.edu.pl/~d_szeluga/groff-utf8.tar.bz2 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: et_EE locale and language of error messages
Marc Hildebrand zypher at gentoo.org writes:
What do you think? LC_ALL=C in portage or not?
- Stefan
Well this problem (localized error messages) exists since I know linux
and the solution has always been use per user locale settings and keep
LC_ALL=POSIX or =C as a system default.
Maybe we should just update the docs?
A bug regarding this issue has been filled:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134032
From the current state of portage code, the patch in question while useful is
not necessary. Portage already defines in /usr/lib/portage/portage_const.py:
USER_CONFIG_PATH= /etc/portage
EBUILD_SH_ENV_FILE = USER_CONFIG_PATH+/bashrc
which is then used in /usr/lib/pym/portage.py:
mysettings[PORTAGE_BASHRC] = EBUILD_SH_ENV_FILE
and consequently in /usr/lib/bin/ebuild.sh:
if [ -f ${PORTAGE_BASHRC} ]; then
source ${PORTAGE_BASHRC}
fi
So, if the documentation is updated (and possibly advertized in next GWN), no
change (even small) is necessary.
And while I can voice my (user's) opinion, I *really* like the idea of forcing
the sane emerge environment by this one-liner. So in fact I'm torn apart...
Wiktor Wandachowicz
(SirYes)
--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo theming during bootup
Having a Gentoo theme here helps to associate the theme with the distribution. Nobody forced me to do this. I just like it :) In his blog (http://www.livingwithpenguins.blogspot.com/), Steven O. writes in the Fresh WORKING install of Gentoo: One of the coolest things about the Fluxbox guide is that the guy that wrote it included all of the Gentoo theamed items, so after you get it setup you can have a *true Gentoo box*. Guess I'm not the only one... :-) Regards, Wiktor -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo theming during bootup
Carsten Lohrke carlo at gentoo.org writes: How do you want not to enforce it? Have you actually read the proposal? It's quite sensible and is entitled: Proposal: Integrated boot themes on LiveCDs and installations I suppose that the themes would be defaulted to on the LiveCDs and optional for regular installations - typical emerge-if-you-need-it situation. Still, the basic question is: Why!? Because it may lead to the creation of well thought out and integrated themes for several programs that are able to use them? Including more robustness and/or functionality similar to the one that the gfxboot provides? There's no benefit for the user, who will choose whatever theming he wants anyways. I for one would be delighted if there was such new set of themes. I'd use them right away. To be honest, I tend to match my bootsplash theme with the one that's used on the current LiveCD. Somehow I feel I need that when people come and ask me What Linux distro do you use?. If it happens that they ask when I boot my laptop they can watch the nice graphical progress (bootsplash) and finally my gdm theme. Having a Gentoo theme here helps to associate the theme with the distribution. Nobody forced me to do this. I just like it :) Imho it's superfluous To be honest, there are not so many themes out there that are worth installing. A good set of Gentoo themes is one of the best ideas I've heard for a long time. (!) and therefore wasted time. I understand your point. But are you sure that spreading the negative energy and killing the idea is best? No progress is done without breaking rules and working against the inertia of habits. I for one favor to stick with that, what upstream provides. I guess you should be able to leave with that. No one would force you to switch the splashes/background/themes unless you wanted it. And while we are at it, is there any chance that the bug #124920 could be taken into account while creating new gdm theme? Regards, Wiktor -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
