> On 23 Feb 2017, at 22:21, R0b0t1 wrote:
>
> However it's gotten to the point where not even building on-device
> works. I'm experiencing breakage in a lot of core packages that may or
> may not be related to portage. What is the best way to ask for help?
> The users on the forums and IRC do not seem to really know how to go
> about solving some of the problems or do not have the time, and I'm
> not sure it's polite to open up a bunch of bug reports on
> https://bugs.gentoo.org. What seems to complicate this is solving some
> of the issues looks like it will take knowledge only the developers of
> the corresponding software have.
I've taken bugs upstream in the past, including with gcc and glibc.
I've also filed bugs with bugs.gentoo.org, but response times can be variable
in my experience. If you file a bug about something minor for a package that a
dev happens to be interested in it'll probably get picked up quickly, but the
Gentoo devs don't have the manpower to fix everything quickly.
One of my bugs was for how gcc handled --march-native on the AMD K6-2 CPU (in
the Cobalt Qube 3) - it was misdetected as an Athlon or Duron, gcc created
binaries with an instruction unrecognised by the CPU and hence packages
compiled fine but crashed as soon as you ran the program (I noticed this with
vim, soon after I installed the box). I found a couple of ways to document what
was happening, posted for help on the gcc mailing list and someone posted a
patch within a few weeks.
Once I confirmed the patch worked, it was added to the gcc tree and was in a
new release within another few weeks. It wasn't the quickest experience I've
had getting help from an open source developer - when I had a problem with
dovecot its developer had a patch (which worked) for me to test the next day -
but no-one was rude to me or made me feel unwelcome. I'm no-one of importance,
but the gcc list helped me, fixed my bug and treated me as good as anyone else.
Of course the Gentoo devs are just as helpful, but they don't normally spend
their days fixing compiler bugs. Better IMO for you to take the problem
upstream yourself, and then when it's fixed open a ticket on bugs.gentoo.org
saying "this is the problem, it's fixed in release 1.2.3.4 of gcc, please add
this to the tree ASAP as it's needed for arm64". IMO this is a good was for
people like us to contribute to the distro.
I'd expect everything you need, at least for an initial report, is in the
emerge logs - surely all they do is dump the compiler output to a textfile? So
you're taking the compiler output to the authors of the compiler - that's what
they need to see in order to help you and fix problems with their program. It's
helpful that you Gentoo is a fairly vanilla-upstream distro.
Stroller.
