Gentoo Installer Program.

• Held Meetings Where We:
• Discussed current status of project.
• Discussed old bugs that needed to be fixed as of last semester.
• Assigned bugs.
• Fixed backend esearch function so that it did not return a package when none were found.
• Submitted Paragraph to OSDL contest.
• Slightly modified direction of project based on the OSDL category submitted to.
• Made a qpkg_commander for getting the list of files a particular package has.
• Met and discussed some finer grains of detail of what we are doing with our project.
• Got the computer with the subversion server back up and running, seemed to be loose memory or something, took out the memory and put it back in and it booted up fine.
• Added more functionality to the qpkg_commander

Gentoo-Dev Mailing List Lurking

• Signed up for Mailing List. Yay.
• Received 312 messages over a period of 10 days. Averaging 31.2 messages per day.
• There are a few main posters that you see over and over, but there are also quite a few other people who post in certain types of threads, or just post very rarely.
• Big thread on migrating xorg-x11 from /usr/X11R6 to /usr.
  Another thread which was much bigger than it ought to have been was with someone wanting to put an IRC bot into #gentoo which had a few little commands you could issue it, but also did some logging and had statistics. Which inspired a big debate on privacy versus it being a public channel, yadda yadda yadda.
• xorg-x11 stuff mentioned above.
• Back Issues are archived by a few places, see This Site for details.
• See the above site for instructions.
• Most of the topics were not really hard-core issues, I think most would be able to get a good gist of what is going on, but I think most people would not care about most of the things that go through this list.
• If you are a gentoo developer, want to be a gentoo developer, or just want to know more about what goes on behind the scenes of the gentoo development world, and keep abreast of the issues, this would be the list to join.
• There were a few posts by fairly new users, but not as much as you might see on most lists.
• One user asked a very basic question and was promptly referred to wikipedia for an answer. There were some threads which got a bit flamy, mostly due to misinterpretations by one or more parties, but for the most part it seems a pretty low-key list.
• Interesting thread on the speed of emerge search. In our portage gui, we had opted to use esearch because the built-in search in emerge was so slow, it seems that the implementation in emerge was returning a big huge list rather than single entries. One person submitted a patch which cut the time into a third. There was also talk in that thread about Updating portage cache also taking a long time and that a similar solution could be used to speed this process up as well.
  Thread also mentioned eix as an alternative, will look into it to see if it is significantly better than esearch.
• Another interesting thread on runtime vs devel packages similar to redhat, where you can install just things that are necessary for running rather than things necessary for compiling, useful for servers where you don't want to give an attacker too much to work with. Talk ranged from whether this was even a worthwhile feature, whether it would be implemented in each and every ebuild (thousands of ebuilds to modify), or to use an INSTALL_MASK type thing to not merge certain types of packages to root.
• I've started to notice a general theme among threads that there is a lot of code that really isn't the most efficient, there are a lot of known bugs that developers have to work around, some big, some little ones that get pushed aside because nobody wants to pester them about fixing the little ones when the big ones are still out there.
• Lots of discussion on allowing for GTK3 in the USE flags and etc. About how the USE flag gtk is used for gtk1 while gtk2 is used for gtk and some people think that gtk1 should be used for gtk1 and gtk should be used for any version of gtk which allows for gtk3 gtk4 etc to be used. Others think it should stand the way it is just adding gtk3 in for gtk3.
• Big thread on sed and the ordering of arguments and flags, since POSIX states the order of flags, while GNU doesn't and between different OSs (such as between linux and SunOS) what features of sed are implemented and whether they are using the GNU way or the POSIX standard. How they are using gsed explicitly on most systems to get the GNU sed rather than the POSIX standard sed.
  Before this thread I didn't realize that POSIX and GNU had such differences, I thought that POSIX was a good standard that most of the GNU stuff stuck to, I didn't realize how much GNU went outside of the strict bounds of the POSIX standards to allow for easier use, I'm glad they did, I can't imagine having to remember what order to put flags in, I hate how some GNU programs like ls don't allow flags after the main arguments, I want to do ls -al and it always complains that -al isn't a directory, I can't imagine having to remember whether it's -al or -la

Z/VM GUI

• Had a meeting where we discussed the current state of things, about the possible futures of the zServer, about where we stood where we first last left off.
• The Z appears to be down, at least cannot be accessed through telnet, so work is on a bit of a standstill.
• The Z has been commissioned to be sold, so this project will be discontinued indefinitely :(