Gentoo Installer Program.

• Held Two 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.

Left to do:

• Define the API for having ebuild type things that could be used for any distro using patches for each distro to define distro-specific things.
• Implement more features that in our GUI to tailor to the OSDL contest.

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.

Left to do:

• Continue monitoring mailing list.

Z/VM GUI

• Set up a meeting time. Have not had time to actually meet, but will begin after break.
• 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.

Left to do:

• Kinda dependent on the fate of the zServer and whether it gets back up and running or not.