Thu Mar 10 18:28:39 CET 2005

Strange bugs

After some discussion (no, I do not overclock etc. etc.) I'm still not sure what causes Bug 84640
Symptoms are "random" crashes that we have narrowed down to portage merging gcc. Bugs like that should not happen, and when they do they should be fixed - alas, my sarcasm detector was redlined by some people who think it is funny when their userbase gets upset because "it doesn't work!!!!"

I'm building a base system in a chroot now, let's see if that helps. Grrrr.

Posted by Patrick | Permalink

Mon Mar 7 19:18:07 CET 2005

Some random thoughts

In the time since FOSDEM I have the feeling that Gentoo has woken from a paralysis. Many good ideas are being pushed around, some old ideas are taken out of hibernation, stuff happens. So what's missing?
  • cvs read-only access for everyone - work in progress
  • portageAPI - there's been some discussion. not much feedback yet
  • patches.gentoo.org - nice idea, would need some elaboration
  • tinderbox - work in progress (as it has been for ~3years)
  • stable binary package support - tinderbox gives us GRP sets for free ...
  • bounties - I've thought about this a lot, but it's a political minefield
  • merchandising - we don't have anything useful a.t.m.
  • a "PR" section on our website so that reporters etc. know who to ask, where to get logos, ...
In other news, the Script repository will soon get a major facelift. We'll get an "official" planet.gentoo.org.
What's missing now is (I'm serious!):
BUGWEEK !

One week of only bugfixing, no new versions if avoidable, version bumps where useful. The rate of growth of bugs has been consistently about twice the number of closed bugs ... I wouldn't mind a Bugweek that might get us some really good publicity as we show that Gentoo is commited to making stuff work.
Any feedback appreciated!

Posted by Patrick | Permalink

Tue Mar 1 19:45:03 CET 2005

FOSDEM

So .... I'm back from FOSDEM. That was a really interesting weekend.
We had our nice booth there, a dev room with enough space and enough food in /dev/snack. I even gave a small talk on the "Features of Portage". Here you can see me collecting power for some rpm bashing:

I especially enjoyed talking to the Wikimedia people. If I find the time I'll help with the creation of a Gentoo Wikipedia LiveCD. As an added bonus, I got Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, to wear a Gentoo T-Shirt:

I think it was a really good weekend, I even got together with karltk and genone for a spontaneous portageAPI / Tinderbox design session. That should save us a few weeks of emails ;-)

Posted by Patrick | Permalink