Not the GWN, Release 2

Not the GWN

We're not in any way related to the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter (GWN) or as it is known now, the GMN. Although inverting the W to be a more grounded M is a radical step and gives the acronym a much more youthful and dynamic look we don't like it that much. An "O" would have made it look much rounder and mature. Also, adding a small "e" at the end would have made it look much more Web 2.0 and stuff. And who can claim that "GONe" is a bad acronym?

The Gentoo motto contest

In the past there have been many suggestions for a Gentoo motto. As far as we are aware there has never been an official one. So we are looking for some suggestions for an inofficial motto - last time's community winner seems to be "Because we can". Two candidates we found are "We suck less" and "Scratch YOUR itch (but not in front of me, you pervert)". We're going to ignore all suggestions sent in and proclaim a random winner in the next Not the GWN. Oh, and if you think "At least it's not Debian" is funny please become a hermit. It's not.

Gentoo staffing needs

If you did not read last weeks GWN (or read Not the ... or not the read ... anyway ...) you may have noticed some suggestions on how to help Gentoo. Here's a more specific list of teams and herds that would appreciate some help. So, for all the altruistic supergeniuses reading this, here's your chance to make a difference. These teams really need some support, and it's people like you that can help. For great Justice!
For great Justice!, borrowed from icanhascheezburger. Thanks!

Gentoo Jokes

Zwei peanuts are walking down der Strasse ... Nein! Nicht! Nein! No! Haha! Sorry, zis was ze wrong joke. It is not funnay.

"How many gentoo developers does it take to change a light bulb?"
"Two: one to change the bulb and the other to field bugs from users who think it really should be screwed in with USE="knife" and not "hand""

Alternative answer: "Unknown. It was estimated that a five-member committee of lightbulb maintenance would be the right number. However two of the members resigned and were replaced with two others. After that other members resigned and were not replaced. The remaining group pondered which wattage should be chosen for the replacement lightbulb or if they should outsource lightbulb maintenance to an even bigger group of people who would probably have some knowledge of electric engineering and shopping among them. In the end, nobody bought a new lightbulb even though they promised the matter of darkness would be solved within a few days. One member of committee justified this by him living on another continent where lightbulbs adhere to an incompatible standard. Half a year later when the lightbulb was still out most of the committee had went AWOL except for one resigned member who sincerely said he was sorry for his inability to fulfil or make any progress towards his grand plan for the lightbulb.
So five (or seven) was not it. Other numbers will be tried shortly after the committee of building maintenance comes to a decision."

Found in this forums thread

Interview: Evil Compile Person

With lots of luck and some bribes in the form of beer and two bags of catnip we were able to track down and have a short interview with Evil C. Person. Some people might know this character from the Gentoo Bugzilla where he is quite visible as an incessant bug reporter.

Can you describe yourself in a few words?

Well, like, I like to compile stuff and things. And portage makes that kinda easy. So I compile stuff. And it fails. Then I, like, report it.

How many packages have you compiled? How many bugs did that generate?

Like, on AMD64, I compiled almost 8800 packages without problems. A bit more on i686. Hehe. And, uhm, all in all that causes lots of errors. Like, people fix and close bugs at a nice rate, and some are really cool. Dude ... they just fix and fix and fix ...
Still I managed to break the SPARTAAAAAA limit of 300 open bugs. But they are getting decimated nicely (Huhu, decimated... yeah ... about 30 died within a day. Hehe.)

With that amount of bugs filed, is there an end in sight?

Ah well, like, yeah, I'm at about 5% failure rate of packages. That's like 2% of real failures, maybe. Rest is mostly USE-deps aborting a build. Like, "I need php with zomg wtf and aargh USEflag". So like now I'm mostly done compiling everything once. Not many bugs left that way, but I have a few amusing ideas. Mwahaha. Phear me!

Tips and Tricks: Perl

#!/usr/bin/env perl
my$ox0=0xFA;my@oxO;my$oxO=join(' ',('A'..'Z')[rand 025]);for(my$i=1;$i<="$ox0";$i++)
{my$oxO=join('',('A'..'Z','a'..'z','a'..'z')[rand 077]);for(my$f=int(rand(8)+1);$f>=0;$f--){$oxO=
$oxO.join('',('a'..'z')[rand 025]);}unshift(@oxO,$oxO);}print"$_ "foreach@oxO;print"\n";

There, that was easy :)

Gentoo in the Press

With the revocation of the Foundation charter, drobbins' offer to get things moving and all the other things this catalyzed Gentoo has seen a nice presence in the press in the last $timeunit. There's of course many more, but our editorial team was lazy and tells you to use a search engine of your choice to find more results.
Gentoo-Wiki.com has a confused article infested with trolls and a general dose of confusion, that's a good source if you desire a strong feeling of "WTF?!?"
But in the end, all your Gentoo are belong to Community, and a great "Obey Justice!" from Grant Goodyear points at things getting better all the time ... doo doo dah doo ...

Developer Corner: Testing package dependencies for correctness

An often overlooked and under-tested item are package dependencies. People often assume that because it works on their system the dependencies of a package must be correct. But testing is tedious. So how can we motivate them to check?
Here's a rough draft of little helper scripts to do it:
create-chroot
mkdir testing
mkdir binpkgs
wget http://funtoo.org/linux/amd64/funtoo-amd64-2008.01.12/stage3-amd64-2008.01.12.tar.bz2
tar xvjpf stage3-amd64-2008.01.12.tar.bz2 -C testing
mount -o bind /dev ./testing/dev/
mount -o bind /proc ./testing/proc/
mount -o bind /usr/portage testing/usr/portage
mount -o bind binpkgs testing/usr/portage/packages
cp /etc/resolv.conf testing/etc/
cp /etc/make.conf testing/etc/
cp ./test-compile testing/
test-compile:
#!/bin/bash
emerge -uNDv system
emerge gentoolkit
revdep-rebuild
emerge -uNDv system
emerge --depclean
emerge --buildpkg --oneshot "$@"
emerge --depclean
emerge --onlydeps -k "$@"
emerge --oneshot "$@" && emerge --depclean
So now create-chroot.sh makes you a nice usable chroot environment. You may want to adjust paths, especially the location of the chroot and the stage used - you may not wish to use amd64.
If you run
chroot ./testing/ /test-compile.sh $package
now it should test $package. And if it fails that may be because you did miss something.
The rather strange abuse of depclean, buildpkg and onlydeps will only keep all explicitly stated DEPENDs around, plus the RDEPEND of those, and so on, but if there's an implicit assumtion of a dependency it'll die.

Quote of the week

I'm curious why it was decided to change the name to GMN? I understand that there hasn't been enough material or volunteers to provide a weekly newsletter so the frequency needed to be changed. But, why even commit to a monthly release schedule? I can already see the forum posts... "The GMN should be called the GYN".

Statistics

Here is the location of a statistics-only GWN with all the information the last 4 months lacked.

Public Service Announcement

Sexual Harassment is no good