Wed Feb 24 13:15:38 CET 2010

Backup Awareness Day

Backup Awareness Day is a great idea. Celebrate it too!

Posted by Patrick | Permalink

Sun Feb 14 11:06:22 CET 2010

Why being a package maintainer sucks ;)

Yesterday I got annoyed enough with Virtualbox bugs to finally fix the issues I had (kernel header changed location in 2.6.33) and bump the xf86-{video,input}-virtualbox drivers too. That went well, nothing unexpected ... but just as I was done I was notified that someone had filed a bugreport. 3.1.2 just committed, mind you, and there's 3.1.4 appearing. The timing was really perfect, like a scene out of a movie where you see the protagonist going "Oh no, not again" - but I bumped it to get it out of the way.
What's left to be done is quite intriguing, there's some new features that users have enabled in the ebuilds, at a first glance it looks really neat, but I haven't had time to integrate these nice changes yet. I'm really happy that there's enough people to work on VBox so I only have to cherrypick the patches. I wish it was that easy for other packages ...

The change in kernel 2.6.33 is quite simple, but causes nice compile failures. I did hit it with vmware-modules too, so that got fixed already. If you have any package failing, here's a brute-force fix that has wored for me (but I'm aware that it's a slightly bit dirty and needs some manual review to avoid breaking anything:
        if kernel_is -ge 2 6 33 ; then
                # evil patch for new kernels - header moved
                grep -lR linux/autoconf.h *  | xargs sed -i -e 's:<linux/autoconf.h>:<generated/autoconf.h>:'
        fi
In other news, perl 5.10 is finally unmasked in gentoo. And with rakudo we already have a perl6 interpreter available.

What's going to happen next? :)

Posted by Patrick | Permalink