Patrick's playground

Moar KDE things

Patrick — 2008-07-18T23:29:41+02:00

So, KDE overlay is still metric tons of fun. With KDE 4.1 RC1 in and most things working there's not that much to do at the moment. svn is slowly showing the first sign of 4.2 as a few things are breaking every now and then.
KOffice released an alpha 9 yesterday, and Civil added that to the overlay before I could do it. So in turn I had to outdo him by adding a live koffice ebuild. That seems to mostly work, so next I'll try to see what's wrong with the split ebuilds I've been experimenting with. Most likely some really small irrelevant piece I have not yet noticed, who knows.

We're all waiting for RC2 / final of KDE 4.1 now, that'll be the next big commit fight. If you want to discuss, annoy or do other things with us feel free to join #gentoo-kde4-live on irc.freenode.net.

In other news, portage has grown parallelization support in svn. You can now tell it how many ebuilds to process in parallel or limit it to a certain system load. I guess that will be one of the most popular features with end-users as you can now max out your dual quadcores all the time every time. Thanks Zac!

KDE 4 RC1

Patrick — 2008-07-15T20:43:13+02:00

I've been surprised today by the release of RC1 of KDE. As a reaction we've bumped the ebuilds in the kdesvn-portage overlay and are testing them as well as we can. Looks like a few things are still broken, but that should be fixed soon.

Because plasma has had a bugfixing spree a short while ago it works on all my machines now, so I'm actually using kde-svn at the moment. An I like it. What I do notice though is that my "old" 2Ghz X2 is slowly becoming obsolete, I can't keep up with all the kids and their quads when it comes to compile speed. Anyone in the mood to donate a Phenom? ;)

Benchmurks

Patrick — 2008-06-12T22:06:09+02:00

I've been playing a bit with my newest toy and generated some shiny graphs. Here's the first one:

And here's a second one:

So what does it mean? Very easy. The first graph is the install time of three applications. Guess who.

The second graph is the time to do two operations. Again, guess who does what.

Quite funny, isn't it?

How to screw your users

Patrick — 2008-06-02T16:26:37+02:00

So, all ~arch Gentooists, be careful if you are using an older kernel - there's a great coreutils update (6.12) that depends on a function that only 2.6.22 kernels and later provide. It will kill your system in quite amusing ways so that you are forced to reinstall an older coreutils version and/or boot a newer kernel.
Symptoms are e.g. "touch: Function not implemented" and can be found in bug 224483.
grrrrrreat ....

Braindamage

Patrick — 2008-06-02T10:53:35+02:00

* Error: dev-db/mysql-5.0.60-r1 failed.
[snip]
* The die message:
* Your machine must NOT be named localhost

Dude, next you tell me I can't name my machine piece_of_junk ...

I really don't like ebuilds telling me what to do and what not :)

Breaking apache - We do what we must, because we can

Patrick — 2008-05-27T12:05:28+02:00

So, like, I've been using apache a bit. At work. Because we have legacy apps that NEED apache and tomcat and other horrible things you should not have to know about.

Now here's the One Meeeeeeeelion Dollar question: Why did the Gentoo Apache maintainers decide to kill the apache2ctl binary and link the init script to it instead? That way you lose many functions and wonder why the output for loaded modules somehow ... looks like a confused init script. It's a pointless invasive change that kills functionality for no reason.

So once I've managed to work around this extra braindamage to a braindamaged application I'll try to find out who thought this was a good idea and see if I can convince this entity to change its mind.

*sigh* I'm getting to old for this stuff ...

Cognitive dissonance

Patrick — 2008-05-22T09:18:44+02:00

I just realized I misunderestimated one thing -

People like spb, Misanthrop (oh wait, Phil, not Mis) and a few others were dissing Gentoo at every chance they had quite simply because they like it too much. See, the problem is that they committed themselves to a project they knew was not going to be liked by many and which pushed them away quite a bit from the rest of the userbase.
So the only way to not feel bad about this is quite simply to badmouth Gentoo. It's not their fault that they feel bad, but there's another factor.
They couldn't just leave Gentoo. They had to be kicked out so they have an external reason why it sucks so much.

And what do we learn from that? Who knows.

LOLGENTOO

Patrick — 2008-05-21T00:36:14+02:00

kekeke zergrush!

Bye bye larrythecow

Patrick — 2008-05-21T00:31:53+02:00

As you might have noticed I, like all other ex-devs, have been removed from planet larrythecow. So now I don't have an audience to think of, and I won't feel bad if I say bad words. Yey!

New Statistics

Patrick — 2008-05-04T01:46:20+02:00

time emerge paludis

real    141m13.965s
user    135m59.178s
sys     4m57.679s

time emerge portage

real    1m15.212s
user    1m8.604s
sys     0m6.580s

So I guess my new development machine can install portage around 100 times faster than paludis. Guess what I'll continue to use ...
And since I forgot USE="portage" again I can't even compare the runtime because it don't work, mon. It be broken ... (hint: EAPI1 is quite neat if you know how to handle it)

In other news, I'm guilty of evil sensationalism. (Oh noes!)
As Ferdy notices it's not a security issue directly which I've mentioned. But what noone seems to notice is how subtle and subversive it is ... it's a classical microsoft, executing data - which leads to the intellectual challenge of crafting the data in a way that causes some subtle things to implode a bit further down the road. Well, noone has actually found a way to use that, so we're safe. Right?
Meh.