Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

If you’ve not come across it before, NoMachine’s nxserver is the closest things Linux has atm to Microsoft’s Terminal Services / Remote Desktop feature. With every release, it’s getting closer and closer to being a real equivalent (the upcoming v1.5.0 looks like addressing the main missing feature).

If you don’t want to pay for support (or you’re not an opensource dev; these people generously give license keys out for free folks!), then there’s always Fabian Franz’s GPL’d alternative, FreeNX. On Gentoo, I always make sure that the nxserver-freenx package is a drop-in replacement for NoMachine’s commercial package, so that you can choose which one you prefer to use.

I’ve spent the evening catching up on long-standing bugs assigned to the NX Herd. We now have FreeNX-0.4.0 in the Portage tree, and I’m finally happy that the commercial packages for nxserver-1.4 can be unmasked. I’m still waiting to hear back on some test reports, but hopefully everything made it into CVS tonight

A big thank you to Jon Severinsson for all the bug fixing he’s been doing over the last few months.

After changing this line in php5-sapi-r2.eclass from:

inherit eutils confutils libtool

to

inherit eutils confutils libtool flag-o-matic

Portage started spitting out a QA Notice:

QA Notice: ECLASS '$ECLASS' inherited illegally in '$CATEGORY/$PN'

which you can find in /usr/lib/portage/bin/ebuild.sh around line 1422.

There’s no valid reason why my change violates Gentoo’s QA policies. I haven’t managed to find any official documentation about this, and Ciaran’s doc doesn’t yet have much about it, so I thought I’d spend the evening digging into it in the hope that it’ll prove useful to others.

If you’re reading this on Planet Gentoo, click the link at the top of this posting to see the full article.

And if you don’t want to read it all, the solution to this problem is to run:

ebuild foo.ebuild depend

to rebuild Portage’s metacache, which makes the warning go away.

… investigating and writing up the inherit() QA Notice. The popfile and PHP bumps will have to wait until tomorrow night.

Heh - I pop onto IRC to tell everyone how disappointing Revenge Of The Sith is, and before I can say anything, I’m collared for fixes needed to popfile and mod_php. Serves me right

The popfile bump is a version bump & a change in deps thanks to Perl’s strange numbering for SQLite v2 support, and the mod_php bump is to fix an ELF problem w/ text relocations.

Big thanks to both mcummings and solar for their help.

Brian, I agree that Ciaran’s claim against DevRel is serious.

I think it’d be great if someone from DevRel could respond to Ciaran’s accusation. He has moved this dispute to the public domain by writing a posting which he knew would end up on Planet Gentoo. He must be confident of his allegation to have done this; can you imagine how would people feel if it turned out he’d deliberately made a false allegation in this way?

I was intrigued by Ciaran’s recent post on Planet Gentoo that he’s been told by devrel that he’s not allowed to say that Pathspec is vapourware, or that we don’t have an active OpenSolaris port.

Unfortunately, a recent power outage hosed my local mailhub (I’d forgotten it still used reiserfs; not any more it doesn’t!!), so I can’t send emails to all involved to ask questions directly. But I shouldn’t need to. The Free Software and Open Source community was built on the idea of that the code is king. If you can’t show me the code, then it either doesn’t exist, or it’s not our idea of “open”.

I went looking for code, and here’s what I found.

… Gentoo doesn’t need to provide a binary distro. Shipping something like Fedora, or Ubuntu, but calling it Gentoo, doesn’t really fit with the concept of a metadistribution.

There are plenty of other groups out there who are either already shipping a binary distro based on Gentoo, or who have announced their intention to do so. We should leave them to get on with what they do best, whilst we put our efforts into what we do best.

What Gentoo does need is to support these groups (and any future potential groups) by providing and demonstrating strong support for creating and installing binary packages that really work. Binary packages need to be installable without a Portage tree being present. In effect, a repository of binary packages should be treated as a Portage tree in its own right, just one without the ebuilds that we’re all familiar with. The binary package installer needs to be something that doesn’t require Python’s large disk footprint. USE-flag dependencies are needed to trap and prevent incompatible packages ending up on the same box at the same time.

The package installer is only part of the jigsaw puzzle. Binary distro groups are going to have a hard time going with Gentoo if our package tree isn’t binary-friendly. (Are? I know for a fact that at least one group is looking at moving away from Gentoo, precisely because of this problem). Developers need to think about and test their packages with binary packages in mind. To use one of the packages I work on as an example, a binary mod_php package could be for apache1 or for apache2, depending on what mod_php was compiled against. Should we be maintaining two separate packages - php-apache1 and php-apache2 - to ensure the binary packages make sense? mod_php is just one of many Apache modules in our package tree; binary packages for these too will have the self same problem.

If we’re binary-friendly, we’ll make more friends, and help make Gentoo a good choice for future distributions to base themselves off. We don’t need to be jealous of Fedora or Ubuntu’s funding, “cool” factor, or column inches. We can be happy doing what we do. And what we do best is provide the simplest way to build systems that are exactly tailored to whatever Gentoo users choose.

I’ve added mod_php-5.0.4 to Portage. It only works with the latest Apache packages from the Apache Refresh project. Ebuilds for dev-php/php and dev-php/php-cgi will be added tomorrow evening.

The remaining tapes of speakers from this year’s Gentoo UK conference have been imported into Pinnacle. Hopefully there’ll be time tomorrow or Friday night to get it edited.

Gareth’s talk about Flash Linux has now been loaded off the camcorder and into Pinnacle. His talk is the longest that we filmed; after an hour and six minutes I ran out of tape for this one.

At the rate things are going, it looks like I should have all the footage imported and ready for editing on Friday evening.