Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

After 11 years of using Sendmail as my MTA of choice, I’ve finally made the switch away to something else. Why? Simply because I wanted to learn something different - and hopefully something not quite as arcane to configure.

I chose Exim over Postfix simply because I liked the look of how Exim’s configuration file works. It hasn’t taken very long to learn the basics, allowing me to hook in anti-spam, anti-virus, virtual domains and delivery to a local Cyrus IMAP server I’ve been using for some time now.

The only thing I haven’t quite got from my old Sendmail setup is the well-trained anti-spam filter. I’ve been a great fan of POPFile, but I’ve now switched to Spamassasin because it integrates better - and hopefully crashes less often than POPFile does.

Tomorrow’s job is to update my fetchmail rules to feed incoming email through Exim. And to find out why fetchmail’s stopped fetching email from my Demon account recently

My post earlier today about Gentoo needing to revisit how we get real news out to all our users has generated quite a few comments so far.

One of the things about the way Portage handles the contents of /etc is that, after every Portage operation, if you have config files that still need updating, Portage tells you. The same idea could be applied to news. We could make Portage check for ‘unread’ news items, and tell you how many you have left to read. We could also provide a utility for reading the news - let’s call this news-update for arguments sake.

emerge sync
<Portage syncs the tree>

* Important: 3 config files in /etc need updating.
* Type emerge –help config to learn how to update config files.

* Important: there are 5 unread news items.
* Type emerge –news to read news about changes to Gentoo.

Something like that

If there’s one thing that the recent Apache package refresh and the upcoming PHP 5 stabilisation has convinced me on, it’s that Gentoo just doesn’t have the right way to get important information out to users - and to the press.

It’s not that we don’t have established communications channels already. There’s the gentoo-dev mailing list, the Gentoo forums, Gentoo Weekly News (although some folks believe that shouldn’t be an official Gentoo organ), Planet Gentoo, and our own developer blogs. We’ve also got (and use) channel topics in IRC.

None of these are proving effective enough. News about both changes has been posted in all of the above places, and yet daily we get lots of users (and developers!) who still aren’t aware that either change was even planned.

I accept that there’ll always be a large percentage of users who either can’t, or won’t, follow all that’s happening in Gentoo. Just as there’ll always be a subset of users who believe that upgrading a package on a production server without first testing the upgrade is acceptable practice Those are users we probably can’t do anything for.

But the recurring theme I’ve seen in the correspondence I’ve personally received is that users aren’t sure where to go to find news about Gentoo. They either complain about the quality of our existing communications channels, or they complain that we have too many for users to reasonably follow.

The one place that we can guarantee that users take (some!) notice of is Portage itself, via the emerge command. Maybe it’s time for Portage to become the way we deliver news to our users?

Deedra, I think the problem with GenUX is that the company hasn’t yet won the trust of parts of the developer community. In many ways, the presence of GenUX is new ground for the developer community; I guess that it will take time for things to work themselves out.

My personal feeling is that GenUX needs to find its feet and its purpose to help with this. After months of a “coming real soon” binary package service, the company seems to have changed direction and gone for selling service & support based around Gentoo instead. Provided the company can do a competent job, I think this is a good move, and should be good for both the Gentoo project and the user community in the long run.

To build trust with the developer community, I think the company has to demonstrate that it can deliver a quality service that won’t blacken the name of the Gentoo project.

I think hiring Gentoo developers is a natural move for any company looking to provide value-added services based around Gentoo. I find it hard to believe that there really are any Gentoo developers naive enough to think that this shouldn’t happen. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, but I haven’t seen anyone calling for other developers to resign their posts from companies that sell services around Gentoo. So, whatever the issue over developers working for GenUX is, I sure don’t understand it yet.

At the moment, GenUX is in the spotlight simply because there is no-one else for them to share that spotlight with. They’ve got everyone’s undivided attention. Time will tell whether or not they can raise their game and prove that they’re up to the task or not.

The following issues are holding back stabilisation of dev-lang/php.

• MySQL 4.1 stabilisation
• Drop eselect support
• Fixing deps in the Portage tree
• lib64 Patch
• PaX support patch

We are actively working on these. We’re holding off on announcing a new date for PHP 5 stabilisation until all of these are resolved first.

In the meantime, everyone can still unmask and use the packages already in Portage (they work well for the vast majority of users), or to use the very latest packages in our overlay.

If your system is not affected by any of the issues above, we encourage you to pro-actively switch to the new dev-lang/php packages sooner rather than later.

Where has the time gone?

I’d just like to say “hello” to all the people who emailed me whilst I was away, asking why mod_php 5 has been removed from Portage, and who I’ve pointed to Planet Gentoo to get their Gentoo/PHP news from

I’m (slowly) working through my email backlog, so if I haven’t gotten a response to you yet, I will do so as soon as I can.

We’ve decided to delay marking dev-lang/php stable for a week.

There are a couple of small fixes that we want to do to dev-lang/php, and there are still packages in the tree that haven’t been updated to correctly work with dev-lang/php.

We’ll review progress on Thursday, and then see where we are with things.

Just a reminder that we’re due to mark dev-lang/php stable on Saturday 8th October, unless anyone reports any serious issues to the Gentoo PHP team before then.

Once dev-lang/php is stable, we’ll continue to provide security fixes only for dev-php/php, dev-php/mod_php, and dev-php/php-cgi until 8th Jan 2006. That gives all Gentoo users three months to migrate their systems across to using dev-lang/php.