Re: [tlug] (gentoo) how to ask for an ebuild or do it myself?

["Evan Monroig" <evan.monroig@example.com>]

On 8/3/06, Al Hoang <hoanga@example.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 07:21:59PM +0900, Evan Monroig wrote:
> > I am giving gentoo a serious try, and I basically have a working
> > gentoo, only for a few applications that I daily use.
>
>         Gentoo is very nice if you're trying to follow some packages on
> the leading edge.  The only disadvantage I've found so far is recompiling
> Firefox, KDE, and some other heavy weight programs each time you want
> to upgrade.  While you could argue, 'if it aint broke, don't fix it' part
> of my reason for using Gentoo is so I can test and play with these packages
> faster than binary distros.  But in general it's very nice.

Thanks for the comment :)

> > One of them is planner-el (for emacs), which works together with
> > remember-el. The planner-el has an ebuild (app-emacs/planner), but not
> > remember-el.
> >
> > A google search led me to this bug [1] which is one year old, so I
> > doubt the ebuild will ever be made.
[snipped details]

>         That's for the truly impatient who want it running RIGHT now.
> For the more patient...

Thanks for the explanation! I will definitely do this because I can't
live without
remember-el. But I will have to wait until tomorrow because the gentoo is not
at home but in the lab.

> > So my question is: Is there any way for me to (politely) say that I am
> > interested in this to happen, or to make it happen myself?
>
>         iirc, Josh is *ahem* a committer for the Gentoo project.  I'm
> sure with some prodding (or beer) he'd try to push to get that ebuild
> actually into the portage tree faster.
>         I'm really not sure how the Gentoo folk take a bug that
> represents a desired ebuild and push it into the portage tree.

> It seems it'd be useful if they had a voting mechanism or something that
> would allow them to count the number of people interested in having X
> ebuild pushed into the portage tree.

Yes, I was hoping for something like that.

> I guess your other option is to email
> the person who is assigned the bug and aggravate them until they commit it.

I think what I'll do is try the ebuild, see if I can "port" it to the
newest version, and then bug people into pushing it.

> > I know nothing of gentoo's packaging except "emerge what-I-want", but
> > I am willing to learn. Pointers welcome (^_^)!

What I meant here is that I don't know about packaging something that
I would like to see in portage, and incorporate "foreign ebuilds under
development somewhere" into my portage. I have read and can use the
USE flags (referring to the guide from time to time).

>         If you have list archives, search for Stephen's first impressions
> of Gentoo.  I think that thread was quite helpful in introducing Gentoo
> for the non-Linux newbie

Yes I remember it, with the
emerging-all-of-xorg-when-I-just-want-links problem... However I
didn't run into this problem because I chose to short-cut links and
instead use firefox and install gentoo all from a chroot inside
another distribution ^^.

It went fine except when I started a second gdm on VT8 : something
went wrong on logout and I lost my two X sessions. Anyway ^^.

By the way, I know this is not the right place, but here are some
thoughts that occured during the installation:

1) Why is not "unicode" among the default use flags? (it was not there
at least for the
profile that I used: x86/2006.0)

2) locales: the handbook tells me about modifying /etc/locale.gen

What is then /etc/locale.build and why does /etc/locale.gen not exist?
Also, I don't have (yet) the program "locale-gen":

(chroot) Evan / # locale-gen
bash: locale-gen: command not found

In the handbook there is a note saying: "Note: locale-gen is available in
glibc-2.3.6-r4 and newer. If you have an older version of glibc, you
should update it now."

I knew this was the solution but at that point I had not been explained how
to use emerge to upgrade/install packages.

3) in http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gnome-config.xml

one should add the instruction

# emerge howl

before

# /etc/init.d/mDNSResponder start
# rc-update add mDNSResponder default

because the USE flags don't make it automatically emerged

4) I think that emerge is really well-done. When I first did "emerge
--sync", it
advised me to "emerge portage", which I did, and was then advised to
"emerge --metadata" and to "emerge --help config", where I was introduced
to the somewhat unusual to me (debian background) but nice nice feature
of protecting configuration files.

5) I find emerge a bit verbose. Sometimes there are messages that I want
to read (those that are colored), and they are buried under hundreds of
compile lines. I would find handy an option to remove the output of
"./configure; make; make install" and the like, and save it somewhere to
show me only if something went wrong

Evan