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



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


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