The last two days were so intense that I couldn’t manage to post something here. Yesterday I had just a few hours of time to spend on gentoo actually, mainly because I had a friend of mine who came visiting me after something like six months and then there was the meeting of my lug which took me quite all the night.
This doesn’t mean that G/Fbsd is frozen or something like that. Actually, yesterday was also released 5.4 release candidate 4 of FreeBSD which I’m trying to prepare for G/Fbsd project ASAP. Actually, I hadn’t updated everything to 5.4 rc3 and moving to rc4 needed to redo some changes I was doing to rc3. And, also if I was able to build for the first time Xorg, the second compilation didn’t go so well: there are features which are activable just on the second compilation, and some of them are broken, for example pam support doesn’t work with OpenPam, the PAM implementation used by FreeBSD, and Xv/OpenGL support doesn’t seems to be able to be removed for now. I’ve managed to fix the PAM problem (I think) but I’m getting a couple of problems during glxinfo linking with opengl flag enabled. I spent two days to go to that point and now I need to find the solution in the next days at every needed cost.
Well anyway today I started committing rc4 ebuilds, after having prepared a script which I used to download the source tarball fragments from FreeBSD’s ftpsite and repackage them as tar.bz2. I’ve also uploaded to mirrors all the rc4 files so that they are available for testing, but remember that 5.4 profile is still a lot incomplete.
During the merge of newly system’s ebuild I found out that using portage’s flex breaks compilation of quite every fbsd’s package, that’s because it tries to link to libl but in flex is called libfl. A few patches fixed the problem.
Now I’m having a bit of a problem because I removed a library which wasn’t mean to be removed and I need to find a way to have it working again, I hope to fix it tomorrow and then commit also usbin ebuild.
News from the 5.4 profile includes for example the complete drop of vixie cron from within freebsd-usbin: now if you want it you just need to emerge vixie-cron as in Linux. That makes the packages lighter and also saves us from supporting all the init.d files for software which is already in portage of its own. This is true not only for cron (which wasn’t being disabled by a useflag at all), but also for sendmail and bind (which had a useflag before to enable them): now they are just not built at all and the useflags are gone: if you want them, just emerge them separately 🙂
Please note that making software not installed by freebsd-* packages doesn’t mean that we are going to replace it in the base system, as we aren’t replacing them with other default software (also if, in case of patch, this could have been done), just we replace them with different versions of the same softwares. This makes 5.4 profile less adherent to freebsd layout but more adherent to gentoo’s one, so installing it over a minimal installation won’t remove the outdated libraries as 5.3 used to. To fix this we need to find a good script which removes orphan files, I think findcruft could do the job, but we need gfind to have it working. I’ll work on this tomorrow.
Also, as 5.4 goes final and the profile is safe, we’re going to move all the init scripts for software provided by freebsd-* packages directly into their ebuild, moving them out of baselayout, this should simplify the problems to Gentoo/kFreeBSD project, I think.
After completing 5.4 passage, I hope we can be able to prepare a stage3 to install g/fbsd without need to install before the clean fbsd. But this is not something to plan for now.
Tomorrow I have a lot of things to do, I hope to find the time for all of them.
