Following Simon’s idea I want to give a status report of 2005 for what I’ve seen in the projects and herds I’m in.
- First of all, with Gentoo/FreeBSD, when I joined, we wre finally able to get the 5.4 release working mixing portage and FreeBSD code to have a working stage3 support, it took a while.
- We started doing changes to the real portage tree to support FreeBSD, fixing dependencies and adding patches so that packages will build “out of the ebuild”.
- FreeBSD 6.0 is still giving us headaches, but I’m currently having an idea that might work.
- Grant (g2boojum) left the lead role for Gentoo/*BSD for Stephen (spb) and I joined as his deputy.
- The Gentoo/Alt project was reorganized, pvdabeel, who seems to have disappeared from Gentoo scene, left the lead role, and I took it by decision of the developers working on Gentoo for Mac OSX and Gentoo/*BSD.
- Fabian (grobian) was chosen as lead for Gentoo for Mac OSX project, taking the place of pvdabeel.
- Kito and Fabian, with help of Brian (ferringb) started working on the prefix support for Gentoo for Mac OSX, preparing the base for other Gentoo/Alt prefixed project eventually.
- The tree started a long road of de-GNU-ification, lots of syntaxes that caused problems on Gentoo/Alt projects are going to be dropped from ebuilds and check written to make sure they won’t get again into them, the first notable thing is enewuser which doesn’t accept /bin/false (being a Linux-only shell) as disabled shell anymore.
- Damian (thunder) started and released a Gentoo/NetBSD port, Robert (arachnist) started a Gentoo/DragonFly port (but still has problems that hinder the release until they are fixed, part of the code is being merged already, tho), reb restarted the work on Gentoo/OpenBSD which was dismissed by Grant.
- Gentoo/Alt Project Page started collecting technotes and documentation about the various Gentoo/Alt projects, providing a reference for other devs and users wanting to help. The gentoo-alt mailing list was created and an alt@gentoo.org alias is being used for Bugzilla’s issues that are common to different Gentoo/Alt projects.
- KDE herd got not one but two major releases using the new split ebuilds, 3.4 and 3.5. We also had to “fight” with the visibility support, that was first introduced in 3.4 but was creating problems because of a short sight in upstream.
- A new Linux-PAM release was marked stable (0.78) making possible to use pamd files compatible with both Linux-PAM and OpenPAM in all packages; also pam eclass was introduced to make simpler their installation.
- Video and Sound team had lots of cuts in their members, mainly because of Chris White leaving them, I took over xine-lib and vlc entirely, and cleaned up the build process with upstream help; after eradicator stopped maintaining XMMS related ebuilds, Luis (MetalGod) took them over; Luca (lu_zero) prepared many snapshot of ffmpeg to cope with requirements of new packages such as xine-lib with external ffmpeg and vlc.
- The GCC4 introduction required lot of patching in packages and shown the limitations of some packages like transcode 0.6, which finally stepped down for the new transcode 1.x releases unmasked last week; the domino effect of those limitations also made us drop avifile support to have more stable multimedia support; currently vlc, xine and mplayer players works fine with no major problems.
- About AMD64, Simon already told everything, I just want to say I’m glad I’m one of the six ATs who joined as a full-time dev 🙂
- Oh and thanks to Daniel (dsd) we have Planet Gentoo, and we can write these posts to let you all know that we’re alive and what we’ve done (this really helped, especially with Gentoo/FreeBSD and Gentoo/Alt, as it shown a different approach to the whole communication problem).
Yeah we probably did nothing, eh?