So, ok, I have the stage. Which stage? Gentoo/FreeBSD 6.0 x86 stage. It’s an experimental stage for now as it’s still using portage 2.1_pre4 and the old baselayout, and I’m probably going to refresh it next week. I’m at least ten days late on my original time table, but the result is quite interesting.
I can’t release it right now as I need to wait for the overlay to get updated with a new patch I added to freebsd-sources to be able to build kernel with new versions of flex. Seems like 2.5.31 release got quite a few of cleanups changing behaviour.. and it’s interesting to see how many people to such changes started yelling “broken, broken!”… well I was a bit annoyed by those changes, but that’s not because flex is broken, mostly because I hoped in a “-permissive” switch at command line…
But anyway, since I restarted working full time on Gentoo/*BSD, there were lots of steps forward. I think this was the most productive month I ever seen in respect to Gentoo/*BSD; maybe because I’m not sleeping that well (or at all sometimes) since last month.. personal life does suck indeed.
Oh by the way, I think I found the reason why FreeBSD is told not to support —as-needed. Some of the system’s libraries doesn’t get linked against the libraries they need, to avoid putting a circular dependency, for example, between the lib package and openssl. This is indeed a problem, but I think I can get around it, maybe splitting out the libc itself to a package and the rest of it with the dependency they need. That way I should be able to make —as-needed working on FreeBSD, an interesting achievement, I think.
On a completely unrelated note, last week I seen the last series of Friends (again, I already watched it in Italian when they aired it here), when I completed the DVD series that came with an Italian magazine… I’m missing it quite a bit… not only for the series (that I like), but also because I’m out of stuff in English to watch 😛 Although there are some great dubbers in Italy, the original voices are something you cannot replace (well a part some exceptions like Gimli in The Lord of the Rings…). The same magazine is now publishing Angel’s DVD (always with prices good enough for me) but unfortunately it’s not being shipped where I usually buy magazines here 🙁
I think I need a new job… possibly not as an underpaid codemonkey using a stupid RAD environment on Windows as I had to do last time… underpaid because I spent three weeks working on that, one week just to get the test environment working (because they didn’t send me a decent spec in the form of “you need thesee versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache, configured in this this and this way”, but just told me “it works with PHP Apache and MySQL”… what the?!), ending up having to re-create the environment three times (okay first time was partly my error, forgot PHP4 and MySQL 4.1 in Windows doesn’t get along that well)… they started ranting when I noted 8 hours trying to get one of the features they required working and failing (not my fault here, if the library isn’t able to cope with a simple thing like a start/end date for a calendar event), and when I left them without adding the three extra hours I needed to complete the requested feature, they ever said that I took too much time to do the job… without even being able to evaluate if what I did was good for them because they didn’t actually know what they asked me to do!
I must say that Gentoo is for me almost like a job… with the main difference that I don’t usually eat while working, but I eat while working on Gentoo 😛
Anyway, I’ll try to relax tonight and see if I’m able to sleep finally…
