Okay this is not going to be a very fun post to read, and the title can already make you think that I’m being an arrogant bastard this time around, but I got a feeling that lately people are missing the point that even being grumpy, I’m not usually grumpy just because, I’m usually grumpy because I’m trying to get things to improve rather than stagnate or get worse.
So let’s take an example right now. Thomáš postd about some of the changes that are to be expected on LibreOffice 4 — one of these is that the LDAP client libraries are no longer an optional dependency but have to be present. I wasn’t happy about that.
I actually stumbled across that just the other day when installing the new laptop: while installing KDE component with the default USE flags, OpenLDAP would have been installed. The reason is obviously that the ldap USE flag is enabled by default, which makes sense, as it’s (unfortunately) the most common “shared address book” database available. But why should I get an LDAP server if I selected explicitly a desktop profile?
So the first task at hand, was to make sure that the minimal USE flag was present on the package (it was), and if it did what was intended, i.e., not install the LDAP server — and that is the case indeed. Good, so we can install only the client libraries. Unfortunately the default dependencies were slightly wrong, with said USE flag, as some things like libtool (for libltdl) are only really used by the server components. This was easy to fix, together with a couple more fixes.
But as I proposed on the mailing list to change the defaults, for the desktop profile, to have the minimal USE flag enabled, hell broke loose — now the good point about it is that the minimal USE flag is definitely being over-used — and I’m afraid I’m at fault there as well, since both NRPE and NSCA have a minimal USE flag. I guess it’s time to reel back on that for me as well. And I now I have a patch to get openldap to gain a server USE flag, enabled by default – except, hopefully, on the desktop profile – to replace the old minimal flag. Incidentally looking into it I also found that said USE flag was actually clashing with the cxx one, for no good reason as far as I could tell. But Robin doesn’t even like the idea of going with a server USE flag for OpenLDAP!
On a different note, let’s take hwids — I originally created the package to reduce the amount of code our units’ firmware required, but while at it I ended up with a problematic file on my hands, as I wrote the oui.txt file downloaded from IEEE has been redistributed for a number of years, but when I contacted them to make sure I could redistribute it, they told me that it wasn’t possible. Unfortunately the new versions of systemd/udev use that file to generate some hardware database — finally implementing my suggestion from four years ago better late than never!
Well, I ended up having to take some flak, and some risk, and now the new hwids package fetches that file (as well as the iab.txt file) and also fully implements re-building the hardware database, so that we can keep it up to date from Portage, without having to get people to re-build their udev package over and over.
So, excuse me if I’m quite hard to work with sometimes, but the amount of crap I have to take when doing my best to make Gentoo better, for users and developers, is so high that sometimes I’d just like to say “screw it” and leave it to someone else to fix the mess. But I’m not doing that — if you don’t see me around much in the next few days, it’s because I’m leaving LA on Wednesday, and I can’t post on the blog while flying to New York (because the gogonet IP addresses are in virtually every possible blacklist, now and in the future —- so no way I can post to the blog, unless I figure out a way to set up a VPN and route traffic to my blog to said VPN …).
And believe it or not, but I do have other concerns in my life beside Gentoo.