Well, hal-0.5.13 is in the tree and fully working. This brings us up to current for the hal world, and should unblock further udev/devicekit work.
Sorry for the problems getting it it; it was a major change. Hotplug is working again.
If anything is still broken for you, you know where to go.
Due to a number of reasons, I ended up taking a couple of weeks off from Gentoo. I didn’t go cold turkey; I kept reading my bug mails, but nothing else. I was hoping the time off would give me a clear idea of whether I wanted to continue with Gentoo, or if I should just give up and close that chapter of my life.
Of course, nothing is ever that easy. I ended missing it somewhat, but also enjoying not having to deal with the crap. So, my stated time is up, and for the benefit of everyone involved, I should probably make my mind up. So *drumroll* I’m coming back. (You read the title, yes?)
I’m going to try to scale back my involvement a bit, to hopefully avoid the burnout I had before. This means I’ll be officially leaving some of the herds I’m in, and orphaning some of the packages I maintain. I’m going to stay with the Gnome herd and the fd.o herd, tho, because that’s the software I use most.
As of now, I’m back on IRC, but I have to rebuild my dev box (I put Fedora on it, to play around), so I won’t be able to get much done for the next couple of days. I don’t plan on reading -dev@ or -core@, although I’ll read -dev-announce@. We’ll see what happens.
Oh, and all you people with hal bugs? I’ll get to them, I promise.
Today, about half a dozen times, I had someone tell me that I was an idiot, or that my code was crap, or that packages I maintained were useless, or that I was doing things wrong. This, unfortunately, it typical for Gentoo (and FOSS, in general, I guess) development. It sucks my energy to develop.
Today, I had one person tell me I was awesome and helpful. This was great, and made me feel good, and made me want to develop.
Unfortunately, this is not typical. It’s rare that this happens even once in a week; not often enough to make up for all the negative energy. And that is even more depressing.
So, I’m getting discouraged. The question then becomes, if I stop working on Gentoo, what do I do with my time? Do I work on upstream Gnome? Do I start a coding project of my own? Maybe jump ship entirely to some other alternative OS? Do I even continue to run Gentoo, once I can’t contribute to it? Or switch to something else? If so, what?
Don’t mind me, I’m in a pissy mood.
UPDATE: Thanks for all the kind words. But honestly, I wasn’t asking for pats on the back, just venting. I know you won’t believe me, but…
For quite a while now, Gentoo has used the plugdev group as a catch-all for Things-You-Need-Special-Permission-For-On-Desktops. This includes automounting (what it was originally for), dbus policy, networkmanager policy, and so on.
As of today, modulo bug # 268223, I have what appears to be a full working desktop without being in the plugdev group. This means, in my opinion, that policykit/consolekit is fully useful on Gentoo.
Ladies and Gentlemen, PolicyKit has been unmasked. I’ve tested it, and it seems to work well enough, and to not be too intrusive in it’s current default setup.
If you have issues, please file bugs. If there’s missing policy, please file bugs. If something is too annoying, please file bugs. If something is horribly insecure, please file bugs. We want to get this right.
In the meantime, I’m going to be going through the policy installed by other Distros to see how it differs from what we’re shipping by default. Probably packages that currently have policykit hard disabled will start adding USE flags to enable it.
It’s unlikely at this point that PK will become required on Gentoo; we don’t generally work that way, and the Gnome team, at least, has been patching the heck out of upstream packages to keep it optional. I don’t see that changing for 2.26 at least.
*EDIT* s/packagekit/policykit/, thanks to MiKeL
Well, after ~1.5 months of work, testing, overlaying, etc., I’ve flipped the switch and moved my personal laptop (my main development machine) to 32bit-userland. It was both easier than I thought, and harder: easier in that it’s possible at all, and with very little work; harder in that there are 19 packages that need to be patched, and 3 (kernel, gcc, kvm) that I have not been able to fix yet.
One thing that surprised me was how many different packages have assembler and attempt to detect the arch and bitness. Just about every media package, okay that kinda makes sense: they all optimize for media playback etc.; but bind-tools? xulrunner? WTF? Anyway, for now, I’ve just patched them all in an overlay for now; many of them seem to use a similar detection method, so maybe I can do something in the profile to make most of them work.
On the plus side, Gnome has done a great job of hiding all the arch-specific code in glib. None of the Gnome apps had any problems with 32bit-userland.
So far: less memory consumed. This is a very good thing, as I was constantly running out before.
Oh, and what, you ask, do I do about those three unfixable packages? I have a 64bit-userland chroot that I build them in, and binpkg them, and then just install the binpkgs. Works fine. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fix those three in the future. The kernel, in particular, has to work for sparc/mips, so it should be fixable for x86 as well.
That is totem playing an ogg in a Gnome desktop in KVM on my 32bit-userland image. It works! Woo hoo!
Now all that’s left is to try it on real hardware, and figure out why the kernel fails to build.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on getting 32bit-userland working on Gentoo amd64. It’s at least partly working now; it boots, you can log in, and I’m in the process of emerging gnome.
However, it’s not a smooth road. I had to use catalyst to make my own stages. No amount of massaging or editing or copying or screaming got me from a 64-bit stage3 to a 32bit-userland. In addition, there’s something wrong with my toolchain somehwere. I can’t build sandbox, for example, and had to use a binpkg from my 64-bit system. Also, the kernel fails to build it’s config programs, so I can’t configure a kernel.
Finally, there are a number of broken packages; that is, packages that detect in some way or another what bitness they think you’re running and then use ASM coded for that. This, obviously, fails. Fortunately, this is so far only 3 packages: glib, libgcrypt, and mesa. We’ll see how many more I hit before I get a working system.
Just a note: I’m not posting any of my profiles yet. It’s not yet working, and it’s not for faint of heart. If you are really interested, give me a ping on IRC and I’ll see if I can help you. Otherwise, just wait until I can lick it into shape.
That’s right, kvm-70 just hit portage. Go hit a rsync mirror near you!
What’s kvm, you ask? Some kind of virtual keyboard/mouse thingy? No, it’s the Kernel Virtual Machine. It’s basically like vmware. It’s actually a modified qemu that uses hardware virtualization (and only hardware virtualization; if you don’t have Intel VT or AMD-V, then use qemu or something else). It’s fast, it’s featureful, but it’s not exactly user friendly, at least not without help.
In the coming weeks, the Gentoo Virtualization team will get libvirt and the associated front ends working for it. That should up the user-friendly factor a fair amount.
Thanks Cardoe (cardoe) and Tiziano (dev-zero), the kvm co-maintainers with me, who did a lot of the work getting this ready for the tree.
Okay, so you can’t have a middling epic fail. 
However, it’s certianly a middling fail, either in UI design or in features.
See, I’ve been reading all about decibel on the planet, and I thought I’d give it a try now that it’s in portage. I emerged it, started it, and it said to pick a location. Apparently, it can only find music in your homedir. If (like me) your music is elsewhere, tough.
Ah well. I didn’t really need a new music player anyway…
EDIT:
Okay, it’s only the minor fail of being undiscoverable. Thanks to nightmorph, it actually works (with a few minor caveats). I suspect I won’t change from rhythmbox to it any time soon, but you never know. If someone were to write a library plugin based on tracker, I’d probably switch.