Gentoo Monthly Newsletter: 18 February 2008

1.  Introduction

This month in the GMN

Welcome to the second issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter. To begin with, we would like to thank the entire community for the overwhelming response to the GMN's inaugural issue. We received a lot of encouraging feedback and hope that you will continue to write in. Remember, the GMN is what its readers want it to be - please see the section on how you can get involved - at the end of the newsletter for more information.

This month's issue implements some of the interesting suggestions we received from our readers. The security statistics have been removed, since it seemed to add a lot of clutter with little value-addition to the newsletter. You can still monitor GLSAs in a variety of ways though - by using glsa-check (part of gentoolkit), by subscribing to the feed on the GLSA page or the gentoo-announce mailing list.

Graphical bugzilla and package statistics is another feature we implemented, don't forget to see the cool graphs and charts! In tune with the feature on our front page announcements, you can now discuss particular issues of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter in the forum. Discuss this newsletter!

We hope you enjoy reading this edition of the GMN.

2.  Gentoo News

Gentoo Trustee Elections

The Gentoo Trustee elections are currently in progress. After nearly a month of nominations, we are left with 8 candidates for the posts. The polls will be open until February 28. Everybody who has ever voted in a trustee election or has been a Gentoo developer for the last 365 days (or more, from the date of close of election poll) is eligible to vote. You can get more information on the election and on each candidate's manifesto on the trustee election page.

Kernel security exploits: Upgrade ASAP

Two major security flaws in the Linux kernel were reported last weekend. Both flaws have the same impact (root access for local users) and both exist within the vmsplice() system call, which was added to the kernel in 2.6.17. There is no configuration option to exclude vmsplice() so everyone is vulnerable.

One of the security issues existed for the entire lifetime of vmsplice(), so any kernel version from 2.6.17 onwards is vulnerable. This was fixed in 2.6.24.2, 2.6.23.16 and 2.6.22.18. It has been assigned the vulnerability identifier of CVE-2008-0600.

The other security issue first appeared in 2.6.23. It was fixed in 2.6.23.15 and 2.6.24.1. This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2008-0009 and CVE-2008-0010.

gentoo-sources-2.6.23-r8 and gentoo-sources-2.6.24-r2 were added to the tree Monday and include fixes for both issues. Install the latest gentoo-sources as quickly as possible.

The full announcement can be found here.

KDE 4.0.1 in the tree

Gentoo's KDE herd is happy to inform you that they've just committed KDE 4.0.1 to the Portage tree.

KDE 4.0.1 is the first maintenance release and fixes many issues of the initial release. Among those changes are stability bugfixes and performance improvements for Konqueror and its Flash integration as well as its JavaScript support. KWin has seen improvements with respect to compositing and error handling. Almost all other KDE modules have been worked on extensively as well.

The full announcement can be found here.

Council Meeting Summary

The Gentoo Council held its monthly meeting on 14 February, 2008. The items put up for discussion were:

• GLEP 46 (Allow upstream tags in metadata.xml): This GLEP was approved, however the proposer is required to explain why the protocols that may be used were restricted to HTTP and HTTPS only - before the GLEP is finalized.
• EAPI=1 (Where is the specification?): The general agreement was that any new EAPIs should not be added until EAPI=0 is fully approved. However, there wasn't any consensus on changing anything about EAPI=1. Mark Loeser agreed to work on PMS for EAPI=0, and will provide an update at the next meeting.

Some items were rolled over from the previous meeting. GLEPs 54 and 55 were not resubmitted to the council for discussion.

• Code of Conduct Enforcement: Donnie Berkholz posted a simple suggestion on the council mailing list. The council supported the implementation and Donnie will get things going.
• Document of being an active developer: No updates.
• Slacker archs: No updates.

Coming Up

• FOSDEM: February 23-24. One of the best community events of Europe. Although there isn't going to be an official Gentoo presence at the event, you can look forward to meeting several Gentoo developers and users at the event.
• Bugday: Looking for a way to help out Gentoo without investing a lot of time? Join us on March 01 for our monthly bugday, and help us squash some bugs.
• Chemnitzer Linux-Tage: March 01-02. Several European Gentoo developers and users are planning to attend, so if you're going to be around Chemnitz at the time, do drop in!
• Council Meeting: The Gentoo Council meets every month to discuss important technical issues that affect Gentoo as a whole. This month's meeting is scheduled to be held on March 13, and everyone is welcome to participate - #gentoo-council on irc.freenode.net at 2000UTC.
• PyCon: March 13-17. There's a Birds Of a Feather (BoF) session planned for everyone interested in Gentoo at the conference. If you're interested, don't forget to drop a note in the forums.

3.  Heard in the Community

The Emacs Team

Introduction:

Some people wonder how maintaining a bunch of packages works in Gentoo and how they can help as users. Every team has its own style of work-flow but some common schemes are present in every team. This month, we take a look at how the Emacs team functions.

Who we are and what we do:

The Emacs team consists of two developers, Ulrich Müller and Christian Faulhammer, who take care of all packages in the app-emacs category besides the GNU Emacs editor and several micro Emacsen. Additionally, we often take care of Emacs support (mostly enabled by USE=emacs) for packages maintained by other teams.

How we work:

There are two ways of working: Act or react. Reaction happens on user requests that come in by bug reports (the preferred way), IRC or by e-mail. Acting happens in mail exchange or discussion on IRC of the team members. We discuss problems we have had or ones that might occur and try to find optimum solutions to them. Optimal in this case means leaving as few people as possible with problems. This often means a trade-off between features and backwards compatibility.

Bug reports are handled by any of the members. Whoever reacts first is responsible for the bug, unless someone else has a superior solution. New packages that are experimental are first tried out in the Emacs overlay, which is connected to a Wiki system where we store temporary information and progress reports. For example, we collect information about packages that have broken or bad Emacs support in the Wiki. Whenever one of us finds time, the problem is fixed and the entry deleted from the Wiki. Alternatively, if the problem could not be fixed, additional information is added to the entry so the next person can start off where this one left. The Wiki also stores information like which packages need a newer version/revision in the tree (including a target date) and test plans for many packages.

Stabilization is handled through the bug tracker. A maintainer files a new bug which says "stable app-emacs/xyz-1.0" in the summary and has all relevant architecture teams (such as x86, amd or sparc) in the CC field. The architecture team then tests the package (with the help of the collected test plans) and marks it stable.

How users can help:

The easiest way to help is to file a bug report if you spot a problem. Even minor ones are important for overall quality, such as if there is a new version of a program/package that could not to be found in Portage. Please give maintainers at-least a few days time after release though! If you are not sure about a problem, try to investigate a bit. Don't be afraid of your request being called "dumb", we actually prefer bugs that can be closed as INVALID (or something similar) as compared to real issues that may not be reported at all. Be sure to check for duplicate bugs beforehand!

Users are welcome to join our IRC channel #gentoo-lisp on Freenode where you can get support for all flavours of Lisp (including Emacs Lisp). IRC is a great way to directly contact developers. Email is a good communication channel too, but not perfect, as emails may get lost. Emails are also forgotten more easily than bug reports.

Working on the overlay is another way to contribute, but we won't give away commit access too easily as a simple change is potential for a lot of harm. Trusted users do gain commit access after proving themselves. Some hints on how GNU Emacs on Gentoo works can be found in the maintainers guide.

Gentoo tops BIND benchmarks

The Internet Systems Consortium conducted a benchmark to test various operating systems for their suitability to run BIND 9. Amongst all the operating systems tested, Gentoo Linux running on kernel version 2.6.20.7 topped the charts, processing 93,000 queries per second! Fedora Core came second with 87,000 queries/second, followed by FreeBSD-7 (84,000 queries/second).

For more information, check out ISC's page on the benchmark.

Planet Gentoo

How to contact developers

Sometimes people are confused how they can get in touch with a developer, Luca Barbato gives us some hints on how you can meet the person you need.

Voicing a user

Joshua Jackson gives user Matthew Summers the opportunity to raise some points about Daniel Robbins' offer.

Gentoo people at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage

Tobias Scherbaum announces the presence of Gentoo developers and users during the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage in Germany. The developer meeting will be on 1st March 2008, but everyone is invited to say hello.

Status of GCC 4.3

In a short note, Ryan Hill informs us of the status of GCC 4.3 in Gentoo.

Summer of Code ideas

Even if it is only spring, Diego Pettenò and Hans de Graaff think about what could be feasible ideas for this year's Google Summer of Code.

Xen applied

Michael Marineau describes how Xen and Gentoo are used in the Open Source Labs.

MIPS back to experimental

Upon other release related things, Stuart Longland announces that MIPS is now an experimental architecture again, meaning that there will be no more stable KEYWORDS, just ~mips. This is due to lack of manpower.

Internal libraries and how to fix it

Diego Pettenò's current crusade is to kill internal copies of libraries. He describes why they are harmful, along with an extended example on how to fix the problem.

How to improve Gentoo's PR

If you've noticed our front page lately, you'll see that Donnie Berkholz has been doing a good job of regularly updating it. He now gives us the details of recent changes in the PR group.

User relations

A meeting of our user-relations group has been summarized by Joshua Jackson

Gentoo on Loongson

The Chinese made Loongson processor is MIPS based, and Stuart Longland announces the availability of some more experimental MIPS stages of Gentoo for this platform.

4.  Tips and Tricks

Screenie

Want to organize your command line screen session or sessions better? Want to have a separate screen session for every task that you do? Want something that will organize you in general? This GMN has the perfect tip for you. It is a tiny script called screenie.

$ emerge screenie

Start by running it.

$ screenie

You should see the following:

SCREENIE - terminal screen-session handler
written by Marc O. Gloor <mgloor&fhzh.ch>

a) add job
q) quit

select:

Lets add a job called "Systems". Once you hit a, enter the name. Hit enter unless you know the process id of existing screen sessions.

Lets add a second job called "Email". Now you should see:

SCREENIE - terminal screen-session handler
written by Marc O. Gloor <mgloor&fhzh.ch>

1) 15468.Systems
2) 15504.Email

a) add job
q) quit

select:

You now have two screen sessions that you can go into and out of. Select one of the sessions. You are now inside of screen where you can do whatever you usually do.

To go to another screen session, press CTRL+a+d (or however you usually exit your screen sessions). You should be back to the screenie menu and ready to choose to go to another screen session.

One use of screenie might be to have a screen session for every task and for every machine you have access to making multi-tasking much more organized. This should also make it much easier to start working again after a long break.

5.  Gentoo developer moves

Summary

Gentoo is made up of 277 active developers, of which 47 are currently away. Gentoo has recruited a total of 630 developers since its inception.

Moves

The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:

• none this month

Adds

The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:

• Ben de Groot (yngwin): Multimedia

Changes

The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo project:

• Mark Loeser (halcy0n) joined the cpp herd
• Michael Januszewski (spock) joined the sci and sci-physics herd
• Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto (jmbsvicetto) joined the kde herd
• Ryan Hill (dirtyepic) joined the mips team

6.  Portage

Summary

This section summarizes the current state of the portage tree.

Figure 6.1: Package distribution by keyword

The following section lists packages that have either been moved or added to the tree and packages that have had their "last rites" announcement given to be removed in the future. The package removals come from many locations, including the Treecleaners and various developers. Most packages which are listed under the Last Rites section are in need of some love and care and can remain in the tree if proper maintainership is established.

Removals:

Additions:

Last Rites

7.  Bugzilla

Statistics

The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. The following chart summarizes activity on Bugzilla between 18 January 2008 and 17 February 2008. Not fixed means bugs that were resolved as NEEDINFO, WONTFIX, CANTFIX, INVALID or UPSTREAM.

Figure 7.1: Bug activity split-up

Of the 10254 currently open bugs: 18 are labeled blocker, 101 are labeled critical, and 343 are labeled major.

Closed bug ranking

The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are as follows.

Figure 7.2: Bug closed rankings

Assigned bug ranking

The developers and teams who have been assigned the most bugs during this period are as follows.

Figure 7.3: Bugs assigned rankings

8.  Getting Involved

The GMN relies on volunteers and members of the community for content every month. If you are interested in writing for the GMN, do write in to gmn-writers@gentoo.org with your articles in plaintext or GuideXML format.

We solicit feedback from all our readers on the newsletter. If you have any ideas for articles, sections, or have anything to say about the GMN, don't hesitate to email us at gmn-feedback@gentoo.org.

You can also give us your feedback and comment on this particular issue of the GMN on the forum thread.

9.  GMN subscription information

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