Gentoo Monthly Newsletter: 30 November 2008

1.  Introduction

This month in the GMN

Welcome to the November issue of the Gentoo monthly newsletter!

This issue is bigger than usual, as there was no October issue. Your editors were out of the country, attending conferences, moving, and dealing with massive hardware failure. However, things are hopefully back to normal. Lots of stuff in this issue!

As usual, you can discuss any aspect of this issue of the GMN in the corresponding forum thread. We look forward to hearing from you!

2.  Gentoo News

Council voting

As announced on the mailing list, nominations were held for a single spot on the Gentoo Council. Developers have until December 5th to vote. There were 11 nominees to the empty seat, of which 5 will run for this election. Please see this page for details.

Kernel team looking for help

Gentoo's kernel team is looking for volunteers.

Have an interest in kernel stuff, or the desire to become interested? Got time and enthusiasm? Have basic Bugzilla experience? Basic kernel compilation experience? The kernel team is looking for YOU!

You don't need knowledge of the kernel's internal plumbing or years of kernel hacking: if you have time, interest, and ask lots of questions, these things will come anyway. Much of the work doesn't involve technical stuff; you don't even need to be a Gentoo developer. It's a good opportunity to get involved with development and later become a Gentoo developer, if you're interested.

The kernel is the heart of any Linux system, so it needs TLC. If you answered anything even a faint "Yes" to the earlier questions, contact Daniel Drake!

New desktop environment: LXDE

Looking for an extremely lightweight desktop environment? Ben de Groot has added LXDE to Portage. LXDE is even lighter than Xfce, providing a variety of interchangeable components. Just install lxde-base/lxde-meta.

Tantalized by the screenshots? Want to try it out? You should know that while some of the recommended components may be marked stable (such as Openbox), the LXDE-specific packages are still marked ~arch, so you'll need to keyword them in /etc/portage/package.keywords.

Trustees Meeting Summary

The Gentoo Trustees held its monthly meeting on November 19, 2008. The items put up for discussion were:

• Bylaws: the bylaws of the Gentoo Foundation have been finalized
• Meeting minutes

The Trustees are now accepting applications for membership. All members of the community are invited to submit an application. You don't need to first be a Gentoo developer.

Council Meeting Summary

The Gentoo Council held its monthly meeting on October 23, 2008. The items put up for discussion were:

• Running through open bugs: For each bug, come up with a concrete next step and who's going to do it. If it's the council, a specific member should take responsibility. The bug should be assigned to whoever needs to take the next step and council@gentoo.org should be in CC.
• Bugs handled:
• 185572 - As the proctors no longer exist, the code of conduct needs an update
• 234705 - Document of being an active developer
• 234706 - Slacker arches
• 234708 - Can the council help fewer bugs get ignored by arm/sh/s390 teams?
• 234710 - as-needed by default
• 237381 - Document appeals process
• Bugs remaining:
• 234711 - GLEP 54: scm package version suffix
• 234713 - GLEP 55: Use EAPI-suffixed ebuilds (.ebuild-EAPI)
• 234711 - Extent of Code of Conduct enforcement

Coming Up

• Bugday: Looking for a way to help out Gentoo without investing a lot of time? Join us on December 06 for our monthly bugday, and help us squash some bugs.
• Council Meeting: The Gentoo Council meets twice every month to discuss important technical issues that affect Gentoo as a whole. The next meeting is scheduled to be held on December 11, and everyone is welcome to participate - #gentoo-council on irc.freenode.net at 2000UTC.
• Trustees Meeting: Scheduled for December 14.
• The Events Calendar has been updated with information on upcoming 2009 events.

3.  Heard in the Community

New Gentoo-based distribution: Incognito

Incognito is a Gentoo-based LiveCD and LiveUSB distribution designed for making secure, anonymous internet usage easier and more accessible fo non-geeks. Incognito is developed using catalyst, Gentoo's tool for creating releases.

Incognito comes with a web browser, IRC client, email client, instant messenger, and other internet applications preconfigured with security in mind. This makes it an operating system to use safely from home, work, university, internet cafés, libraries, etc.

So how popular is it? A crude estimate by its developers list around 10,000 to 20,000 users, among them human rights activists from China, the Middle East, and Africa.

Gentoo Wiki Returns!

Due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, the servers of the unofficial, user-run site Gentoo Wiki went down at the beginning of October and despite much effort by Mike Valstar (thrasher7), the site's owner, it was not possible to recover the original content. After much hard graft however, the site has returned and is now fully up and running, with any registered user able to contribute. A regular, full, off-site backup system is also now in place to make sure that if such circumstances come about, the hard efforts of contributors will not be lost again.

Don't fear, however - most of the old wiki content was saved by the efforts of Nick Stallman (Cheater512), who set about trawling Google Cache shortly after the crash and set up a static copy of the old wiki at http://gentoo-wiki.info - Contributors are invited to copy articles across to the new wiki, make them look good and check for accuracy and freshness.

Contributors should make sure they read up on the style guidelines and templates in the Help section as some of the templates have changed and the site aims to give better guidance on how to write the perfect article.

There are now more language-specific wikis than ever, with Czech, German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Dutch, Russian and Turkish now officially supported.

The Gentoo Wiki admins would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the contributors so far, whose invaluable efforts have helped get the wiki back up and running so quickly.

Planet Gentoo

Sing-along song: Tobias Scherbaum discovered a happy Gentoo user which couldn't stick to singing in the shower.

Package statistics: Some time ago there was a Google Summer of Code project to gather information which packages are installed on user systems. This was inspired by a Debian tool. Steve Dibb now asks for simple contributions to at least gather some information.

X.org 1.5: The newest version of the X server seems to be a source of some hassle, so Remi Cardona and Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen tell us how they solved their problems.

FOSDEM: Tobias Scherbaum announces next year's most important conference in Europe: FOSDEM 2009.

Stable candidates: Petteri Räty tells us about an RSS feed that gathers packages that may be good to be stabled.

Recruiting stats:: Robin H. Johnson has some statistics about recruited developers.

Good deeds:: Daniel Drake tries to change the world with the One Laptop Per Child project and G1G1.

Experts: Jan Kundrát is looking for a web expert to create a CSS template for the gallery export of KPhotoAlbum.

The council: Doug Goldstein has a short overview about what the Gentoo Council is and does.

Securing git-daemon: Running git-daemon as root is a bad idead, so Diego Elio Pettenò explains how to run it as an unpriviledged user.

Check your Python scripts: Robert Buchholz from Gentoo Security Team has some information how executing Python code can be harmful.

Choice for TeX: Either you use the TeX core binaries shipped with TeX Live 2008 or you update them separately giving you some more control, as Alexis Ballier tells us.

Generated PMS: The Package Manager Specification defines what an ebuild is and how it has to be interpreted by the various package managers. Fernando J. Pereda now provides pre-generated versions of it for convenience.

app-misc/screen replacement: Luca Longinotti presents a replacement for the handy but sometimes mulish screen program.

OLPC again: Gentoo developer Daniel Drake is active for the OLPC initiative and deploys the XO laptops in Ethiopia currently.

4.  Tips and Tricks

Using TODO lists with your shell

Love the shell? Want to know what else you can do with it? This tip is for you!

An old issue of the GWN featured a tip on using app-misc/devtodo. It's great for creating TODO lists, but what about keeping track of them?

If you set PROMPT_COMMAND="todo" in your environment, the TODO list of the current directory (if there is one) will be displayed before every shell prompt.

If you use PROMPT_COMMAND="todo --global --global-database ~/TODO; todo" you will see your global TODO list followed by the current directory's TODO list. This makes keeping track of your tasks much easier.

Running commands on many machines revisited: screen and pdsh

In our last issue, we featured tips on running commands on multiple Gentoo machines. One of our astute readers wrote in to tell us of another way of doing it: with app-misc/screen. You use a separate window to ssh into each host, then use screen's at command to send keystrokes to each screen. Below is a sample screen script to accomplish the task.

#!/usr/bin/screen

# Read the default user's config
source $HOME/.screenrc

# connect to all hosts
screen ssh gentoo-box-1
screen ssh gentoo-box-2
screen ssh gentoo-box-3
screen ssh gentoo-box-4
screen ssh gentoo-box-5
screen ssh gentoo-box-6
screen ssh gentoo-box-7
screen ssh gentoo-box-8
screen ssh gentoo-box-9
screen ssh gentoo-box-10

# Don't pause the display just to echo the command
# we're running
msgwait 0

# The 'at' command takes the name of a window as the 1st arg,
# and a GNU Screen command as the 2nd arg.
# The 'stuff' command stuffs keys into the current window's
# keyboard buffer. The ^M at the end is a carat followed by
# an uppercase M; stuff translates that into a carriage return.
at ssh stuff "emerge --info^M"

An alternative way to run commands is to install app-shells/pdsh, a high-performance, parallel remote shell. Using pdsh, you can easily customize the number of concurrent commands you can run, watch for output on the command line for each machine at the same time, and limit the amount of time a command can execute on the remote machines.

Here's how to run date on four machines named gentoo-box-1, gentoo-box-2, and so on:

# pdsh -w $(echo gentoo-box-`seq -s ",gentoo-box-" 4`) "date"

gentoo-box-1: Fri Oct 17 23:17:51 PDT 2008
gentoo-box-3: Fri Oct 17 23:17:51 PDT 2008
gentoo-box-2: Fri Oct 17 23:17:51 PDT 2008
gentoo-box-4: Fri Oct 17 23:17:51 PDT 2008

Notice that each set of output is preceded by the host from which it came. You can turn this feature off by using the -N option with pdsh.

One problem with pdsh is that you cannot pump input to the commands you run. This means that you will not be able to input passwords interactively using pdsh. You need to have public key encryption setup or have askpass configured correctly along with X forwarding. For more information read the man page for ssh under SSH_ASKPASS also read the pdsh man page under Limitations.

That's it for this issue's Tips and Tricks. Thanks to all the readers who wrote in with their ideas for managing multiple machines!

5.  Gentoo developer moves

Summary

Gentoo is made up of 245 active developers, of which 42 are currently away. Gentoo has recruited a total of 671 developers since its inception.

Moves

The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:

• Josh Glover
• Martin Schlemmer
• Leonardo Boshell
• Lukasz Strzygowski
• William Thomson
• Jason Smathers
• Zaheer Abbas Merali
• Jeremy Huddleston
• Jakub Moc

Adds

The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:

• Heath Caldwell joined the kerberos team
• Patrick Lauer joined the KDE team
• Angelo Arrifano joined the ARM and Embedded teams
• Federico Ferri joined the Tcl/Tk team
• Tomas Chvatal joined the KDE team
• Tiago Cunha joined the Sparc and AMD64 teams
• Jesús Guerrero joined the Forums staff

Changes

The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo project:

• Tobias Heinlein is now the German Lead Translator for the Documentation team
• Peter Alfredsen joined the dotnet team
• Andrey Kislyuk joined the sci-biology team
• Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto joined the desktop effects team
• Hanno Boeck joined the desktop effects team
• Denis Dupeyron joined the LXDE team
• Samuli Suominen left the Xfce and AMD64 teams
• Christoph Mende joined the Xfce team
• Jeremy Olexa joined the Xfce team
• Mart Raudsepp joined the gstreamer team
• Luca Longinotti left the Vserver team
• Andrew Gaffney will maintain genkernel and other Release Engineering-related packages

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. The package removals come from many locations, including the Treecleaners and various developers.

Removals:

Additions:

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 30 October 2008 and 29 November 2008.

Figure 7.1: Bug activity split-up

Of the 14154 currently open bugs: 17 are labeled blocker, 114 are labeled critical, and 460 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.

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