Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: April 26th, 2004New apache maintainer and public mailing list We're pleased to announce that Chuck Short is the new maintainer of Apache-related packages for Gentoo Linux, and leader of the newly-formed Apache herd. Chuck succeeds Donny Davies, who is retiring from the Gentoo Project. Chuck is being helped by a group of volunteers who responded to our recent call for Apache maintainers. We hope that some of these will be invited to become full Gentoo developers in the coming months. We've set up a new public mailing list for discussing the use of Gentoo on webservers. It's also a place to share your thoughts about how we can further improve Gentoo as a webserver platform. The mailing list is gentoo-web-user@gentoo.org; send a blank email to gentoo-web-user-subscribe@gentoo.org to subscribe. Gentoo Linux seeking a new squid maintainer With the departure of Donny Davies, The Gentoo Linux Project is seeking a new maintainer for squid. We're looking for a dedicated developer with experience with squid and writing ebuilds. You may want to search Bugzilla for squid-related bugs to get an idea of the kind of bugs you'll have to deal with. If you're still interested, send an email to recruiters@gentoo.org. ipsec-tools and iputils contain a remote DoS vulnerability racoon, which is included in the ipsec-tools and iputils packages in Portage, does not check the length of ISAKMP headers. Attackers may be able to craft an ISAKMP header of sufficient length to consume all available system resoources, causing a Denial of Service. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement 3. Featured Developer of the Week (This article was contributed by developer Grant Goodyear) This week one of Gentoo's senior developers, Donny Davies (woodchip), retired with a message to the gentoo-dev mailing list stating "Because of work and various other social commitments I can no longer fulfill my duties as package maintainer for this project. As such, I wish to pass on responsibilities to whomever wants the job." On behalf of the rest of the Gentoo team, I wish Donny well in his new endeavors. I also wish to acknowledge here some of woodchip's many accomplishments during his time with Gentoo. Donny became a Gentoo developer sometime during 2001. I had been a developer for only a short time when woodchip joined, and my records of that period are rather sketchy, so I'm not sure exactly when he joined. (It would be possible to grep the cvs log to determine when Donny made his first commit, but woodchip touched so many files that wading through the log is a highly non-trivial exercise.) On 2 Sep 2001 he committed a samba revision where he had stripped out svc support (once upon a time most servers in Gentoo were setup to run from daemontools by default), so his tenure has been at least that long. My recollection is that one of woodchip's more impressive early feats was the complete replacement of all of the init scripts in Portage for Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc6. Through 1.0_rc5 Gentoo had used fairly standard rc scripts modified from Stampede Linux, but for 1.0_rc6 Daniel Robbins (drobbins) and Martin Schlemmer (azarah) had created a new dependency-based init script system that is still used today. Within a span of days Donny rewrote every single init script in the Portage tree and committed new masked packages to await the release of 1.0_rc6. Thanks to woodchip (and drobbins and azarah, of course) the transition to the new init scripts was nearly painless. Since then woodchip has been responsible for maintaining some of the most vital packages in Portage. Solar recently posted a list of all of the packages that have woodchip's name in the ChangeLog, and the breadth of packages that he has touched is truly impressive. Less visible, but perhaps even more important, woodchip was the principle maintainer for the Gentoo PAM, apache, and samba packages. As useful as PAM is for simplifying authentication on a Linux system, the package itself is a nightmare to maintain because for much of its life a great deal of the package's most useful functionality has existed only as a barely-coherent collection of redhat patches. At the same time, PAM is one package that is never (well, hardly ever) allowed to break, since the result of a broken PAM configuration is generally an inability to log into the machine. Apache is a similarly vital package, and woodchip handled the transition from Apache-1.x to Apache-2.x with considerable aplomb. The transparent installation of Apache modules into the correct module directory along with appropriately installed configuration fragments is entirely due to Donny's careful shepherding. Similar care can be seen in the samba package. Donny, thank you very much for all that you have done for Gentoo, for your willingness to answer all sorts of weird and naive questions, and for your friendship. Gentoo will be much poorer without you. Best wishes. New Forum Administrator Since Wednesday 21 April, former moderator ian! is now giving the other site admins a helping hand in keeping the Gentoo Forums fully functional. Sadly, his new duties will also include the cancelation of a steady number of user accounts that are being abused to spam the Forums each week... Portage Slotting 101 Here's an informative thread about Portage and how "slotting" of different package versions works. UTF-8 Console Fonts and More International Gentooers may be interested in the UTF-8 thread that blossomed into a detailed discussion of how non-english fontsets and languages are handled in Gentoo. Germany: German NFP Registered, Local Gentoo Merchandise Shop Opened While Daniel Robbins is busy converting Gentoo into a not-for-profit organisation on his side of the Atlantic, the German Gentoo developers have finalised all the necessary steps for registering an almost identical legal entity, called "eingetragener Verein" (registered association) under the German law. It'll take the commercial courts another four to six weeks to acknowledge the setup, but the association is already operational, has opened a bank account, and started raking in bushels of money via their new online shop, whose main advantage over the Gentoo store in the US lies in its comparatively low-cost deliveries to customers in Germany. Proceeds from the online sales are split between the manufacturer of the goods on offer, and the association who'll reinvest the leftovers in things like burning and printing LiveCDs to be thrown around the crowds at events across Europe, and covering the costs for the increasing number of Gentoo booths at those same trade fairs and conferences. UK: New Gentoo-UK IRC Channel Opened The British Gentooistas have been lagging behind their European neighbours, at least in creating regional Gentoo support sites. Now, even if they cannot possibly be blamed for lacking the same type of online activities (traditionally centered on translations of the English Gentoo documentation), they could at least have agreed on a venue for their first regional user meeting by now, let alone a date. But last week's creation of a UK-specific IRC channel (#gentoo-uk on irc.freenode.net) on Freenode by Edinburgh-based Gentoo developer Ciaran McCreesh should finally provide a good starting point for future activities. Looking forward to their announcements. Tips and Tricks is on hiatus this week. The following developers recently left the Gentoo team:
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo Linux team:
The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo Linux project:
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