Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: July 19, 2004"Apple, we have a problem" - Gentoo MacOS X Released
Almost exactly one year after the idea of porting Portage to MacOS X came up - and the joint Metapkg initiative between Fink, Darwinports and Gentoo took off - a 20-head-strong developer team around Pieter van den Abeele (strategic lead) and Daniel Ostrow (operational) is now ready to release an extraordinary beast into the wild: Gentoo MacOS. They deliver on a promise no other Linux distribution has been daring enough to make yet: Portage on MacOS is now fully operational, seamlessly integrated as a package manager in a non-Linux operating system. It initially serves the main purpose of an SDK for inclusion of new packages, testing and patching. Granted, KDE isn't ported yet, but make no mistake: Gentoo MacOS is ready for consumption by Macintosh users who want, say, scientific DTP via TeX, something they will now be able to simply emerge in OS X just like they'd do in Gentoo Linux."Right now it's a tool to install lots of commonly requested applications on OS X", explains Pieter van den Abeele. "But in a few months, we'll have a port system that builds Darwin from scratch, provides a standardised lookup and installation routine for Dashboard widgets, enhancements and tools like the Desktop Manager and many, many more popular OS X applications." Downloading the Gentoo MacOS Installer provides users with a patched portage, its tree, and the Python modules. It sets environment variables and demands a bootstrapping shell script to be run before the first emerge that detects the operating system (Panther or Tiger), chooses the relevant profiles and injects every application it finds already installed in MacOS X.
Since Gentoo's own GCC ebuild for MacOS X isn't ready yet, compiling is currently done using the Xcode development tools which include GCC 3.3 provided by Apple. "People already on Tiger can experiment with GCC 3.5", adds Pieter. Tiger, the new release of MacOS X, is due in 2005 with its brandnew database filesystem Spotlight, modernised video services and many other features. The Gentoo MacOS developers are busy polishing the knobs (a Cocoa user interface is part of the plan), getting iSync integration to work (emerge an application on one machine, automatically replicate onto all other Macs in a LAN), right down to making Catalyst produce Darwin LiveCDs... "But first the cool stuff, then Darwin", chuckles strategic lead Pieter. Even though his team is already larger than the entire Gentoo Linux PPC developer group, they still train new devs almost daily, and whoever wants to help with the project is very welcome to get in touch. The public Wiki holds installation instructions and serves as a reporting tool for packages outside of Portage that already compile without bombing out. The Gentoo MacOS Installer can be downloaded from here. Full size (1024x768) screenshots of the Gentoo MacOS installation procedure:
rsync: Directory traversal in rsync daemon Under specific conditions, the rsync daemon is vulnerable to a directory traversal allowing to write files outside a sync module. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement wv: Buffer overflow vulnerability A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in the wv library that can allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the vulnerable application. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Linux Kernel: Remote DoS vulnerability with IPTables TCP Handling A flaw has been discovered in 2.6 series Linux kernels that allows an attacker to send a malformed TCP packet, causing the affected kernel to possibly enter an infinite loop and hang the vulnerable machine. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement PHP: Multiple security vulnerabilities Multiple security vulnerabilities, potentially allowing remote code execution, were found and fixed in PHP. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Portage The portage team is currently working on readying portage-2.0.51 for public testing and stable releases in the near future. The features of 2.0.51 are mostly internal, but there will be some obvious changes related to FHS compliance and better handling of virtual and 'any of these' dependencies. There will be some changes in the caches as the migration to 2.0.51 starts, but as long as users are currently on at least portage-2.0.50-r7, they won't notice. Devrel The recruiters team have suspended plans to implement a formal copyright assignment process, pending legal counsel and some issues with wording, the status of developers younger than the age of majority, and the legal status of non-U.S. development. For now, ebuilds are specifically assigned copyright to the Gentoo Foundation, but there is no formal contract. There is also now a Developer Away page which will document developers who are away or out-of-contact for a variety of reasons. Gentoo-Alt Pieter van den Abeele (strategic lead) and Daniel Ostrow (operational) will be heading up the new MacOS project to support the implementation of portage on Macintosh computers. See the News section for details on this initiative. Hardened The Hardened Gentoo team is currently getting ready for a parallel release with the 2004.2 Live CD. Infrastructure The infrastructure team are currently testing eGroupWare's suitability for use by Gentoo developers for communication and project management. Releng The Release Engineering team are hard at work gearing up for the release of the 2004.2 Live CD,currently scheduled for the 26th of this month. 4. Featured Developer of the Week Featured Developer is on hiatus this week. Portage, not Portage First anniversary of one of the most popular threads in the forums: Gentoo developer Pythonhead started a list of portage utilities that aren't in Portage exactly a year ago that's been spoon-fed with suggestions by many users since then. The list is constantly updated and has grown to currently 37 tools, including esoteric shell script like license2kill (gets rid of every package not covered by an Open-Source-Initiative-approved license) and hands-on helpers like Pythonhead's own "bumper" (bumps ebuilds when a new source version is available for download and doesn't require a totally modified ebuild) and a handful of replacements or modifications of standard portage features like updating config files, downloading and emerging things. Some of the tools have actually made it into Portage already, some will never stand a chance of inclusion in the tree. Take your pick: Using ~x86 All the Time? Should you use the ~x86 flag for everything on your system? Some claim it is too unstable, and others claim that it is more stable than not setting any keywords. Check out the interesting arguments both ways in this thread. Gentoo-Sources What is your opinion on using gentoo-sources for the kernel? A few people believe that there are too many patches applied in the gentoo-kernel, but there are also good arguments for them as well. The thread is here. Send-only Mail Server Have the need to allow a server to send mail, but not receive it? This thread opened up discussion on such a topic using Postfix. UK: Gentoo Meet-Up Looking for Organizing Committee Gentoo developer Stuart Herbert is seeking volunteers who would be willing to organize a meeting for UK-based Gentoo developers and users in September or early October 2004. The initial venue is to be Manchester, conveniently placed at the geographic center of England, Wales and Scotland. Help is now needed to organize a venue, internet access, accomodation and the conference programme, along with publicity around the event. If you're interested in participating, post your availability to this thread on the Forums. The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 10 July 2004 and 16 July 2004, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 6802 currently open bugs: 138 are labeled 'blocker', 177 are labeled 'critical', and 530 are labeled 'major'. The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are:
The developers and teams who have been assigned the most new bugs during this period are:
Using bash history If you have ever typed a long command and needed to repeat it, or you need to repeat a series of commands, try using history instead of re-typing. The history command allows you see (and execute) previous commands. Type history to see the last few commands you've entered. It will show you the command and a number. To execute the command use history !number where number is the number of the command listed. (e.g. history !234). 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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