Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: July 25th, 2005
1.
Gentoo News
Bugzilla: Bug 100,000!
In early 2002 Gentoo Bugzilla was
started to have a central tool for tracking bugs. Over time, other things like
feature requests and version bumps were also tracked as bugs since Bugzilla
makes it quite easy.
On Saturday, July 23rd, at 9:58 UTC, bug
number 100,000 was posted.
Figure 1.1: Bug 100,000 in Gentoo Bugzilla |
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This is a numerical milestone that shows how popular Bugzilla has become. The
database weighs in at almost 1.5GB! The current rate is just over 100 new
bugs a day with a small spike on weekends and a larger spike during the
BugDays that are taking all
available timezones to expand to almost two days these days.
Without the constant tweaks and upgrades by Jeffrey Forman this wouldn't be possible.
Also, a big thanks to the bugwranglers that manage the bugs and keep us from
drowning in the constant flood of new bugs!
Keeping gentoo-sources-2.4
In last week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter we wrote about “Discontinuing
Gentoo-2.4-sources”. Due to the whole bunch of e-mails the Gentoo
kernel team received, they decided to keep gentoo-sources-2.4
beside vanilla-sources-2.4.
There was an update to sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.4.31-r1,
which is masked ~x86 currently. Gentoo developer Tim Yamin asks for tests of this
kernel-version, as some patches have been removed. A detailed list of the
patches and a some help for the migration can be found in Gentoo developer
John
Mylchreest's blogpost from last Monday after the first bunch of user
e-mails reached the Gentoo kernel team.
Furthermore John asks those users who are using OpenSWAN with
gentoo-sources-2.4 and who are unable to move to a 2.6-kernel, to
mail kernel@gentoo.org, so that they
can make a decision about the future of this patchset from the feedback they
got. Last of all the kernel team would like to mention that for those users
who are using OpenAFS, that this package is getting it's much needed
attention, and that a kernel-2.6 compatible release should be available
reasonably soon.
2.
Heard in the community
gentoo-dev
upgrades and rc-scripts
Brian Harring starts a nice discussion
with the naive question: “Out of curiousity, has any put any thought into some
automated method or hook for allowing restarting of rc-scripts on
upgrade/re-emerge of a package?”
Bugzilla isn't just for bugs [reminder]
Maybe it's named badly, maybe the documentation isn't obvious enough, but
Gentoo Bugzilla is not only for bugs, but also for feature requests and other
things. Michael Cummings even asks for
reports of working packages in ~ARCH so that it's easier for developers to see
if there are any issues. Of course this shouldn't be abused!
3.
Gentoo International
Germany: National User-Meeting in August
German forums moderator slick
currently organises a national
user-meeting during the weekend August 13 and 14. Currently
planned is camping near to an inn in the lovely village Wissen located
in the countryside called Westerwald (between Cologne and
Frankfurt/Main). Potential attendees to this meeting are asked to
register on a special
website slick set up for this event.
The idea behind is that there are many people in the quite large German
community who meet daily in IRC or the forums, probably met at one of
the local Gentoo User Meetings or on a fair somewhere in Germany. But
there was often too few time for a longer talk and getting known better
to each-other.
4.
Gentoo in the press
Intel's virtualization tests with Gentoo as basis
In NewsForge's
Ottawa Linux Symposium diary was mentioned a talk by Intel's architect
Gordon McFadden about a virtualization test-setup. He used Gentoo with a
2.6.11-kernel and XFS-filesystem as basis for a User-Mode-Linux (UML) server.
“His reasoning for using Gentoo was not philosophical, but simply that he had
not used it before and wanted to try something new.”
5.
Tips and Tricks
Using vim as Man-page and Info browser
Man-pages and Info are a very good resource for additional information
of an application. Man-pages are usually shown with less and for
Info you use the info-browser. Especially the info-browser is
somewhat uncommon to use if you are not an emacs-user. In
this week's Tips and Tricks we will show you how to use vim as
your Man-page and Info browser.
First we need to install an additional package for the Info browser in
vim. The Man-page browser is included by default, but needs a
little config-change for vim:
Code Listing 5.1: Installing app-vim/info |
# emerge app-vim/info
|
Code Listing 5.2: Configuring vim for Man |
# echo "runtime ftplugin/man.vim" >> ~/.vimrc
|
After that we will use bash-functions for calling vim and create
aliases for man and info. Therefore edit your
~/.bashrc:
Code Listing 5.3: Creating man- and info-functions |
function viminfo () { vim -R -c "Info $1 $2" -c "bdelete 1"; }
alias info=viminfo
function vimman () { vim -R -c "Man $1 $2" -c "bdelete 1"; }
alias man=vimman
|
Using the aliases gives the advantage that you still can use the
original command by calling \man or \info.
Inside vim's Man-page browser you can use CTRL-] in order to call
the man-page for the word under the cursor, and CTRL-T to jump
back. More information are available with :help Man. There are
more keys for the Info browser. A short help is shown with H
when you display an Info-file.
6.
Moves, adds, and changes
Moves
The following developers recently left the Gentoo team:
Adds
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo Linux team:
- New developer: Bjarke Istrup Pedersen (Gurligebis) (bugday)
Changes
The following developers recently changed roles within the
Gentoo Linux project:
7.
Gentoo security
Mozilla Thunderbird: Multiple vulnerabilities
Several vulnerabilities in Mozilla Thunderbird allow attacks ranging from
execution of script code with elevated privileges to information leak.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
MediaWiki: Cross-site scripting vulnerability
MediaWiki is vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack that could allow
arbitrary JavaScript code execution.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
zlib: Buffer overflow
zlib is vulnerable to a buffer overflow which could potentially lead to
execution of arbitrary code.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
Shorewall: Security policy bypass
A vulnerability in Shorewall allows clients authenticated by MAC address
filtering to bypass all other security rules.
For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement
8.
Bugzilla
Summary
Statistics
The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track
bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the
development team. Between 16 July 2005
and 23 July 2005, activity on the site has resulted in:
- 811 new bugs during this period
- 426 bugs closed or resolved during this period
- 29 previously closed bugs were reopened this period
Of the 8200 currently open bugs: 106 are labeled 'blocker', 193 are labeled 'critical', and 553 are labeled 'major'.
Closed bug rankings
The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are:
New bug rankings
The developers and teams who have been assigned the most new bugs during this period are:
9.
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10.
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11.
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