Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 16 January 2006New USE defaults in the making For some packages portage has auto-use entries, which means that unless you explicitly override a USE flag it will be enabled after emerging a package and disabled after unmerging it. Example: after "emerge sqlite" the sqlite flag will show up as enabled in "emerge info" and "emerge -vp" of something that has sqlite in iuse unless you have "-sqlite" or "-*" in USE in make.conf. If you unmerge sqlite the USE flag will show up as disabled again (unless you have sqlite in USE in make.conf of course). This has caused some annoyances as USE flags tend to "randomly" jump when a new package triggers auto-use (either because you emerged or unmerged it or because the package.use file in the tree was edited). Many bugs have been filed, the general consensus is to phase out auto-use. The change will happen in one of the next Portage 2.1 releases - it is in the tree and marked ~ARCH on almost all arches. "Stable" users will stay unaffected for some time since Portage 2.0.x will not change its behaviour, but upgrades can and will change USE flags. If you just upgraded to a portage 2.1 release you will probably want to look at the "emerge -DuvpN world" output and add flags that you want to keep enabled to make.conf if they show up as "-foo*". The Gentoo baselayout team is pleased to release baselayout-1.12.0_pre14 to the eagerly awaiting public. Here's a summary of the major changes since 1.11:
Gentoo PPC meeting defines roadmap for 2006.0 and beyond The PPC developers spent three hours on Sunday night to discuss what lies ahead of them. The 2006.0 release for PowerPCs will include generic stages 1, 2 and 3, specific stage3 tarballs for G3 and G4, both a minimal and a complete install CD, plus GRP packages on a separate CD image. All 2006.0 profiles, generic and optimized, will include NPTL support. The PPC team will tackle some of the open bugs when another PPC bugday will focus the efforts of developers and users. If you'd like to participate in weeding out some of the undergrowth, tune into #gentoo-ppc on irc.freenode.net next Saturday, 21 January 14:00 UTC. Before starting a recruitment campaign for new develpers, the team is currently evaluating who among the 21 listed PPC devs is currently active or de-facto retired. Along with boosting the activity level within the team, they're also planning to enhance communication with other architectures and users by starting a mark-up of their blog posts and sending heads-up to the GWN team on a regular basis. Major highlights from the Gentoo Linux for AMD64 activities have been included in a status report published by the Gentoo AMD64 project last week. As the hardware has become more affordable, 2005 saw the user base grow a lot, and the number of developers didn't stand back: The AMD64 team started with nine developers at the beginning of 2005, and currently counts 32 active developers, plus 16 "arch testers", i.e. power users putting the development under close scrutiny and filing bug reports. The "arch testers" concept works so well that the idea has gained popularity with other architectures who are now considering setting up tester teams of their own. See the entire report for more accomplishments of the AMD64 team. New toolchain on SPARC The Gentoo SPARC developers are getting ready for the 2006.0 release. Gustavo Zacarias has marked a new gcc (3.4.5) and glibc plus 2.6.11 kernel headers stable. The change will not affect those still using the old 2005.1 profile, but as this upgrade demands users to re-emerge their entire system, you may want to check the thread for useful information before you get bitten by anything that didn't go as planned: Gentoo developer Rajiv Manglani will again hold two evening seminars about Gentoo Linux for students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, MA. The first one (tomorrow, Tuesday) will give an introduction to Gentoo, while the follow-up course on Thursday will provide a more detailled look at Portage and the creation of ebuilds. If you would like to attend one or both meetings, please contact sipb-iap-gentoo@mit.edu today!
Steve Dibb is the founder of a group of Gentoo users in Utah. Located in West Jordan, he's recently set up a website that uses "a vanilla install of Geeklog" to provide state-wide support and articles about Gentoo (first entry is a review of Damien Krotkine's flagedit tool), and serves as a starting point for future activities like meetings and installfests. "Utah is actually a cool place for all the Linux support going around," says Steve, which orginally made him worry a bit: "I had sent out an e-mail a few months earlier to see if there was any interest, and to my surprise there was quite a positive response to the idea, despite that fact that there are already a lot of local Linux, Unix or other FOSS groups and mailing lists in the state." The one-month-old Gentoo Utah group now counts eleven members, all of whom use Gentoo in both production and private environments. On top of the website Steve is hosting a mailing list where "we don't get flamed for using Gentoo like we would on the other local mailing lists" and which benefits from being small and local: "The list gives us a chance to discuss Gentoo, without being flooded from a larger userbase." Allround PC (9 January 2006, in German) Building a home theater PC (HTPC) with Gentoo Linux is a typical example of the benefits obtained from setting up only a minimal installation. It's been done several times before, of course, but this step-by-step description of the process provides a concise overview of which hardware to use, where to configure which modules, how to integrate remote controls and more. As some of the elements used are not yet part of the official Portage tree, the article also points to the gentoo.de overlay that contains additional VDR plugins needed for the HTPC setup. Ladislav Bodnar from Distrowatch picked up a piece of Gentoo documentation, the new Gentoo Linux LiveUSB Howto that "has now become part of the project's official documentation," and which he finds "particularly useful for installing Gentoo Linux on a modern laptop with no CD-ROM drive." Linuxdevices.com (11 January 2006) An article about a Linux robot site that launched a user-controllable robot appeared on the pages of the embedded online magazine Linuxdevices.com last week. The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:
The following developers recently changed roles within the Gentoo project:
mod_auth_pgsql: Multiple format string vulnerabilities Format string vulnerabilities in mod_auth_pgsql may lead to the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement xine-lib, FFmpeg: Heap-based buffer overflow xine-lib and FFmpeg are vulnerable to a buffer overflow that may be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Blender: Heap-based buffer overflow Blender is vulnerable to a buffer overflow that may be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement Wine: Windows Metafile SETABORTPROC vulnerability There is a flaw in Wine in the handling of Windows Metafiles (WMF) files, which could possibly result in the execution of arbitrary code. For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 08 January 2006 and 15 January 2006, activity on the site has resulted in:
Of the 9083 currently open bugs: 77 are labeled 'blocker', 176 are labeled 'critical', and 489 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:
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