Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: 29 May 2006
1.
Gentoo news
Don't mix and match GCC 3.4 and 4.1 versions
It has been discovered that even though GCC 3.4 and 4.1 share the same
libstdc++.so version, some slight changes require you to
follow the GCC
Upgrading Guide. Bug
#134447 illustrates an example of what may happen upon partial rebuilds (Qt in
this case). Sorry for any inconvenience that this error may have caused.
GnuPG update
gnupg-1.9.20 has been marked stable, allowing its added features
GPG-AGENT (passphrase caching) and GPGSM (S/MIME support) to be made available
to all users of Gentoo Linux. As the GnuPG developers have indicated
these features are ready for production use. Following their recommendation, the gpg
executable on your system is still the gnupg-1.4 version, as gnupg-1.4
and gnupg-1.9 are both installed at the same time (in different slots). If
you want to use the development
version of gpg please enable USE=gpg2-experimental, then emerge
gnupg-1.9 and the executable /usr/bin/gpg2 will
be installed. It will only be used if explicitly called, and by applications that are gpg2-aware.
Not all applications look for gpg2 or understand its interfaces, which is why gnupg-1.4
is also installed. As a result of the stabilization the gpg-agent package is
superseeded by gnupg-1.9.20. For information on how to use gpg-agent see Gentoo GnuPG User guide.
Rsync server Guide rewrite
Tobias Klausmann, systems administrator for rsync5.de.gentoo.org, was
kind enough recently to completely rewrite the Gentoo
rsync server guide with fixes both in the instructions and the code snippets.
Gentoo developer Jeffrey Forman and the infrastructure team want to thank him for
the hard work and appreciate making Gentoo's documentation just a little bit more complete.
2.
Developer of the week
"A room full of strangers is a room full of potential friends" - Christel Dahlskjaer (christel)
Figure 2.1: Christel Dahlskjaer aka Christel |
 |
One of the more recent additions to the Gentoo development team,
already known by many from her function as Freenode staff, Christel
Dahlskjaer was originally pulled in to help the User Relations project.
Since then she has also infiltrated PR, Events, Gentoo/MIPS,
Gentoo/Alpha, Developer Relations and Release Engineering, and she
is also Gentoo's administrative contact during this year's Summer of
Code contest. "User Relations exists to act as a facilitator for the
many user focused projects within Gentoo," she explains. "We are bridging
the gap between users and developers by improving the information flow, keeping
users and prospective developers informed about the development community.
We also deal with complaints." Although she originally came onboard to
work on User Relations, she finds much enjoyment in working on the other
projects she is taking part in.
One of the few active women in the midst of primarily male Gentoo
developers, Christel is also a qualified nurse, and currently studies
towards a MSc in Forensic Psychology. To keep herself busy and out of
trouble, she keeps a number of computers around the house, including an
Alpha Server, a Sun Blade 1000, an O2 and "a terribly gorgeous babypink
iBook," all of which of course run Gentoo.
The question "KDE or Gnome?" has no relevance for a fluxbox user such as
Christel -- who lives in Exeter (England) and is "happily not married,
yet" -- and irssi is her favourite application, no surprise really, her
being a Irssi developer after all, and Senior Freenode Staff, but she
insists that "senior" does not necessarily mean "old."
3.
Heard in the community
planet.gentoo.org
Perl 5.8.8 is at your door
Perl 5.8.8 has been marked stable on most architectures during the last week.
Like after every Perl upgrade you have to run perl-cleaner to rebuild all
Perl modules and packages linked against the old libperl.
4.
Gentoo international
Germany: Winners of the gentoo.de quiz announced
As reported,
the German not-for-profit association "Friends of Gentoo e.V." asked on their
community-site gentoo.de "Are you Gentoo?" Now the quiz is over, and the
organizers now know that more than 500 participants are Gentoo. The
interest in this quiz was so impressive that there will be another quiz in
late-summer this year. If you have questions you'd like to see included in
that next quiz mail them to www@gentoo.de.
Congratulations to Benjamin Franzke, Chiara Sannitz and Meik Frischke who won
the T-shirt, mouse-pad and Gentoo stickers offered by the "Friends of Gentoo".
5.
Gentoo in the press
Newsforge (22 May 2006)
Author Robin Miller gives Gentoo an interesting supporting role in this
article about the Debian developer conference DebConf6. Answering his
own question why Debian is important, he obviously finds that others get
more public visibility: "Novell and Red Hat have significant PR and ad
budgets and use them to make lots of noise in the trade press. Gentoo has
devoted followers who post pro-Gentoo messages in almost every online
discussion about GNU/Linux distributions." Small error: Miller thinks
Debian's social contract is unique, which goes to say that maybe Gentoo's
devoted followers are at least one
pro-Gentoo message short so far.
6.
Gentoo developer moves
Moves
The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:
Adds
The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:
- Roy Bamford (NeddySeagoon) - Forums
Changes
The following developers recently changed roles within the
Gentoo project:
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. Between 21 May 2006
and 28 May 2006, activity on the site has resulted in:
- 668 new bugs during this period
- 401 bugs closed or resolved during this period
- 25 previously closed bugs were reopened this period
Of the 10054 currently open bugs: 56 are labeled 'blocker', 141 are labeled 'critical', and 526 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:
8.
GWN feedback
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9.
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10.
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