Utilities related to Portage administration

1.  Project Description

The Tools subproject deals with portage related tools that are not included in the core portage package. This covers maintaining ebuilds for external packages as well as developing and improving our own utilities and scripts.

2.  Project Goals

The major goal of this subproject is to provide Gentoo users a set of userfriendly tools to make portage easier to use. This includes config utilities (both GUI and console), programs to create and maintain ebuilds and scripts to control portage beyond what emerge can do.

3.  Developers

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

4.  Resources

Resources offered by the Gentoo Portage Tools project are:

• Gentoolkit SVN repository (over viewcvs)
• Ufed CVS repository (over viewcvs)

5.  Herds

The Gentoo Portage Tools project maintains the following herds:

6.  Contributing to Portage Utilities

Bug Reports

Please report all bugs you encounter on our bug tracking system. Before opening a new bug report please make sure that the bug has not already been reported by another user.

In your bug report please state clearly:

• Which tool the bug is about
• How you triggered the bug (commands executed, files edited, ...)
• What portage version and the version of the tools you used when you found the bug
• If the bug is reproducable
• The output of the emerge --info command

Please don't get too impatient if there is no immideate reaction on your bug, it can sometimes take a while before a developer has time to look at it (this also applies to non-Portage bug reports). Often we'll need additional information from you while trying to resolve a bug, please provide it as soon as you can, if we have to wait too long (over a month) we'll likely close the bug as RESOLVED:NEEDINFO, you can however reopen it when you posted the requested information.

Please do not reopen bugs unless you're in one of the following situations:

• The bug was marked as RESOLVED:FIXED, but you can still reproduce it with the new version that is suposed to contain the fix (the version is generally stated when the bug is closed)
• The bug was marked as RESOLVED:NEEDINFO and you have provided the requested information
• The bug was marked as RESOLVED:WONTFIX, RESOLVED:CANTFIX or RESOLVED:LATER and you think we misunderstood you. Do not reopen a bug just because you disagree with our resolution.

Be aware that we will still read comments on bug reports even if the report itself is closed, so you don't have to reopen it just to get our attention.

Every bug report deals with one specific problem, please respect that and don't talk about other not directly related bugs on a bug report.

Submitting Patches

If you want to submit a patch, please make sure the patch complies to the following criteria:

• Use TABS. Some people like 8 spaces, some people like 4, and some like 2. Tabs are the happy medium. Patches that use spaces and/or a mix of tabs and spaces for indentation will likely be rejected.
• Generally submit diff files instead of whole files, only when the diff is significantly larger than the file itself or the file didn't exist previously submitting the whole file is acceptable.
• Diffs have to be in unified form (diff -u, svn diff).
• Always submit a detailed explanation of what the patch does and, if necessary, why you chose the specific implementation you submitted (IOW: what's the benefit of the patch). Also include any problems and/or drawbacks you think the patch has.
• Always state against which version (for releases) or revision and branch (for svn patches) the patch was made.
• Only submit clean patches. Do not include other patches in a submitted patch. If the code found in a patch does not match the description of the patch, it will be rejected. Also don't add any unrelated code cleanups in your patch

If the patch is related to a specific bug report, please attach it there as text/plain. If it is not directly related to a bug report (to your knowledge) please open a new one.

SVN/CVS repositories

All tools that are directly developed by the Portage Utilities Project are maintained in SVN or CVS repositories on the Gentoo CVS server. These include:

• Gentoolkit: svn+ssh://cvs.gentoo.org/var/svnroot/gentoolkit
• Ufed: cvs.gentoo.org:/var/cvsroot/gentoo-src/ufed

Currently no anonymous access is available for these repositories.