Monthly Archives: February 2009

gentoo

Gentoo: Yearly Releases – help or hurt Gentoo?

February 25, 2009 – 12:15 am

I have been thinking for awhile now and can’t convince myself of an answer.

Does the lack of yearly releases help or hurt Gentoo?

I enjoy Gentoo because I never have to re-install my host. The “rolling release” model is great, a model shared by nearly all(?) source-based distros. However, with our new automated weekly stages – which I think are a great idea, we lose a few things. In no particular order, we lose:

  • PR – new ‘releases’ generate a buzz on the distro sites and blog-o-sphere around the world.
  • Ability to say “we no longer support base installs before 20XX.Y” – repo changes, bash versions, portage upgrades, etc.
  • The appearance of activity. (This point is debatable)

However, with that being said, I think that yearly releases are also pointless with the presence of weekly stages, because:

  • ‘releases’ mean nothing to existing hosts – the only thing you have to do is update your make.profile symlink. There is no other direct benefit unless we tie features to a new profile.
  • It is a metric ton of workload to get a stage out there that is guaranteed to work for a year.
  • Missing man-power for the release schedule. As evident by the regular occurrence of releases slipping behind schedule.
  • Obviously it is easy to script or automate. Good job release team on getting this done.
  • By the end-of-life date of the stage (normally a year, sometimes longer), you have a ton of old packages to update. Meaning, weekly stages provide a much faster complete install.

So, how do I solve the above? Well I’m not exactly sure. One idea I have is to automatically create new profiles every 6 months. This would allow PR to continue. Individual arch teams can decide how long to keep old profiles – I’d recommend one year. However, updates to the profiles would only go into the latest profile – so it would be advantageous to update the profile asap for users. One particular downside about not creating new profiles is that they will never be eligible for EAPI upgrades, only new profiles are eligible. I don’t exactly see a downside to this idea besides it being some work every 6 months for someone.

Does anyone else have opinions on this subject? Or other ideas on how to gain back what we lose as presented above?

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skydiving

New Project: http://planetskydive.net

February 23, 2009 – 11:03 pm

I’ve completed my new project, finally. I am proudly releasing http://planetskydive.net to the world. Planet Skydive is simply a one stop for people to read skydiving blog posts.

Have you ever wanted to blog about skydiving but thought it was pointless because no one would read it? Well, now you have an audience.

I wanted to have a place that I could subscribe to that would aggregate all the skydiving posts that people wanted to contribute. Anyone can contribute, the only thing that you cannot do is advertise products for sale. This is not a classified page, for that you can use dropzone.com

If you would like to be added to this site, send an email to “jeremy at jolexa.net” with your blog address, point of contact email address, province/state & country if you want a flag by your posts. Then you can make a post and it will show up here. This index is updated hourly, so it is not instant.

Some post ideas:

  • Your journey at your first bigway camp
  • Some achievement (being selected for a world record attempt, first 4-stack CReW, first otter jump, whatever)
  • Objective review of a new dropzone
  • Your dog’s first skydive
  • Your goal for becoming USPA dictator, I mean, what you are doing on the USPA BOD and why we should care.

If you don’t have a blog yet and want one. I would highly recommend either wordpress or blogger. (both free)

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linux

Linux: Quote of the Day

February 8, 2009 – 10:44 pm

The advantage of Open Source is not the price, it’s its open nature. Knowledge is freedom and Open Source is all about freedom, no closed source alternative can match that. But this not something so obvious when you’re new to Open Source.  –Oliver Fourdan (Creator of Xfce) [source]

Yup, sounds right. Explains why even in this global economy, people will still buy closed source products (ie. more expensive). They are comfortable with them and don’t care to learn otherwise. It is too bad really.

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life

Sneaky credit card companies

February 7, 2009 – 10:07 am

So, you know those “gift cards” that are made by Visa/AMEX/MasterCard and can be used anywhere? Well..they are sneaky, here is why. You must have a balance on the card that covers the cost you are trying to purchase! Otherwise it is ‘denied’ like a credit card is. This is real annoying when you have less than a dollar on the card and you can’t use it anywhere! Money down the drain for me and making money for them. grr. Buyer Beware – I would much rather receive a gift card to a specific store and actually be able to use all of it, wouldn’t you?

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life

Megabus sucks, Chicago is cool.

February 6, 2009 – 9:30 am

About a month ago now, my girlfriend and I went to Chicago. We choose megabus because we heard ‘ok’ things about it. All I have to say is ‘buyer beware’ – avoid at all costs!

At first glance, megabus looks great. Cheap-ish rates, direct service, better than greyhound, wifi on bus, etc. However, the real story comes out once you start your journey. Enroute to Chicago, the ambient temp on the bus was ~50 degrees or so. The wi-fi wasn’t equipped or wasn’t turned on. It was packed (this was expected though). On the way home, well..the freaking bus was 2 hours late to get to our pick-up spot! WTF. The driver didn’t know how to drive a bus, it seemed. He also got lost in Milwaukee.. WTF #2. Wi-fi was on, but we couldn’t associate with the access point…the driver “didn’t know how to work such fancy technology thingies” – FAIL! – get trained in on your equipment, sir.

Ok, rant about megabus is over. Bottom line: You will probably be disappointed with the service. Google search for “megabus sucks” and see all the other stories of how bad this company is.

Chicago was neat though – we got to see “The Bean” (below)

the_bean

And we ate at a bunch of restaurants, went shopping, saw a protest, walked around the city, among other stuff. Cool place there.

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gentoo prefix

Gentoo Prefix – added OS support

February 5, 2009 – 5:20 pm

Gentoo Prefix now supports Itanium Linux and AIX-6.1 (with caveats).

ia64-linux mostly works out of the box. There is one small issue with scanelf which I would like to fix if I ever find the time. (‘scanelf(9292): unaligned access to …’ – low priority because everything still appears to work). We previously supported ia64-linux but it was removed because we didn’t think anyone used it – and no one responded when we asked. It was added back, by me, to support a work endeavour.

AIX-6.1 – whew..this one was a pain to bootstrap a prefix env. I took the lazy way and put my AIX-5.3 prefix last in my PATH so I had working tools to start with. Now, after I got it all working, there is some sort of hiccup with bash/python(?). Something is causing something to hang when python’s workdir is trying to get cleaned up after the emerge. There is a hanging file descriptor out there (.nfs). Again, not easy to debug. (Don’t even bother telling me about lsof, I know, I know…). So AIX-6.1 works, but maybe not very well. YMMV ;)

As a side note, we are up to ~2100 packages in the prefix tree thanks to some helpful Prefix users.

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gentoo

New online home

February 4, 2009 – 12:45 pm

If you have rss feeds to my old WP hosted blog, you may want to check them now and update if needed. That blog is closed for comments and I’ll rid google of it after it fully picks up this site. (Over 20,000 hits over there, thanks!)

My new home is located on a Gentoo VPS from a provider called Linode. I have nothing but good things to say about Linode right now. Service, response time, user community, admins in irc, price, etc. I have been working on setting up a webserver (this blog), email server – which caused me much pain overall, and a few other random things. For the most part, my new host is fully setup now and relatively hands free for major services.

Expect more [written] news from me soon here now that I got this project done. Oh, by the way, Linode has a referral program. If you appreciate some of the work I do for Gentoo, you should use my referral code to make a purchase there. Here is the link: http://www.linode.com/?r=b4fa70eb87c890e08baf7b0c7852fb7cecd8963b

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