This post will probably annoy some people, or bring bad “spotlight” to Gentoo Linux. I call it a case study, but it is just my opinions… The QA team has said that there is some sort of “policy” on masking packages that break reverse dependencies. I’ll subscribe that that policy for the sake of not breaking users machines on purpose, however, let’s take a look at the current case study: poppler-0.16 package.mask (in context, name removed because it isn’t needed): +# Masked because of ABI change, breaks +# depending packages.
Xfce-4.8pre2 was announced yesterday. Gentoo has it available already thanks to the work of Samuli (ssuominen). The pre1 version was available with 0day bumps too, that proved to have the normal beta release “issues”, there are many bugs fixed in pre2 (ChangeLog). I saw several Gentoo users participating on the Xfce bugtracker, thanks. If you are of the type to test and report bugs, feel free to upgrade to 4.8pre2 and help make 4.8 final a solid release by participating upstream ([bug tracker][3]).
The Gentoo Prefix project is still alive and still kicking. There has not been any major noteworthy highlights so you may not heard from us in some time. The number of users increases and the number of active contributors seems to stay the same or increase much more slowly. Gentoo Prefix was the reason I become a Gentoo Linux developer, so get involved..it is an easy gateway to being a Gentoo Developer if you are interested.
There seems to be a semi-meme going [around][2] on some of the planets I read. My concern is long directory paths and I wanted a dymanic solution for it. Surely, I cannot be the first person to think of it, but I haven’t seen it in use anywhere else. jolexa @ helios :: ~ %% and jolexa @ helios :: ~ %% cd projects/prefix-tinderbox/really_long_dirname_so_that_binpkgs_can_be_shortened/a/b/ jolexa @ helios :: .../a/b %% (the colors and wrapping are representitive only) and the code that produces that: _chomp_path() { local path=${1/${HOME}/\~} local last=${path} sedout= count=0 count2=0 sedout=$(echo ${path} | sed -e 's:/: :g') for i in ${sedout}; do (( count++ )) done if ((count > 2)); then last="..." for i in ${sedout}; do (( count2++ )) if (( count2 >= count - 1 )); then last+="/$i" fi done fi echo ${last} } PS1='\[\033[1;34m\]\u \[\033[1;32m\]@\[\033[1;34m\] \h \[\033[1;30m\]::\[\033[1;37m\] $(_chomp_path $(pwd)) \[\033[1;30m\]%%\[\033[0m\] ' If anyone wants to improve that function, let me know.
I’m not going to say anything bad about GoDaddy. You can read all that stuff at NoDaddy. I browsed around and looked at a few registrar’s that people recommended. The top 3 that I found recommended were name.com, namecheap.com, and [internet.bs][4]. I settled on internet.bs because of the free private whois offerings (others have this too), the free one year extension, and most importantly the fact that they responded to me via email within 5 minutes!