Exherbo

Paludis 0.34.5 has been released: –continue-on-failure would always consider old-style virtuals unsatisfied. This is now fixed. Posted in paludis releases Tagged: paludis

So, I had a few random old scripts lying around in SVN. I've migrated them to git now. Along with my other repos, they're browseable at http://git.pioto.org/ Things of interest might be: rbtpb - A replacement for tpb which is hopefully more robust. rubeak - A tool for handling multimedia keyboard keys, and some IR remotes.

The video of my FOSDEM talk (10 cool things about Exherbo) is online now along with all the other great FOSDEM talks. I've already had quite a bit of positive feedback about my talk but don't miss the other videos either - there was quite a lot of good talks this year and I'll have to catch up on a few videos myself.

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. Rather good, although the ending looks suspiciously like it’s mocking all those misguided fools who say Stephenson can’t write endings. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. 20% brilliance, 70% filler hidden behind ... [More] novelty. Dollhouse. Has potential. I give it ten episodes, by which point it will either be awesome and cancelled or lame and going on for another five years. I may change my mind next week. Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: books [Less]

So apparently someone has been crazy enough to grant me commit access to the Irssi project's subversion repositories, so I better start doing something useful with these new super-powers. A thing that many users has been looking for is the ability ... [More] to select various targets (either channels or nicknames) that shouldn't be logged via Irssi's autolog feature. This used to be impossible, but as of revision 5006 it's possible to use the autolog_ignore_targets-setting. Example usage If you want to disable logging for all #irssi channels on every network to which you are connected to: /set autolog_ignore_targets #irssi If you want to disable logging for only the #irssi channel on EFNet: /set autolog_ignore_targets EFNet/#irssi Of course you can add multiple targets: /set autolog_ignore_targets EFNet/#irssi Freenode/#exherbo ahf [Less]

I am using Mutt as my e-mail client and I have done that ever since I started using Unix. I have for many months been annoyed by my very ugly theme that I created when I was around 13, but I have never actually spend a few minutes on making something ... [More] shiny that didn’t piss me off. Inspired from Ciaran McCreesh’s Vim theme called Inkpot, I decided to create an inkpot’ish theme for Mutt and here is the result that you can put in your .muttrc: color attachment color30 color80 color header color10 color80 "^(From|Subject|cc|date|To|X-Spam-Level|User-Agent|X-Mailer):" color signature color39 color80 color tree color26 color80 color message color26 color80 color status color85 color81 color normal color78 color80 color error color79 color64 color indicator color80 color73 color markers color26 color80 color index color64 color80 ~D color index color64 color80 ~F color index color30 color80 ~T color tilde color80 color80 color body color10 color80 "(http|https|ftp|news|telnet|finger|irc)://[^ \">\t\r\n]*" color body color10 color80 "mailto:[-a-z_0-9.] @[-a-z_0-9.] " color body color26 color80 "[;:=][-][)/(|]" color quoted color52 color80 color quoted1 color22 color80 color quoted2 color71 color80 Note: This probably only works in urxvt since that’s what I am using There is, of course, a screenshot: Mutt Update: Henrik Stuart claims to have converted it to support xterm-256color as well. Here is the code: color attachment color61 color232 color header color10 color232 "^(From|Subject|cc|date|To|X-Spam-Level|User-Agent|X-Mailer):" color signature color63 color232 color tree color63 color232 color message color37 color232 color status color247 color235 color normal color229 color232 color error color231 color196 color indicator color232 color215 color markers color37 color232 color index color196 color232 ~D color index color196 color232 ~F color index color49 color232 ~T color tilde color63 color232 color body color10 color232 "(http|https|ftp|news|telnet|finger|irc)://[^ \">\t\r\n]*" color body color10 color232 "mailto:[-a-z_0-9.] @[-a-z_0-9.] " color body color37 color232 "[;:=][-][)/(|]" color quoted color130 color232 color quoted1 color25 color232 color quoted2 color207 color232 [Less]

Lies, damn lies and statistics… At the time of writing (Wed Feb 11 11:22:48 CET 2009), the following numbers might be of interest: 269 days since official announcement We’ve been working on Exherbo for longer than that but serious work on packages ... [More] and “userspace” stuff began around the time of the announcement. 30 official package repositories This includes individual developers’ supplemental repositories. Thanks to Paludis’ excellent support for multiple repositories and in particular the unavailable repository type, keeping track of packages in 30 different repositories is easy as an end-user (my laptop/server currently uses 16 of those repositories). Does any other distribution make it as easy to keep track of many small end-user oriented repositories? The Debian/Apt approach is definitely more painful than this. 7 unofficial package repositories online casino net These are repositories belonging to Exherbo users rather than official developers. The difference between these and the official ones is that these aren’t hosted on Exherbo infrastructure and they’re listed in unavailable-unofficial rather than unavailable. 1313 packages in official repositories Believe it or not but chances are you will find most of what you need here. There’s a long way to the tens of thousands of packages in distributions such as Gentoo and Debian but we don’t really have to go there. Adding packages with importare is easy and there are whole groups of packages that doesn’t really have to be hosted in official repositories. If a group of people want to add robotics-related packages to Exherbo they can just create an unofficial repository (could be anything, $scm repo, tarball, rsync) and get it listed in unavailable-unofficial. We really want to keep the number of packages we have to maintain low to allow us to spend time developing the system and its related tools. Maintaining packages doesn’t require any magic cloaks. 76 packages in unofficial repositories This isn’t a lot, in part because some people prefer to provide packages as patches for official repositories but mainly because Exherbo is just now crawling out of its infancy, taking its first steps towards being used by a wider audience. As this audience grows, we expect the number of unofficial packages to grow as well. Unofficial is actually a somewhat misleading term. It’s true that we don’t maintain them, but we do glance over the repositories before they are added to unavailable and if we hear of major breakages from these we can quite easily remove them again. Most (if not all) of the people with unofficial repositories listed in unavailable tend to hang around in #exherbo on IRC, so submitting patches to them is simple. 20 developers As currently listed on the wobsite. You will notice this number has been near-constant over the last year (I think one developer joined since the announcement). There’s no real reason to let this number grow at the moment, since all package maintenance can be done without push-access to the official repositories. 20 contributors to official repositories Over the last year, patches from 20 people against the official repositories have been accepted and pushed. Several packages are currently maintained by non-developers. Switching to Git early on was a great decision since it makes the whole patch-dance incredibly easy. We owe a great deal of thanks to these people. 90 people in #exherbo This is also one of the near-constant numbers. A majority of these people idles in the channel, but if you ping a developer with a link to a git format-patch, it’s likely to get pushed or rejected with suggestions for improvements quickly. Keep in mind that most Exherbo developers lives in Europe and some of us (usually not Ingmar) also sleep every now and then. 50 kicks & 27 current bans in #exherbo Given the potential for flames and the number of assholes on the internets these numbers seem fairly low. It’s usually a peaceful channel. 3 platforms (x86, amd64, ppc64 [unofficial]) Exherbo currently has stages for three different platforms though not all packages has been tested on all platforms. Paludis will refuse to install untested packages and mark them as ‘Masked by platform’. Feel free to submit a git format-patch if you find that a masked package works well on your platform (you can override the platform mask in /etc/paludis/platforms.conf). Activity in 12 official repositories over the last 24 hours Even though it’s been nine months since the initial announcement we’re still doing lots of work all over the place. 6896 commits in official repositories ~ 56 minutes between commits The most important number of them all!!! This comes from ohloh and is a little more than a day old. It’s not too bad for forty people working on this project in their spare-time. 31 open bugs / 120 closed bugs We usually only use bugzilla when we need to keep track of issues for an extended period of time. Most issues are quickly resolved over IRC. If you file a bug, remember to attach a git format-patch! 1174 quips Don’t say we’re not funny! If you know a bit about Gentoo, you should recognise many of the quoted people. 1 supported PM No-one has stepped up to provide an alternative implementation of the exheres-0 EAPI, written in Haskell. Patches are welcome (in /dev/null, that is). 1 (unwanted) slashdotting That certainly turned what should’ve been a low-key announcement in a few relevant places into a lot more attention than what we wanted (or was prepared to recieve at that point in time). Still, it was a fun couple of days. 0 flamewars That’s right. It’s hard to start a serious flamewar among 20 people. 1 awesome mascot ‘Nuff said 1 deleted wikipedia article Someone wrote a wikipedia article just after the announcement, which was swiftly deleted as Exherbo didn’t meet the notability guidelines for wikipedia back then. Since wikipedia is all about verifiable, third-party information it will probably take a while before we’ll meet that requirement. But that’s all for the better - the people browsing wikipedia in search of their next distribution probably aren’t the kind of people we need/want right now. 3 talks (only 1 video) Bryan gave the talk on Genesis at FOSS Aalborg. It was this talk that prompted the announcement of Exherbo, and at the moment, this is the only talk we have a video from. Bryan then gave a talk about the visions and long-term goals of Exherbo last October at Open Source Days. This talk was a lot more interesting in general but unfortunately no video recording has been made available so far. Lastly, Bryan was invited to talk at FOSDEM four days ago. The video isn’t out yet, but it probably will be soon. >9000 people pissed off by our honesty For some reason a lot of people felt offended by the fact that we didn’t want them to waste their time on a half-working, most-likely-broken distribution. If you tell them to use it, they will complain that it’s broken. If you tell them not to, they will complain that you’re an arrogant bastard. Even so, scaring these people away was a lot better the wasting time on supporting them. We’re reaching a point where we feel Exherbo is usable by a wider audience, but we certainly weren’t there nine months ago. If you look a the frontpage you will see that its content was changed a short while ago, to better reflect the current state of Exherbo. Too many offers of community management/PR/HR help We still don’t need that thankyouverymuch! That’s what I could think of at the moment. Are there any other interesting Exherbo-related numbers out there? [Less]

Just before FOSDEM the Exherbo website got a much needed update. The old website was mostly untouched from our announcement almost a year ago and many things have changed since then.So what's new?- We've reorganised the content to make it easier to ... [More] find downloads, our developer documentation and various other resources.- It's friendlier - we've added tons of packages during the last year and we're hardly ever breaking Exherbo completely anymore so many of the old warnings don't apply anymore. We're still not promising any support though so you need to have a good grasp of how linux works if you want to try Exherbo.- Much nicer buildsystem for the website. The old website was a conglomeration of make, sed, cat and files in at least 4 different formats spread across two git repositories making it a bit unwieldy. The new website is built using just make and markdown for all the content. We still have content spread across two repositories but we've removed some of the weird interdependencies between them.What's in the future?I expect that we'll start adding more documentation in the coming months and that there might be a bit more reorganisation of the content as the website grows. If you have a fair grasp of how Exherbo works and good english writing skills this is an area where we could use some help.Please contact me (kloeri on #exherbo / irc.freenode.net or [email protected]) if you think anything is wrong with the new website or you want to contribute some material. [Less]

Paludis 0.34.4 has been released: VDB entries lacking CONFIG_PROTECT keys (such as those created by Portage) would cause an error in 0.34.3. This is now fixed. Tests for 0.34.3 would fail as root because reads and writes to a-rw files would still succeed. Affected tests are now skipped when root. Posted in paludis releases Tagged: paludis

So this led to this ’nuff said! Mood: Extremelly happy. — ferdy Tagged: esa, estec, happy, research, spacefish