Posted
almost 3 years
ago
Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked
by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated
to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act
of hostility and we have effectively left
... [More]
Freenode.
Please note that at this point the only official Gentoo IRC channels,
as well as developer accounts, can be found on Libera Chat.
[Less]
|
Posted
almost 3 years
ago
The Gentoo Council held an emergency single agenda item meeting today. At this meeting,
we have decided to move the official IRC presence of Gentoo to the
Libera Chat IRC network. We intend to have this move complete
at latest by
... [More]
13/June/2021. A full log of the meeting will be available for
download soon.
At the moment it is unclear whether we will retain any presence on Freenode at all; we
urge all users of the #gentoo channel namespace to move to Libera Chat
immediately. IRC channel names will (mostly) remain identical. You will be able to recognize Gentoo
developers on Libera Chat by their IRC cloak in the usual form gentoo/developer/*.
All other technical aspects will feel rather familiar to all of us as well. Detailed
instructions for setting up various IRC clients can be found on the
help pages of the IRC network.
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Posted
almost 3 years
ago
According to the information published recently, there have been major
changes in the way the Freenode IRC network is administered. This has
resulted in a number of staff members raising concerns about the new
administration and/or resigning. A
... [More]
large number of open source projects
have already announced the transition to other IRC networks, or are
actively discussing it.
It is not yet clear whether and how these changes will affect Gentoo.
We are observing as the situation develops. It is possible that we will
decide to move the official Gentoo channels to another network
in the best interest of our users. At the same time, we realize that
such a move will be an inconvenience to them.
At the same time, it has came to our attention that certain individuals
have been using the situation to impersonate Gentoo developers on other
IRC networks. The official Gentoo developers can be identified
on Freenode by their gentoo/developer cloak. If we move to another
network, we will announce claiming a respective cloak.
Please check this page for future updates.
More information on the Freenode situation can be found at:
Christian (Fuchs)’s Freenode resignation
@freenodestaff tweet
Open Letter On freenode’s independence
Andrew Lee, We grew up with IRC. Let’s take it further.
2021-05-22 update
The Gentoo Council will be meeting tomorrow (Sunday, 2021-05-23)
at 19:00 UTC to discuss the problem and the possible solutions.
The Gentoo Group Contacts team has been taking steps in order to ensure
readiness for the most likely options.
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|
Posted
almost 3 years
ago
According to the information published recently, there have been major
changes in the way the Freenode IRC network is administered. This has
resulted in a number of staff members raising concerns about the new
administration and/or resigning. A
... [More]
large number of open source projects
have already announced the transition to other IRC networks, or are
actively discussing it.
It is not yet clear whether and how these changes will affect Gentoo.
We are observing as the situation develops. It is possible that we will
decide to move the official Gentoo channels to another network
in the best interest of our users. At the same time, we realize that
such a move will be an inconvenience to them.
At the same time, it has came to our attention that certain individuals
have been using the situation to impersonate Gentoo developers on other
IRC networks. The official Gentoo developers can be identified
on Freenode by their gentoo/developer cloak. If we move to another
network, we will announce claiming a respective cloak.
Please check this page for future updates.
More information on the Freenode situation can be found at:
Christian (Fuchs)’s Freenode resignation
@freenodestaff tweet
Open Letter On freenode’s independence
Andrew Lee, We grew up with IRC. Let’s take it further.
[Less]
|
Posted
almost 3 years
ago
We are aware of the situation surrounding Freenode ownership and / or administration
(1,
2,
3,
4)
and are watching current developments closely. So far no decision on Gentoo involvement
has been taken. Please check this page for future updates.
|
Posted
almost 3 years
ago
We are glad to welcome Leo and Mark to the Google Summer of Code 2021.
Mark will work on improving Catalyst, our release building tool.
Leo will work on improving our Java packaging support, with a special focus on big-data and scientific software.
|
Posted
about 3 years
ago
Gentoo mourns the sudden loss of Kent Fredric, also known to us by his IRC
handle kent\n. He passed away following a tragic accident a few days ago.
Kent was an active member of the Gentoo community for many years. He
tirelessly managed Gentoo’s
... [More]
Perl support, and was active in the Rust project
as well as in many other corners. We all remember him as an enthusiastic,
bright person, with lots of eye for detail and constant willingness to help
out and improve things.
On behalf of the world-wide Gentoo community, our heartfelt condolences go out
to his family and friends.
Please join us in remembering Kent on the Gentoo forums.
[Less]
|
Posted
about 3 years
ago
Happy New Year 2021! Due to the COVID pandemic, 2020 was a year unlike any other, and this has also
impacted many open source projects. Nevertheless, at Gentoo we have made some great strides forward.
While we now start into 2021 with fresh
... [More]
energy (and maybe soon antibodies), let’s also take a look
back. We’re happy to share with our
community the most exciting news of the past 12 months – including numbers on Gentoo activity, our
new developers, and featured changes and improvements!
Gentoo in numbers
2020 has featured a major increase in commits to the ::gentoo
repository, and especially commits from non-developers. The overall number of commits has grown
from 73400 to 104500 (by 42%), while the number of commits made by non-developers has grown from 5700
(8% of total) to 11000 (10.5% of total). The latter group has featured 333 unique authors in 2019, and
391 in 2020.
The ::guru repository
has thrived in 2020. While 2019 left it with merely 7 contributors
and a total of 86 commits, 2020 has featured 55 different
contributors and 2725 commits. GURU is a user-curated repository with
a trusted user model. Come join us!
There was also a major increase in Bugzilla activity. 2020 featured
almost 25500 bugs reported, compared to 15000 in 2019. This is probably
largely thanks to Agostino Sarubbo’s new tinderboxing effort. The total
number of bugs closed in 2020 was 23500, compared to 15000 in 2019.
New developers
We’ve finished 2020 with three significant additions to the Gentoo
family (in chronological order):
Max Magorsch (arzano)
Max joined us in February to help out with Gentoo Infrastructure. Since
then, he already did tons of work. Just to list a few things, he has
redesigned and modernized the Gentoo websites and rewritten
packages.gentoo.org
into the super cool form we have today.
Sam James (sam)
Sam joined us in July, and has contributed to a lot of different
projects since. He is known as an active member of the Security team
and multiple arch teams, as well as someone who fixes lots of bugs
in different packages.
Stephan Hartmann (sultan)
Stephan joined us in September, and immediately started working on our
Chromium-related packages. He has pushed commits
to upstream Chromium; hopefully he’ll deal with all the specific problems
that come up in Gentoo here. Thanks to him we also have finally caught
up with Windows, offering our users a packaged version of Microsoft Edge.
Featured changes
The following major changes and improvements have happened in 2020:
Packages
Distribution Kernels:
Gentoo now supports building and installing kernels entirely
via the package manager. The new kernel packages also come with an (optional)
stock configuration based on well-tested Fedora kernels, to ease
the entry barrier and maintenance effort of Gentoo systems.
Wayland:
Wayland support in Gentoo has progressed greatly, making it
possible to run an Xorg-free desktop. Wayland is supported
with large desktop environments such as KDE Plasma and GNOME, as well
as with lightweight alternatives such as Sway and Wayfire. The latter
makes it also possible to use Wayland to a large extent without
resorting to XWayland.
Lua:
A new framework has been created that permits multiple versions
of Lua to be installed side-by-side. The vast majority of ~arch
packages have already been migrated to this framework. This way, we have
finally been able to unmask new (slotted!) Lua versions.
Python:
We have managed to almost withdraw Python 2.7 from Gentoo,
and upgrade the default to Python 3.8.
Python 2.7 is still available as a build-time dependency for a few
packages. We have additionally patched all the
vulnerabilities
known from later versions of Python.
Architectures
ARM64:
ARM64 (AArch64) support has been elevated to stable status and is no longer experimental.
The ARM64 project now provides automatically generated stage3 files,
and is usually one of the fastest arch teams to test packages. We
have worked to bring more packages to ARM64 and make it more
feasible to run a full desktop!
PPC64:
KDE Plasma is now available on PPC64, thanks to extensive testing and keywording
efforts by Georgy Yakovlev.
RISC-V:
Work on RISC-V support has started, with particular focus
on the riscv64 architecture. The RISC-V project provides stage3 files and stable profiles
for the soft-float (rv64imac/lp64) and hard-float (rv64gc/lp64d) ABIs,
in both systemd and OpenRC variants. The arch team has
managed to run Xorg already!
Prefix:
Gentoo Prefix is once again capable of bootstrapping on the latest
macOS releases, and work is underway to modernise prefix-specific
ebuilds and merge them back into the main tree - this way ensuring that
users get the latest software and that maintenance burden is reduced.
Android:
The Gentoo Android project has released a new 64bit Android prefix tarball,
featuring gcc-10.1.0, binutils-2.34 and glibc-2.31 in your pocket!
Infrastructure
packages.gentoo.org:
The packages website has received many improvements towards being
a central source of information on Gentoo packages. It now shows
the results of QA checks, bugs, pull requests referencing
a package, and a maintainer dashboard indicating stabilization
candidates and outdated versions (according to Repology).
Additionally, the display can be configured
for your personal preferences!
Bugzilla:
The Infrastructure team has implemented a major improvement to Gentoo
Bugzilla performance. The database has been migrated to a newer
database cluster, and the backend has been switched to mod_perl.
CI / Tinderbox:
A second active tinderboxing (build testing) effort has been started,
resulting in more bugs being detected and fixed early. This also includes
running a variety of QA checks, as well as minimal environment builds that are
helpful in detecting missing dependencies.
Other news
HPC adoption: The Prefix Project
has published a conference proceeding on a case
study of Gentoo in high energy physics. Gentoo also sees wider adoption in the HPC community
such as Compute Canada and EESSI.
Discontinued projects
While Gentoo would like to support as much as our users wish for,
we could not manage to continue all of the projects we’ve started
in the past. With limited resources, we had to divert our time
and effort from projects showing little promise and activity. The most important
projects discontinued in 2020 were:
Architectures: Alpha and IA64 keywords were reduced to ~arch (i.e. unstable/testing only).
HPPA stable keywords were limited to the most important
packages only. SH (SuperH) was removed entirely. With very small number
of users of these architectures, our arch teams decided that
the effort in maintaining them is too great. In case of SuperH,
our last available hardware died.
LibreSSL:
By the end of 2020, we have decided to discontinue support
for LibreSSL. With little to no support from various upstream projects,
the effort necessary to maintain package compatibility exceeded
the gain, especially given that OpenSSL has made a lot of progress
since the forking point.
Thank you!
We can here describe only a few major items, and these cover by far not all that is going on.
We would like to thank all Gentoo developers for their relentless everyday Gentoo
work. While they are often not recognized for this work, Gentoo could not exist without them.
Cheers, and let’s make 2021 even more productive!
[Less]
|
Posted
about 3 years
ago
Happy New Year 2021! Due to the COVID pandemic, 2020 was a year unlike any other, and this has also
impacted many open source projects. Nevertheless, at Gentoo we have made some great strides forward.
While we now start into 2021 with fresh
... [More]
energy (and maybe soon antibodies), let’s also take a look
back. We’re happy to share with our
community the most exciting news of the past 12 months – including numbers on Gentoo activity, our
new developers, and featured changes and improvements!
Gentoo in numbers
2020 has featured a major increase in commits to the ::gentoo
repository, and especially commits from non-developers. The overall number of commits has grown
from 73400 to 104500 (by 42%), while the number of commits made by non-developers has grown from 5700
(8% of total) to 11000 (10.5% of total). The latter group has featured 333 unique authors in 2019, and
391 in 2020.
The ::guru repository
has thrived in 2020. While 2019 left it with merely 7 contributors
and a total of 86 commits, 2020 has featured 55 different
contributors and 2725 commits. GURU is a user-curated repository with
a trusted user model. Come join us!
There was also a major increase in Bugzilla activity. 2020 featured
almost 25500 bugs reported, compared to 15000 in 2019. This is probably
largely thanks to Agostino Sarubbo’s new tinderboxing effort. The total
number of bugs closed in 2020 was 23500, compared to 15000 in 2019.
New developers
We’ve finished 2020 with three significant additions to the Gentoo
family (in chronological order):
Max Magorsch (arzano)
Max joined us in February to help out with Gentoo Infrastructure. Since
then, he already did tons of work. Just to list a few things, he has
redesigned and modernized the Gentoo websites and rewritten
packages.gentoo.org
into the super cool form we have today.
Sam James (sam)
Sam joined us in July, and has contributed to a lot of different
projects since. He is known as an active member of the Security team
and multiple arch teams, as well as someone who fixes lots of bugs
in different packages.
Stephan Hartmann (sultan)
Stephan joined us in September, and immediately started working on our
Chromium-related packages. He has pushed commits
to upstream Chromium; hopefully he’ll deal with all the specific problems
that come up in Gentoo here. Thanks to him we also have finally caught
up with Windows, offering our users a packaged version of Microsoft Edge.
Featured changes
The following major changes and improvements have happened in 2020:
Packages
Distribution Kernels:
Gentoo now supports building and installing kernels entirely
via the package manager. The new kernel packages also come with an (optional)
stock configuration based on well-tested Fedora kernels, to ease
the entry barrier and maintenance effort of Gentoo systems.
Wayland:
Wayland support in Gentoo has progressed greatly, making it
possible to run an Xorg-free desktop. Wayland is supported
with large desktop environments such as KDE Plasma and GNOME, as well
as with lightweight alternatives such as Sway and Wayfire. The latter
makes it also possible to use Wayland to a large extent without
resorting to XWayland.
Lua:
A new framework has been created that permits multiple versions
of Lua to be installed side-by-side. The vast majority of ~arch
packages have already been migrated to this framework. This way, we have
finally been able to unmask new (slotted!) Lua versions.
Python:
We have managed to almost withdraw Python 2.7 from Gentoo,
and upgrade the default to Python 3.8.
Python 2.7 is still available as a build-time dependency for a few
packages. We have additionally patched all the
vulnerabilities
known from later versions of Python.
Architectures
ARM64:
ARM64 (AArch64) support has been elevated to stable status and is no longer experimental.
The ARM64 project now provides automatically generated stage3 files,
and is usually one of the fastest arch teams to test packages. We
have worked to bring more packages to ARM64 and make it more
feasible to run a full desktop!
PPC64:
KDE Plasma is now available on PPC64, thanks to extensive testing and keywording
efforts by Georgy Yakovlev.
RISC-V:
Work on RISC-V support has started, with particular focus
on the riscv64 architecture. The RISC-V project provides stage3 files and stable profiles
for the soft-float (rv64imac/lp64) and hard-float (rv64gc/lp64d) ABIs,
in both systemd and OpenRC variants. The arch team has
managed to run Xorg already!
Prefix:
Gentoo Prefix is once again capable of bootstrapping on the latest
macOS releases, and work is underway to modernise prefix-specific
ebuilds and merge them back into the main tree - this way ensuring that
users get the latest software and that maintenance burden is reduced.
Android:
The Gentoo Android project has released a new 64bit Android prefix tarball,
featuring gcc-10.1.0, binutils-2.34 and glibc-2.31 in your pocket!
Infrastructure
packages.gentoo.org:
The packages website has received many improvements towards being
a central source of information on Gentoo packages. It now shows
the results of QA checks, bugs, pull requests referencing
a package, and a maintainer dashboard indicating stabilization
candidates and outdated versions (according to Repology).
Additionally, the display can be configured
for your personal preferences!
Bugzilla:
The Infrastructure team has implemented a major improvement to Gentoo
Bugzilla performance. The database has been migrated to a newer
database cluster, and the backend has been switched to mod_perl.
CI / Tinderbox:
A second active tinderboxing (build testing) effort has been started,
resulting in more bugs being detected and fixed early. This also includes
running a variety of QA checks, as well as minimal environment builds that are
helpful in detecting missing dependencies.
Discontinued projects
While Gentoo would like to support as much as our users wish for,
we could not manage to continue all of the projects we’ve started
in the past. With limited resources, we had to divert our time
and effort from projects showing little promise and activity. The most important
projects discontinued in 2020 were:
Architectures: Alpha and IA64 keywords were reduced to ~arch (i.e. unstable/testing only).
HPPA stable keywords were limited to the most important
packages only. SH (SuperH) was removed entirely. With very small number
of users of these architectures, our arch teams decided that
the effort in maintaining them is too great. In case of SuperH,
our last available hardware died.
LibreSSL:
By the end of 2020, we have decided to discontinue support
for LibreSSL. With little to no support from various upstream projects,
the effort necessary to maintain package compatibility exceeded
the gain, especially given that OpenSSL has made a lot of progress
since the forking point.
Thank you!
We can here describe only a few major items, and these cover by far not all that is going on.
We would like to thank all Gentoo developers for their relentless everyday Gentoo
work. While they are often not recognized for this work, Gentoo could not exist without them.
Cheers, and let’s make 2021 even more productive!
[Less]
|
Posted
over 3 years
ago
The Gentoo Distribution Kernel project is excited
to announce that our new Linux Kernel packages are ready for a wide audience! The project aims to create a
better Linux Kernel maintenance experience by providing ebuilds that can be used to
... [More]
configure, compile, and
install a kernel entirely through the package manager
as well as prebuilt binary kernels. We are currently shipping three kernel packages:
sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel - providing a kernel with genpatches applied, built using the package manager with either a distribution default or a custom configuration
sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin - prebuilt version of gentoo-kernel, saving time on compiling
sys-kernel/vanilla-kernel - providing a vanilla (unmodified) upstream kernel
All the packages install the kernel as part of the package installation process — just like the rest of your system!
More information can be found in the Gentoo Handbook
and on the Distribution Kernel project page. Happy hacking!
[Less]
|