Moving innovations

Today I finally closed bug 203706, 4 years after it was initially opened. That means that you can now go and install ruby 1.9.3 without having to unmask the packages and associated use flag. It also means that we'll try to add the ruby19 flag, when possible, to new ebuilds as we add them. With ruby 1.8 no longer in maintenance starting June 2012 we can now work towards making ruby 1.9 the primary stable ruby implementation. At this point in time, though, we don't officially support running your whole system on ruby 1.9 yet.

Unless you take action yourself nothing will change for the moment. If you want to start installing your ruby packages also for ruby 1.9, then you must add ruby19 to your RUBY_TARGETS in /etc/make.conf.

  RUBY_TARGETS="ruby18 ruby19"

Note that this will only work in the testing tree for the moment. If you find bugs, please report them or drop by in #gentoo-ruby.

After a hiatus of more than 2 years Rubinius is back with Gentoo. Rubinius 1.2.4 got added this weeked as dev-lang/rubinius, making it the 5th ruby provider natively supported in Gentoo. If you want to install your ruby packages (also) for Rubinius you should add "rbx" to RUBY_TARGETS in /etc/make.conf. That will ensure that all packages that have been marked as ready for rubinius will be installed for it.

Right now that list is quite small still, but this should improve over time. If you would like to see a package marked for Rubinius (or another missing ruby implementation), then please open a bug for it. Please add the output of a successful build with both FEATURES=test and USE=doc to verify that everything works as expected.

Thanks to the people participating in bug 334177 for testing, initial ebuilds, and support.

Yesterday I updated the eclass for XEmacs to support site file based initialization similar to what Emacs on Gentoo offers. When I say similar, I mean identical. A rip-off. Stolen. But without the legacy support. Many thanks to the Emacs team for painfully constructing and debugging a good approach to this problem.

With this support in place XEmacs code that isn't provided as an XEmacs package can now register itself so that you don't need any additional configuration to make use of the package. A simple example is for modes to register themselves automatically for the associated file extensions. The Emacs Gentoo project page has a more verbose explanation. It also includes the mechanism to start using this. Add it to your .xemacs/init.el (after you've installed a package that uses this).

So, which packages already use this? Unfortunately the answer currently is none, but patches are pending for app-admin/puppet. Please feel free to file bugs if you would like to see support for this added to other packages.

Like many other people I've also created a new PGP key. My old key was, well, old, and based on a 1024 bit DSA key, which is no longer considered secure. My new key also contains my name as it appears on my passport, which should make keysigning parties go a bit smoother.

My old key, 0xFB0878BB, will remain valid for some time, but I'll sign my emails and Gentoo commits with my new key, 0xEFDBB3EC. I've signed my new key with my old key, so if you could verify my old key you should be able to verify my new key, although it will take one further step in the web of trust. I expect to be at the keysigning party at FOSDEM so that will integrate the new key more firmly.

Bug 23949 has been around for a long time, but it can finally be closed soon. I will be sending a last rites email for app-xemacs/xemacs-packages-sumo shortly, and after that the package will be moved into package.mask. If you want to easily install all xemacs packages with a single command, just use app-xemacs/xemacs-packages-all instead. You will get the same thing as is currently shipped in the sumo packages, but without all the file collisions that may occur.

I have also updated the XEmacs project documentation to reflect this change.

I really needed an excuse to try out my new backpack. Actually I have the AC Lite 15 but that is no longer present on the site and I guess that explains the discount I got on it. It’s not that I’m not happy with my other backpack, but I found the Osprey a bit too big for simple daytrips. Hiking along the Oosterschelde yesterday confirmed to me that it’s also very nice to have a small backpack. I still expect to use the Osprey on multi-day hikes which I’m planning for spring and summer, but for single-day trips I think the Deuter will win out.

Yesterday’s route took me along the Grenslandpad from Biezelinge to Krabbendijke in Zeeland. Since I left a bit in a hurry to catch the once-an-hour train in Krabbendijke I took the wrong guidebook with me so I was left to navigate only based on the markings. Not a big deal normally, but here the markings where either faded by the salt water to the point that you could hardly see them, or they were put in such awkward places that it was unclear what way to go. With some educated guessing I did find most of the route, but in the end things were a bit unclear again and I just used the GPS to find back my car. The weather was great, with a strong wind blowing in the general direction I was walking in and splendid sunshine all afternoon.

Flameeyes mentions some possible eselect project for SoC. I’d like to add a project idea to that: rework eselect so that it has an interface at a higher level. Please explain to me why I have to write 195 lines of code (rails.eselect) just to manage a symlink to a binary. It seems to me that this is what most eselect modules are doing, so this case should be really easy, and just a matter of configuration. I’m sure some of the eselect modules are doing more complicated things, but that can be solved by providing hooks.

I’d rather specifiy something like this (and not make silly mistakes in the bash code like in the current eselect modules):

TITLE="Ruby on Rails"
DESCRIPTION="Some more verbose, multiline, stuff"
TARGET="/usr/bin/rails"
PROVIDERS="/usr/bin/rails-2.0* /usr/bin/rails-1.2* /usr/bin/rails-1.1*"

This is a bit of a simplistic example. I’m sure a slightly more complicated format would be needed to handle some of the common cases, including additional binaries, man pages, etc. Determining that would require taking inventory on the current eselect modules and seeing the common patterns, which makes it, uhm, a project.

If your buddies are using Mac OS you may have seen Quicksilver in action. Now there’s a recreation of the same concept for GNOME called GNOME Do. I’ve created an ebuild for Gentoo which is in my git overlay (you can get it as graaff through layman).

Note that it doesn’t yet work properly with the brand-new metacity compositor due to the (fixed) GNOME bug 504876.

I’m not really into New Year’s resolutions, but there is something about the quiet period between Christmas and the New Year that makes you reflect a bit on the past year. One thing I noticed is that I haven’t been outdoors as much as I’d like. Two weekends and a handful of days in a whole year is a bit disappointing.

With clear blue skies there was no excuse this past Sunday not to go and do some hinking. The wind was much stronger and colder than expected, but that just reenforced the fact that I should have been thinking about the direction I was going in. I wouldn’t have had to stare into the sun all the time as well. Still, some nice views along the Waterlinie on the Waterliniepad.

For some time now there have been an emacs and xemacs overlay available through layman. Both of them pointed to the same overlay of the Emacs project. While this worked fine and also seemed easy for the Emacs project people from a maintenance perspective, we’ve now decided to split up things more clearly to avoid confusion. The emacs overlay now contains all experimental things related to GNU Emacs, and the xemacs overlay contains everything related to XEmacs.

For XEmacs users nothing changes if you were already using the xemacs overlay, but if you used the emacs overlay up to now then you will need to add or change to the xemacs overlay to continue using the latest xemacs ebuilds and eclasses, most prominently the xemacs 21.5 ebuild.