Moving innovations

I’m at home on a Sunday afternoon as I’m writing this. The weather is nice, with big clouds and an odd patch of blue, which makes it easy to dry out my camping gear on the balcony. It’s all still wet from what was going to be a weekend of camping and hiking in Belgium. We decided to leave there early this morning instead of hiking for another day, as the rain forecast was for 20mm of rain to fall in the course of 6 hours. That kind of downpour crosses the border, it’s where the fun ends.

It’s not that I wasn’t prepared as I got some new hiking gear. I got the Haglöfs Fusion jacket partly to take with me to work when going by bike and partly for hiking trips with a chance of rain. It did get a good workout on Saturday already, when we had some heavy rain in the first hour, and so far I love this jacket. Wears great and is easy to pack. The one thing that drives my crazy though is why there is a piece of velcro on the hood. Can that be used to fold the hood away? If so, I’m at a loss how to do that.

I’ve also retired my old backpack after years and years of heavy duty. A few minor annoyances have been building up while using it over the years, and I took the opportunity to correct them with a new backpack: Osprey’s Stratos 32. After two days of hiking I really love this pack. It’s large enough to stow quite a bit of stuff when travelling, but small enough to wear it as a daypack. It’s got a bunch of nice features that make it a treat to use such as the special side pockets for water bottles, the zippered side pockets for maps and books, and bungee loops on the back to easily attach stuff to the backpack.

As for hiking: we did manage to get a good day in on Saturday with only an hour of heavy to light rain at the beginning. The area just east of Liège is pretty heavily populated and the path took us over a bit too many paved routes for my liking, but it also ended right next to our campsite which made shuffling the cars a bit easier.

The castle of Dalhem

The premise of Giver is something that appeals to me: it will allow you to easily give files to others. It uses avahi to determine other Giver users out there and allows you to easily share files with them without messing with any configuration. Having this up an running would be useful for me in several situations, especially if someone would create a MacOS X port.

So I naively thought I’d just whip together an ebuild for it so that I could play around with it. That was before I knew that Giver is written in C# and uses some not-yet-released bindings for libnotify and dbus. Uhm, wait, does it depend on notify-sharp or notify-sharp. Trying them out in order I found out it’s actually the latter, but NDesk’s version depends on NDesk’s not-yet-released DBusSharp bindings.

At this point I thought that someone in Gentoo must have already worked on this, but Google was of no help in part because the now unmaintained .NET bindings in D-Bus GIT are also called dbus-sharp in many cases. If only I could easily search the overlays on overlays.g.o... But wait, that’s possible! Thanks to the people in #gentoo-dev I was pointed to eix, which can also use a remote index consisting of most of the stuff covered by layman and overlays.g.o. Just run update-eix-remote and all those overlays are at your disposal without having to install them first.

ecatmur’s overlay contains an ebuild for dbus-sharp, but it was for an older version and has some issues. To make a long story short I’ve created ebuilds for dbus-sharp, notify-sharp, and giver. They can be found in my personal GIT overlay.

Oh, and Giver? It works as advertised. You get an icon in the notification area which opens into a window showing all Giver users on the local network. Dragging a file or a folder onto a user offers the files to that user, who can then accept or decline. Simple, no fuss.

Update: Andreas Proschofsky also wrote ebuilds for giver and its dependencies during GUADEC. Since his ebuilds were a bit nicer than mine he has folded my improvements into his versions, and I recommended to use the ebuilds from his overlay for now.

Yesterday I ran into Steev’s email about the removal of virtual/x11 and checked the dev-ruby packages for any occurances. After fixing those I noticed that several people where fixing packages all over the tree and I decided to join in and have a bit of fun poking around ebuilds I’d normally never see. As a nice side effect I learned a few new things about Gentoo as well.

Although I had heard about keychain I never really looked in to this, but with the amount of commits we were doing yesterday entering my GPG passphrase quickly became tiresome. While configuring gpg-agent to deal with this keychain was pointed out to me as a way to manage both ssh-agent and gpg-agent. I finally realized the one big benefit that keychain would bring to me: no more passphrase-less keys for stuff like cron-jobs!

One of the things that we noticed as we were removing the virtual/x11 stuff is that there are plenty packages that have a lot of old ebuild versions around. Some people are of the opinion that this doesn’t hurt, but the kind of cleanup we did yesterday shows that it does hurt for such maintenance activity. I’ve fixed a number of packages where only the old versions contained references to virtual/x11. Why are these still in the tree… Sure, it makes sense to keep an older version around while stabilizing a newer version, but only for a couple of months at the most. When I asked whether we have a QA tool that might be showing which versions of a package could/should be deleted, I got pointed to earch and was disappointed to find that this basically shows the same information as packages.g.o, but without the nice layout. So, if this tool exists I’d be happy to hear about it, and otherwise I might have to try writing something myself.