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Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2010 is almost here, and Gentoo will be there!

This years Chemnitzer Linux-Tage on March 13th and 14th is another great chance to:

• get in touch with Gentoo developers
• buy Gentoo shirts (be quick, first come first serve)
• chat, discuss, start with ebuilds and overlays, you name it

The "Chemnitz Linux Days" is a conference that deals with Linux and Open Source Software . It is open for everyone, novices and experts alike. This event is organized by IN Chemnitz, CLUG, Computing Center and Faculty of Computer Science of Chemnitz University of Technology, and many volunteers.

See you there!

Sebastian Pipping contributed to the draft for this announcement.

SCALE 8x is almost here, and Gentoo will be there!

Southern California's premier open-source software event is just around the corner, running from Friday, February 19 through Sunday, February 21. Several Gentoo developers will be there; it will be our biggest showing since SCALE 5x.

We'll be showing off some nifty devices running Gentoo, and we'll be giving out installation media. Whether you're a developer, user, or simply curious, be sure and stop by booth #33. See you there!

Gentoo has turned up in lots of interesting places before, but Michael from Misa Digital has put Gentoo to work in something entirely different: a unique instrument he invented, a MIDI guitar that uses a touchpad and digital keys instead of strings!

Behold the Misa Digital Guitar:

The Misa runs Gentoo Linux on an AMD Geode processor, using the Linux kernel version 2.6.31. It sports MIDI and Ethernet ports for connectivity.

I had the chance to ask Michael some questions about the guitar and his preferred choice of operating system:

Why Gentoo?

Since the guitar is an embedded system, I needed a really minimal distribution that would boot fast and had a small footprint. After investigating Linux From Scratch, I realised I did not have the time to invest in building a complete system. I was told that the minimal install of Gentoo is like Linux From Scratch with a package manager. I probably made you cringe with that simplistic analogy but essentially it was right for me. Once I had the install up it took me no time to recompile the kernel and streamline it as much as possible. I'm not a Linux expert though, so I reckon someone else could shrink it even more.

Yes, there are other solutions out there but they are surprisingly inaccessable. And the "live-CD" style distributions do not allow you to change the actual workings of the system. I figured it was best if I just used Gentoo because I have full control.

What were the two biggest challenges in crafting this instrument?

I would say the two biggest challenges are: 1) manufacturing and tooling the actual parts; and 2) sourcing components.

When you are a lone developer with no company, trying to keep the idea "secret", no one wants to cooperate with you. For example if you need a particular electrical like a screen, ordering "one" of something is surprisingly difficult - and you can expect it in 4 to 6 weeks - really slow! And then when you get it, you realise it is not suitable, so you have to repeat the process. The only exception is a website called Digikey, which will have the parts at my doorstep in 1 week guaranteed. But they don't have everything.

Working with Gentoo was a breeze, the Linux community in general is extremely helpful.

What can you tell us about the hardware?

There is no signal processing, it outputs digital signals via a MIDI connection. I had toyed with having an onboard sound generator but ultimately you limit the sound possibilities. By using MIDI, you are guaranteed support with practically every sequencer, synthesizer etc on the market - it is a standard that has been around for over 20 years.

[The touchpad] is a 5 wire resistive touch sensor. These are the most durable screens available on the market. The LCD behind it is OEM and ordered from China.

What changes to Gentoo (as a distribution) would make it easier for you to run it on the guitar?

I thought Gentoo was a breeze to work with. And can I just say, the Gentoo x86 install handbook? BRILLIANT. I used it so much that I think I actually know it off by heart now.

What's in store for the future?

I'd just like to see these instruments hit TV :)

Thanks for your time, Michael, and for crafting such a unique instrument! Be sure to watch a demonstration video of the Misa Guitar in action.

A parting gift for the German Conspiracy,

Gunnar Wrobel recently acquired the rights for his own book about Gentoo, and it has now been published under a free license and is available for download. The latex source for the book is also included. Gunnar's intentions in publishing the latex source was to encourage translations... it would be neat if that really happens. Please take the time to thank Gunnar for all the excellent work he has done for Gentoo.

Stephanie J. Lockwood-Childs contributed to the draft for this announcement.

Yes, we will be there! Compiling all the way ... ,

Gentoo will be present at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3), from December 27th to 30th in Berlin, Germany. The annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club takes place at the Berliner Congress Center (bcc) in Berlin, Germany. Enjoy our ebuild hacking sessions, bug filing workshops, get some merchandise and use our local rsync/http mirror. You will find the Gentoo table on the upper floor.

Hope to see you there!

Robert Buchholz contributed to the draft for this announcement.

The Gentoo Foundation Inc. has been approached by a few large Gentoo users about purchasing advertising on the gentoo.org side bar. They are not in the IT industry so cannot support us in the traditional way, by donating their own product.

The trustees anticipate that more approaches of this nature will be received and view it as a sign of Gentoo maturing. Recognising that this would be a break with tradition, by allowing even major users to contribute to Gentoo in this way the trustees determined to put the question to a vote of Foundation members.

The recording date for the vote will be 29th November. Voting will be from 1 December to 11 December, to enable the result to be available for the next Trustee meeting on 13 December.

Important: To vote, your Foundation membership must be approved on or before that date.

Requirements:

Please refer to the Gentoo Foundation Bylaws, in particular 4. Article IV Members

The motion to be voted on will be:

Should major Gentoo users be permitted to purchase ads on the sidebar - Vote yes or No

If you have any questions please contact Trustees or on irc at #gentoo-trustees.

Please turn your KDE radio on, and make sure to increase the volume to its maximum level for this important message.

After multiple setbacks we have finally managed to stabilise KDE4 on both major desktop architectures (amd64 and x86), with other teams to follow.

For this and other reasons as discussed , those of you who still use KDE3 should be seriously considering an upgrade in the near future.

The KDE3 support is being deprecated with immediate effect. This means that ebuilds are dropping KDE3 support where they were broken, or clashing with KDE4.

If you wish to still use KDE3, and you want to help others with having KDE3 around, drop a mail to kde@gentoo.org, where we can give you commit access to the special overlay which will specifically contain only KDE3 packages.

This overlay (named kde-sunset) can be easily used via layman.

Sadly upstream is not supporting KDE3 anymore and we simply lack the manpower to keep support for both (as you might have noticed in the past few months KDE3 has become more and more rusty for which we humbly apologize).

Sorry to bring you the bad news and with hope that KDE4 will suit your needs,

Tomas Chvatal

KDE Teams substituting Lead

KUDOS to Nirbheek Chauhan and David Abbott for helping to put this announcement together and Alec Warner for proofreading it.

Attention Gentoo Community,

After numerous bug fixes and enhancements the Ten Team would like to encourage everyone to try out the 10.1 release.

A FAQ is available to assist you. We have also started a thread in our Forum. Please post any BUGS you encounter.

Please download the latest testing release for your architecture Gentoo Ten Live DVD 10.1 x86 | Gentoo Ten Live DVD 10.1 amd64.

Thanks for your continued support,

The Gentoo-Ten Project

David Abbott contributed to the draft for this announcement.

Happy Tenth Birthday, Gentoo!

Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the immediate availability of a new, special edition LiveDVD to celebrate this monumental occasion. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below.

• System packages include: Linux Kernel 2.6.30 (with gentoo patches), Accessibility Support with Speakup 3.1.3, BASH 4.0, GLIBC 2.9, GCC 4.3.2. Binutils 2.18, Python 2.6.2, Perl 5.8.8, and more.
• Desktop Environments and window managers include: KDE 4.3.1, GNOME 2.26.3, Xfce 4.6.1, Enlightenment 0.16.8.15, Openbox 3.4.7.2, Fluxbox 1.1.1, TWM 1.0.4, and more.
• Office, graphics, and productivity applications include: OpenOffice 3.1.1, G/Vim 7.2.182, Abiword 2.6.4, GNUCash 2.2.9, Scribus 1.3.3.11, GIMP 2.6.4, Inkscape 0.46, Blender 2.49a, XSane 0.996, and much more.
• Web browsers include: Mozilla Firefox (Minefield) 3.5.3, Arora 0.7.11, Opera 10.0, Epiphany 2.26.3, Galeon 2.0.4, Seamonkey 1.1.17, and other favorites.
• Communication tools include: Pidgin 2.5.9, Quassel 0.5, Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.23, Claws Mail 3.7.2, Ekiga 2.0.12, Qtwitter 0.7.1, irssi 0.8.13, and many more.
• Multimedia applications include: Amarok 2.1.1, MPlayer 1.0_rc4, DvdAuthor 0.6.14, LAME 3.98.2, FFMPEG 0.5_p19928, GNOME-MPlayer 0.9.7, SMPlayer 0.6.6, and several others.

The Gentoo-Ten LiveDVD is available in two flavors, a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64-only version. The livedvd-x86-amd64-32ul-10.0 will work on x86 or x86_64. If your arch is x86, then boot with the default gentoo kernel. If your arch is amd64 boot with the gentoo64 kernel. This means you can boot a 64bit kernel and install a customized 64bit userland while using the provided 32bit userland. The livedvd-amd64-multilib-10.0 version is for x86_64 only.

Please select your architecture to be redirected to a mirror for download: x86amd64

A FAQ is available to assist you. We have also started a thread in our Forum. Please post any bugs you encounter.

In addition, we have some exceptional new artwork from Ben Stedman, and Gentoo Developer Alex Legler.

Thank you for your continued support,

Gentoo Linux Developers, The Gentoo Linux Foundation, and The Gentoo-Ten Project

Woot! Happy Birthday Gentoo. As part of the Birthday party today we announce the winning screenshots.

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest. There were 54 entries using 5 different window managers / desktop environments.

The Winners

1. Quick23t Compiz Fusion
2. ashtophet Fvwm 2.5.27
3. Integer Fluxbox

For all the specifications and cool details please visit the winners page.

discuss this!

Building packages on a Gentoo System starts with package description files called ebuilds. They're basically shell scripts. Along the way, you specify from where to get the source tarball. When you build, Portage downloads the source and then proceeds to unpack and compile it. Because they're shell scripts, they can use shell variables to great effect.

LINKS:

Southeast LinuxFest
http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/

Texas Linux Fest
http://www.texaslinuxfest.org/

TechCast.us
http://techcast.us/

PythonGroup Wiki
http://asterisklinks.com/wiki/doku.php?id=core:start

PythonGroup Forum
http://asterisklinks.com/python/index.php?board=4.0

Gentoo (dabbott)
http://dev.gentoo.org/~dabbott/

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

Download

Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2010 is almost here, and Gentoo will be there!

This years Chemnitzer Linux-Tage on March 13th and 14th is another great chance to:

• get in touch with Gentoo developers
• buy Gentoo shirts (be quick, first come first serve)
• chat, discuss, start with ebuilds and overlays, you name it

The "Chemnitz Linux Days" is a conference that deals with Linux and Open Source Software . It is open for everyone, novices and experts alike. This event is organized by IN Chemnitz, CLUG, Computing Center and Faculty of Computer Science of Chemnitz University of Technology, and many volunteers.

See you there!

Sebastian Pipping contributed to the draft for this announcement.

So, this post is not really technical, but I'm posting it to the Gentoo planet anyway because it applies to the social part of Gentoo. I see a lot of people making the same mistakes that I once did, or saw people make while interacting socially within Gentoo. This post is not in response to someone in particular; more like in response to the "feeling" I get.

Communication Problems (technical): when communicating over inefficient media such as email or IRC, keep in mind that the other person has no way of knowing what you meant, or felt, when you said something. Due to this, it is easy to cause insult, and even easier to be misunderstood or misquoted. No one knows your mood when you type on the net.
Solution: Make ample usage of smileys; make it clear what you mean, in as few words as reasonable. When on the receiving end, give the other person the benefit of doubt. It's quite easy to misunderstand what someone said. When in doubt, re-read and re-interpret.

Communication Problems (social): I've personally found that the root cause of 110% of arguments that escalate is a severe and dire lack of proper and clear communication. People are just unable to express what they mean, what they want, and what they are thinking in clear, easy-to-understand terms. Part of the problem is that "clear, easy-to-understand terms" vary among people. The other part is that different people think in different ways, and English is usually not their native language.
Solution: To be able to communicate effectively with someone, you need to understand how they think first. This is obviously too much work to do with everyone you meet, but if you're going to be working with or around someone; take the time out to empathize with their world-view. If you want to convince someone of your opinion, put yourself in their shoes and see it through their eyes.

Communication Problems (length): This is one problem that seems to plague people a lot, and often they don't even know it. Writing 4 paragraphs when 1 would've sufficed is a bigger problem than just writing one cryptic word. A lot of analogies are coming to my mind right now to explain this, but I'm going to go with this: 'tl;dr'.
Solution: When you write something, keep in mind that time is a precious commodity, and by writing a long mail/response, you will waste their time if they choose to read it. And hence, most people will not read it. If you want them to read it; spend some of your time and make it easier to read. Make it short.

Communication Problems (rage): E-mails written and IRC conversations conducted in anger. You read an email, see someone make a commit, or just something they said on IRC; and you go into RAGE mode. It makes you furious. You don't understand how the guy can be so bloody stupid. Maybe it's the last frickin' straw. You flip off and start shouting. The other side may be oblivious to your distress; or worse, they flip off as well. When the dust settles, pandas and kittens make sad faces at your blood pressure and the decisions you made.
Solution I've been on both the rage-side and the rage-causing side, and I can tell you this: It doesn't help anyone. If you get angry at someone on the internet, stop. Stop and get off the computer. Come back later. If you cause someone to get angry, pause. Pause and figure out why. Think to yourself; maybe you're wrong, maybe they misunderstood you, maybe they had a bad day. But first off, calm the other guy down. Stop arguing, and take a walk. Come back later and try to reconcile your differences. Fact: 149% of arguments lead to burnout and heart disease.

Now, I don't expect people to keep all this in mind all the time. Hell, I'm writing this now, but I know I'll never be able to stick to this 100%. The point I'm trying to make is that You're Fallible. Everyone is. Just keep that in mind all the time, and just remember the above things vaguely (you can bookmark it for reference!). I'm sure we can all do better than we're doing right now.

I have ranted on about the purported support for Gentoo in Amazon EC2; I would like to slightly defend Amazon on this matter saying something that some people might find inflammatory but, I think, we should acknowledge if we strive to improve: Gentoo suck as a guest OS! Now that I pointed at the elephant in the room, let me try to qualify and explain this statement, trying to see what we can do about it.

The first obvious problem is that the standard baselayout we ship with has no idea how to work with vservers and other virtualised environments; we have baselayout-vserver, but last I knew it was a bit behind in features. Actually, we have a very good support for guests in baselayout, version 2, based on OpenRC. Indeed one of the features that the new baselayout brought to the mix was supporting out of the box many different VPS implementations (xen, vserver proper, OpenVZ, and, lately, LXC thanks to Andrian). Unfortunately, almost two years after the addition of OpenRC to the tree, and over three and a half years after the introduction of the first alpha of what became the current situation, we still don’t have it stable, although we’re nearing that date, hopefully.

Even discounting this problem (I actually use OpenRC on all my production systems, and never, or almost never, got problems with that), there are still problems with a number of scripts and configurations that assume presence or work of various real-hardware components that (obviously) we don’t have.

For instance, take the default syslog-ng configuration: it uses the /dev/tty12 device for logging… it doesn’t check whether the device exists before opening it for write, and the end result is that it can create a standard file with the log printed on it if you don’t remember to disable it after install (yes I noticed this just the other day after months of having the vservers running, shame on me!). On the other hand, metalog (which requires an option to run in vservers, since it will fail to start if it cannot access the kernel, and it obviously cannot do that within a vserver — and only the currently-unstable version has the option to do that) uses /dev/tty10 by the default configuration… just to show that we can’t even agree on the devices to use!

And of course there is the one big issue: our system set is too big! This means we end up bringing in a lot of stuff that is definitely not useful on vservers by default (like the kernel sources) just because we need them for the default case of real hardware. I guess one solution here would be to reduce the system set and then use the additional sets available in Portage 2.2 to handle the real-hardware cases (in the default stage… and from that an emerge -C &x40;hwboot would give you a virtualizable-system)… but alas that’s something that never got enough momentum to become reality.

In general, though, Gentoo could become a much better OS to work as guest… we should all try to work on improving that step by step, bit by bit… remember: report whatever you feel is wrong with Gentoo packaging on our bugzilla after making sure there isn’t a report already. Don’t assume somebody else will see your problem, don’t assume that you’ll be the only one with that problem, please report it… just try to keep an open mind that maybe it’ll be marked as an invalid bug because you should have done some extra configuration… on the other hand, we really should make it easier to use Gentoo as a guest operating system.

Global Financial Derivatives trading company, OSTC Poland, uses Gentoo Linux in significant sectors of its IT infrastructure. We spoke with long time Gentoo user and head of OSTC Poland's IT department, Patryk Rządziński, to learn more about how and where Gentoo is used. We discovered, as you will read in the full interview, that Gentoo, and more generally open source software, serves well in the commercial world.

So SCALE 8x went okay.

I was interviewed by the SCALE Public Relations team; you can see the video here.

I'd say we had the most diverse assortment of machines at any booth -- something like 10 different machines on 5 architectures. Certainly we had a bunch of developers; we haven't had a showing like this since SCALE 5x.

Everyone loves event pictures, so here's the Gentoo team:

Left to right: vapier, nightmorph, antarus, nerdboy, wormo, omp, halcy0n, solar
Not pictured: blackace (he took the picture)

And now, the hardware running Gentoo! On the table, from left to right:

1. Beagleboard running E17 on the huge monitor
2. Hammer/Nail board by Tin Can Tools (in the clear orange-capped tube)
3. Blackfin development board (hooked up to the middle keyboard, and with a touchscreen running Doom)
4. deployed Blackfin module (that 2-inch square to the left of the wireless mouse)
5. my Core2 Thinkpad running KDE4
6. a mini-notebook
7. OLPC XO (green/white, on top)
8. PowerPC Walnut board (in the K'Nex case). Barely visible behind it is the laptop that's tied in via serial port.

There were a few other Gentoo-powered laptops, subnotebooks, and smartphones demoed throughout the conference, but not all of 'em are visible in this picture.

I mostly demoed KDE 4.3 on my laptop, since the desktop effects and eye candy proved to be a good draw, especially the "falling snowflakes" animation. Man, I love that thing! It's a built-in KWin effect, so there's nothing special to install. Now all I want is a "falling raindrops" effect on my desktop, without resorting to Compiz.

I did occasionally switch the laptop to Xfce when I wanted to save power, or just to showcase Gentoo's flexibility. I got a good draw not when showing a standard Gentoo wallpaper, but when I showed off a desktop rather like this (clean version here). There were a buncha little kids that stopped by and oohed and ahhed over that for a bit.

The talks were rather disappointing this year. Several of my fellow devs stated that they "just plain sucked." Basically, none of us attended because of the talks. There just weren't any powerful draws. I was only vaguely interested in attending a couple of sessions, the ones on startup-up/embedded improvements and building a featherweight desktop. Didn't actually get to see those, as the timing and draw was just kinda "meh."

Instead, I found myself at the Mindstorms talk, which was very lackluster. I expected to see lots of toys in action, and videos, and whatnot. The speaker wasn't at all engaging, and the single Lego robot was impossible to see, and it wasn't working correctly for the entire presentation. I stopped by another session or two, but nothing grabbed my interest. I spent most of my time on the show floor, helping in the booth or wandering the floor. Speaking of which . ..

I stopped by the KDE booth to see the newest 4.4 and 4.5 stuff being demoed, and I also tried to help one of the devs figure out the build dependencies for one of the latest libraries. Man, source building on Ubuntu sucks. There's some really, really nifty Plasma desktop stuff going on for small screens. The newspaper-like activity flow is something I wouldn't mind using day-to-day on my workstation.

Another neat bit of 4.4/4.5 is the ability to switch your Plasma desktop widgets while still keeping your applications open in front of you. It's sort of the opposite of workspace switchers, where each application group is on a separate virtual workspace, while the desktop remains fixed. I never bother with more than one workspace, but I do like the idea of switching the widgets behind whatever it is I'm working on.

The 4.4 improvements and upcoming 4.5 features are definitely enough to keep me interested in KDE, so I'll leave it on my laptop and look forward to the day 4.4 is stabilized in Gentoo.

The Gnome and XBMC booths were just across the alley from our booth, but I didn't get a chance to check out either. The Gnome guys blasted pounding techno music the whole conference, which gave all of us--even the ones without hangovers--good-sized headaches. The XBMC folks were running some pretty impressive demos on their Zotac MAG, but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to go over and chat with 'em.

In the last few days, I've decided to put together a living room HTPC built around an Acer Aspire Revo and XBMC Live, and it woulda been good to see the thing properly demoed a couple of weeks ago. Still, from what I saw from the Gentoo booth, XBMC is one heck of an awesome app.

Our booth was fairly well trafficked, but overall it felt like attendance (and interest in Gentoo) was down from previous years. Take that with a huge grain of salt, though -- while I felt like SCALE was more sparsely attended and the talks sucked, the actual numbers tell a different story. The event organizers say attendance was up more than 10% and there were more standing-room-only talks than ever before. So make of that what you will -- but I might not go back next year if it's going to be anything like my experience this year. There need to be more sessions that are relevant to my interests.

One of the high points of SCALE was meeting the folks interested in Gentoo, and definitely talking with our existing users, like the ever-loyal calculus from IRC. Thanks for coming by, folks!

Original post from Planet Gentoo.

Yesterday Robin (robbat2), our Gentoo MySQL maintainer notified me that there has been a patch in MySQL 5.1, also approved by upstream developers, that fixed the akonadi crashes. Robin worked very close with the upstream developers and helped a lot for this. The patch in Gentoo is in dev-db/mysql-5.1.44-r1. At first it didn’t work, but recompiling x11-libs/qt-sql did the trick (which is the split sql module of the Qt package – Gentoo provides split Qt packages). As far as I know, other distros already shipped it. For those who didn’t, more information can be found in the following bug reports:

• MySQL bug
• KDE bug
• Red Hat bug

… and the patch is here

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo

I’ve been playing with matplotlib and Gentoo bug numbers from the last ~6 month to be able to see how we are performing at fixing bugs lately. This is the current output:

I am presenting this graph today to suggest that:

• Bugzilla stats have interesting things to tell
• Fixing bugs could use more attention, manpower and a better process in Gentoo
• The planned re-write of bugday.gentoo.org could play a keys role with improving the process
• A Gentoo Google Summer of Code project could work on software to continuously extract detailed bug statistics for us
• You can do neat plots using Python and matplotlib

[EDIT] The source code to produce above graph is now available.

Just a very quick call:

Today, Saturdays 6th is a Gentoo bugday.

Users and developers get together at #gentoo-bugs on Freenode IRC to cooperate on fixing bugs: ideally all at once but a few thousands per participant makes a good start, too. It makes a difference, it’s fun, it’s a great way of contributing to Gentoo.

See you there!

(Actually I need a few hours of sleep first…)

In my immediately previous post I have thrown in a couple of nods to two particularly nasty issues related to shared object plugins; I have written extensively, or even excessively, about the issue so I’m not going to write more about the presentation of shared objects (or dynamic libraries if you prefer the Microsoft term for the same concept), and I’d rather go on with the two current problems at hand, which I’ll try to cover in a proper manner.

Shared objects as plugins

When building shared objects for plugin usage, like the case for NSS I noted, PAM plugins or extensions for languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, Java… you don’t need static libraries at all, so a shared object is enough!

While some of those system do support statically linking engine and plugins in an application, this rarely works out as intended; for instance FreeBSD (used to?) support statically linked PAM, but that worked only for the default modules, and if you configured your service authentication chain to use non-default modules you have a non-working setup. So the net result is definitely against having to support statically-linked PAM, or any other statically linked system.

Since you cannot link this stuff statically in, you can easily see that there is no need to install (nor build!) the static archive version of those things; this is usually done properly by both custom-tailored build system (as upstream likely tries to minimise the effort) and by the language-specific buildsystems (like the various incarnation of mkmf and rake-compiler in Ruby, distutils in Python, ant for Java, and so on so forth). On the other hand, especially with autotools-based build system, most people seem to forget that there is a nasty overhead in building both version, beside the waste of installing the extra file.

Indeed, since libtool will prefer building PIC objects for the shared objects (as it’s required for AMD64 and most of non-x86 architectures), and non-PIC objects for static archives (to reduce overhead); since you cannot build once for both (nor you can pre-process once, as you can have __PIC__ conditional code!) you end up having to call the compiler twice for each source file. To reduce this overhead you can usually default to disable static libraries (or disable it through ./configure invocation) or you can disable it altogether as instructed so that it only ever builds the shared object version, and not the static one. Unfortunately this does not stop libtool from installing a pointless .la file but that’s a different story.

While there is a safety check in Portage proper to check for .la and .a files in /lib, there is no such check for Ruby, Python, Perl, Java extensions. My tinderbox has an extra check for that and is usually able to find them; I also have a bug report template that tries explaining the maintainers involved why I report to them that a .la file is pointless and that they might want to fix the eventual static archives at the same time as well. Unfortunately, sometimes people decide it’s too much of a hassle to prepare the patch to send upstream and apply that in Gentoo, so you end up with ebuilds that avoid using make install to avoid installing the already built archives, or just delete them after install (works okay for .la files, since they are usually small and it’s definitely not trivial to avoid installing them), causing the double-build to still be performed.

Boot-critical programs and shared objects

Different page, correlated issue happens with boot-critical programs: things that need to be started before you mount all your local filesystems (maybe because they are needed to mount such filesystems, like lvm) need to have all their shared objects being available at that time. This becomes a problem when you end up needing libraries installed in /usr/lib and you split out /usr (similarly to what I said about /boot I don’t think the general case should be for splitting it out; sure there are cases where it’s needed for various reasons, but it shouldn’t be by default!), as they wouldn’t be able to run.

To solve this problem you either move the libraries (and all their dependencies) to /lib, or you have to statically link applications. The former creates a chain reaction that makes the whole point of splitting /usr mostly moot; the latter problem actually moves the problem down to the user: since Gentoo policy is to never force static linking on the user, as shared object linking has many many advantages, this is usually made conditional to the static USE flag; such a flag will build the software with static linking, and will thus require the dependent libraries to be available in static archive form (which is why rather than Portage features or whatever else, static libraries are usually made optional via an USE flag: it can be depended upon).

Mix the two! Shared object plugins for boot-critical programs!

And here is the reason why I merged the two problems, as they might seem just barely related: there is a case where you actually need a static archive to build a shared object plugin; that’s the case for PAM plugins that need libraries, such as pam_userdb uses Berkeley DB library for storage.

It’s not an easy case to solve, because of course you’d be looking to have the library available as static archive, but at the same time it has to be PIC to work properly… up to the 0.99 version, the solution was to build an internal copy of Berkeley DB within the PAM ebuild; without counting the additional problems with security, we ended up with a very complex ebuild, a lot more complex than it would be needed for PAM alone. I discarded that solution when I took over PAM, and split the Berkeley DB support in its own ebuild… doing the same thing as before. That ebuild has been, up to now, pretty much untouched, and the result is that we have a stale ebuild in tree using a stale version of Berkeley DB. I don’t like that situation at all.

Sincerely, after thinking about it I think the best solution at this point is simply to get rid of the stale ebuild, and decide that even though PAM is installed in /lib, it does not warrant total coverage: we won’t be moving, or building statically, things like PostgreSQL, LDAP, MySQL and so on so forth, and yes, those are all possible providers for the PAM modules. I guess we should just add one very simple statement: don’t use external-dependent modules for authenticating users and services that are boot-critical.

If I’ll still be a Gentoo developer next month, after I free myself up from my current work tasks, I’ll be merging back sys-auth/pam_userdb into sys-libs/pam, and then take care of getting the new PAM stable, and the old ebuild removed. This should solve quite a few of our problems and set a better precedent than what we have right now.