Josh Saddler

I've been working on a little project for Gentoo. I'm keeping it under wraps at the moment, since if I never get to an actual release I don't want to dash anyone's (misplaced?) hopes. Unfortunately, the only release by upstream is an RPM -- and one that gives the FHS the finger (whoever heard of /usr/appname/? bah. It's worse than /usr/kde/). Adapting it to an ebuild is proving to be a big PITA, especially for someone who's new to writing ebuilds (me). The best part is that this would normally work slightly better on x86, which it's designed for, but I'm developing and testing on amd64. It actually runs perfectly; requires a few emul-linux-x86-* libs as it's 32bit, but it does run.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find a way to make rpm.eclass work with the rest of Portage so that it installs to /opt/ properly. More precisely, it should be installed to /opt/, as specified in the devmanual, since it's a binary package. However, the dang thing expects to find its shared libraries in /usr/lib/, which is bad 1) because even x86 binary packages still must have everything placed in /opt/, and 2) because /usr/lib/ is no good on amd64, because it should be /usr/lib32/. And no, I won't/can't resort to any symlinking kludge from /opt/ to /usr/; that wouldn't fly too well with other developers.

However, since the source code is not released, I can't think of a way to make the app look for its .so in something besides /usr/lib/. More headaches: I've been trying to submit a support request at upstream's website, but keep running into rather convenient 500 Internal Error messages. I'll send another request and a phone call or two on Monday, once the Thanksgiving craziness is more settled down. tsunam has been a help in figuring out a few things, too. Thanks!

I'm really excited about this package. I want to get it working according to Gentoo standards. It works just fine when all the stuff is dropped as-is into /usr/lib32 (don't ask me why), but /usr/lib and /opt/ cause the dreaded "cannot load shared object" error. ldd shows nothing out of the ordinary, not that it would be fixable if it did. I hope upstream listens to my request; this app is something that I really want to bring to the Gentoo community. I may have to find a proxy maintainer, since I don't have commit access to the right part of the tree, but I do want it to be in Portage.

And, I want to be my first "real" successful ebuild.

* * *

Speaking of Thanksgiving, I cooked quite the feast yesterday. (Rant: I'm never doing a turkey again, even though it turned out to be delicious, especially since it was my first time roasting one.) Yay for my first Thanksgiving as a married man. All the cooking seemed to go over very well with my wife and the rest of the family. 'Twas fun; I should do really big, complicated dinners more often.

Since I'm still housebound, still trying to get well, I converted the main portions of my devspace to GuideXML. Nice little daytime project. It's a good improvement over what I had before, and it's easier to maintain than raw XHTML. My next project is to figure out some XSL magic so that I can get the "Gentoo Documentation" header removed by xslt; supposedly gorg will accept custom xml stylesheets placed in the guidexml doc.

Also, we now have a couple of new members in the GDP: diox, the new Dutch translator, and shindo, the new Japanese translator. Welcome to you both!

(Shamelessly yoinked from Seemant's blog)

"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull"

I think that phrase neatly sums up the drama on the -dev and -core mailing lists, for all time.

Tunes: Bombay Dub Orchestra - Compassion (Continental Drift Mix)

I've just finished writing up and committing the documentation for Portage 2.1. That's right, it hasn't really been documented until now...aside from make.conf.example and reading comments in /usr/bin/emerge. Thanks to Alec, Marius, Bo Andresen, and Zach for taking the time to review the revised Portage handbook. Lots of text, but it's good to finally move on from 2.0.*. Several chapters were updated for your viewing pleasure.

Next I plan on finally closing that 2006.1 Handbook metabug for the release. There's only one other bug tangentially related to the PPC handbook, so I need Joe or some other PPC dev to take a look at it. Nothing that blocks closing the meta-bug.

I'm also hoping to get some testing/confirmation for a fix I've made to the Alternate Installation Guide on netbooting grub. I scoured the forums, and I think I've got the right solution, but I lack the hardware to test.

In other news, I keyworded and revbumped fortune-mod-gentoo-doc; it now compiles and runs on amd64. Still looking for more #gentoo-doc quotes.

Also, at some point I'll have a complete writeup about the rather fun build process for my new workstation; I finally got the pictures organized. Accompanying text is forthcoming. I ended up having to emerge gphoto2 and gtkam, since the camera uses PTP; I had expected it to work as a normal USB mass storage device. Once the photo packages were installed, downloading the pictures was a snap.

In other other news, an oldie but goody, avenj, is retiring. He's been around Gentoo for a very long time, having really done a lot to shape the distro we all use and love. So thanks, Jon, for your contributions over the years, and thanks of course for the fortune-mod-gentoo-dev package, and for your sense of humor that found its way into the quotes database. ^_^

It's been quite the commit-fest for me this past week -- in part because I've been housebound. See, a week or so ago I noticed that I was limping slightly at work, I had some painful twinges in my right knee and hip/lower back. I shrugged it off; I didn't remember doing anything to myself, so why worry? But a couple days later I couldn't even move. Felt like a hundred electrified icepicks were stabbing their way out from the inside; my whole leg and back were in terrible pain. Couldn't walk, couldn't move, just breathing hurt. Just being vertical is a b*tch; gravity pulls on the leg something fierce.

So I made use of my new county-provided medical insurance and went in for an examination: turns out I have sciatic nerve damage. How on earth does an otherwise normal person in his mid-twenties get that, I wonder? I work at a library; it's not like there's anything really strenuous to do. Anyway, the doc said it'd take probably six weeks to heal. In the mean time, I have some strong painkillers/anti-inflammatory drugs, along with a bedtime muscle relaxant (Flexeril), which I've taken before -- and yes, it still makes me floaty and spacey every time I take it, even just as a half-dose.

I feel really terrible about missing work, especially since I've only been there since July. Even with the doctor's note and the county medical leave-yadda-yadda, I'm still the newest guy there, and I don't want to lose my job!

At least today is the last day of the enforced leave, so I'll see what it's like walking around constantly in a day or so. The painkillers help, though they're bad for my stomach -- they're partially what landed me in the ER a year ago.

All this to say that I've been doing a whole lotta editing on the docs. Got a lot more conditionals into the handbooks, so now you won't see as many instructions for arches that aren't your own. Also removed all XMMS references from the docs per Flameeyes's request. No, no flaming, we can't have XMMS in our docs if it's not in our tree. I'm a big XMMS fan, and I wanted it to stay too, but I understand why it left. Farewell!

(Side rant: the only issue I have with Audacious is that its file picker is absolute piss; you can't even select multiple files to add at the same time; you have to do it one by one.)

So while I'm not quite to tsunam's level of commits, I'm pleased with the complicated commits I've been making so far. I have dreams of reaching the 1000 mark, but it's tricky with documentation, since you can spend a week writing or rewriting a complete doc, putting in a phenominal amount of changes, word count, guideXML, and so on, but it only shows up as 1 or 2 commits. Oh well. Quality over quantity, right? That's where my focus should be.

So despite the chance to take the weight off my injury(ies) and do some work for Gentoo, I'm itching to get back to my job. There's only so much break I can take.