On Saturday 04 April 2009 22:42:00 Norman Rieß wrote: > I am annoyed by a little more generous thing lately, which i am afraid > isn't fixable by a summer of code. But you wanted to know what annoys > me, so here it is. > > There was a lib update, that broke sancho a while ago. A new version of > sancho fixed this. But i had to use this new version from the developers > site, because even ~arch package was several versions lower. > Some weeks ago the oscar protocol or something was changed and pidgin > was not able to login to icq. New version fixed this instantly, but it > took a while till this version hit ~arch. Again i had to install a > program outside of portage.
These are indeed tricky problems. And you rightly know that it is a human problem not solveable with code. It requires testing and more specifically unit testing that detects regressions. > Gnome 2.26 was released and 2.24 hit portage around that time. > I just built me an openbox desktop today. Google and Openbox Hompage > show quite a few docks which can be used. None of them is in portage or > it is hardmasked. There where two docks available, one segfaulted! I > found a great taskbar named tint2, not in portage. I compiled it and it > works perfectly. Gnome in portage has it's share of problems. There is a very interesting bug at bugs.gentoo.org that lays out why portage is eternally ages behind gnome upstream. I don't recall the details anymore, but I do remember it was a very interesting read and gave me a real reason for problems with the gnome ebuilds (to replace the "gnome is just a piece of crap" reason I had in my head at the time...) > This is what annoys me most lately. And yes, i am planning on reading > into ebuild stuff and trying to contribute. Best possible answer IMHO. Portage is only as good as it's devs and users make the tree. Someone has to do the work and someone has to write the first ebuild for a package. There's no valid reason why that person can't be you. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
