Sunday, December 16, 2012

I can hardly believe it's been almost a year since my last blog post. It's been a fairly busy year overall. I am now a full gentoo developer, I've taken on more programming tasks and projects...

  New Projects:
- PyGPG  Is a python interface library that runs gnupg in a subprocess while mining all data that it exports through it's status-fd output. It aims to be a complete, flexible solution to using gnugp via python. It is early in it's development, but there is an -9999 ebuild in the tree.

 - Gentoo-keys   Is a gentoo gpg key manager app that will use pyGPG to download the binary gpg keys from key servers and manage the gentoo release and developer keys that will be used by layman and other apps to validate the gpg-signed repositories.xml list, the install media, etc..  I may also use it to manage any overlay gpg-keys that may become available in the future. So far I have the main seed file management routines in place. Next I will begin coding the routines needed to manage the downloading, removing, moving of the gpg keys to the correct keyrings and validate it matches the fingerprint from the seed file. Once that is done, I will likely do some coding to make validation using those keys easier, along with code for the git commit validation hooks which are needed for the tree migration from CVS to Git.

-  Mirrorselect  I've just done an update for the make.conf move from /etc/ to /etc/portage/. From there I proceeded to convert it from a nearly monolithic script into a full python lib with a complete api. That will leave it open for creation of a gui or inclusion of it's capabilities into other applications. I also did some python 3 compatibility fixes too.  It has just been released as app-portage/mirrorselect-2.2.0-r1.

  On-Going Projects:
- Layman   I have finally gotten around to fixing the last of the bugs in 2.0.0's code and re-released rc5 as 2.0.0 final. Rc5 has been out for a month now without a single bug filed against it. So look forward to having 2.0.0-r1 stabilized soon. Next on layman's agenda is complete the gpg signed repositories.xml support.  For which working code is already in place in the -9999 live ebuild. But so far infra does not have a regular gpg-signed list available. There is only a testing one that is not updated since it's creation. I have 2 others on my dev space as well, but they too are not updated so not usable for use other than testing. After that I plan to continue the python 3 code migration.

 - Gentoolkit  There are a number of small bugs that need attention along with some enhancements and updates needed.

 - Porthole  I've been neglecting it for far too long. It is getting behind on many changes to portage and pkgcore. Plus I have several improvements half finnished.

 - CoreBuilder  Like porthole, I've not done any work on it for quite some time. It is a web based interface to package management similar to porthole and uses portholes new backend structure. It's primary reason for being is for tinderbox testing of packages.

 - Esearch  Nothing new to report after we finished the major update to it's code. There have been a few minor bug fixes and is very stable. It is also python 3 compatible and it's db can be loaded, updated with either python 2 or 3 and fully usable by the other.

 - Portage  After several years, the emaint re-write I did has been merged into portage and people have been using it along with a few new modules that I've coded along the way. I have an idea in the wings for a module to assist users in cleaning up any "-MERGING-" pkgs which have failed during the move from the build sandbox to the live file system. Currently they have to be dealt with manually.

 - Pkgcore  I need to get working on the backend manager code for porthole and coreBuilder. From that there is likely to be some enhancements to pkgcore's api.

 - Gpytage  While I've not been doing any coding on it, Ken69267 has returned from the brink of gentoo retirement and is doing some work on it again. We look forward to the changes and enhancements.

 - Etc-proposals  Nothing new to report, it's code has been working fine.  But if anyone wants to work on updating it's QT/KDE interface, that would be welcome to all it's QT/KDE users.

Well, Christmas decorations, my wife and kids are waiting for assistance...

Later everyone :)

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Lazy blogger

Well, I've certainly been a lazy blogger...

Short story...

Porthole
and Cazou (student) were accepted as a GSOC 2011 project. Unfortunately, it failed by midterm :( Still, there was a decent start to the backend re-write and the code submitted was good, so provided I can get my butt in gear, I should be able to complete it. Once that is done, it will be easier to maintain porthole. Currently, it is in an in between state. I mean that in both the front-end and the back-end. I began making changes to the front end to be able to add a proper layman plug-in that can use the category & package view panes. But that code is not completed and needs more testing, debugging. Some of the other things need some updates as well to keep up with changes in portage's code and config files.

Layman
I've gotten the 2.0 api nearly completely debugged. I have just a few more small changes to make to release rc4 witch will be the last rc and should end up as the final 2.0.0 release. More about that later, I promise. Also I made a request to the infrastructure team and antarus stepped up and produced some great stats for the last half of 2011. The new http headers it is sending with the requests for an updated overlays list has resulted in a better than a 20:1 ratio of 304 errors (list not updated since last time) to sending a new updated list. :D more on that to come...

Other news
As of Nov. 19, 2011 I am now a gentoo staffer. I've also just recently completed the ebuild quiz, so will become a full dev once that is reviewed and accepted. So, once that is finalized I should have less excuses, more incentive to get some of these lingering task completed.

Gotta go for now.