Willing to contribute? Join Sunrise

May 16, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo · 4 Comments

Ok, I know that there are some people out there who maintain several ebuilds on their private overlays. Also, there are some others that keep attaching new ebuilds on our bugzilla. But few of them know that Gentoo offers an official overlay for users to contribute ebuilds. That is Sunrise. Either you are familiar with ebuild writting or not , all you have to do is reading HowToCommit guide, answer a simple question, get your password, and start commiting any ebuild you like :) . For those who dont know much about ebuild writting, there are developers on #gentoo-sunrise channel ( freenode network ) who are willing to help you and teach you how to write proper ebuilds :) .

ps (tip): Note that many developers are looking for new ebuilds on sunrise, so if you want your shiny ebuild to reach the portage tree ( as quick as possible ) , sunrise is the answer :)

Tags: Gentoo, overlay, sunrise

Crazy about Qt? Time to prove it :)

May 12, 2009 · Posted in Gentoo · Comment

Many of you might have already seen my e-mail on gentoo-dev ml. For those who haven’t , Qt herd is about to face lack of manpower after July. We already have two upcoming developers but we could use some more as well :). So, if you are willing to help us keep Qt in a high QA level you could do it using the following two ways:

1) Qting-edge overlay is open to new contributors who are willing to see their favorite Qt4 applications reach an official gentoo overlay. Of course you will need to prove that you have some ebuild skills. Not much, since our magic eclasses do all the dirty stuff. We are trying to keep the quality in high levels, so we might need to review your commits before you do them ( at least at the beggining ).

2) If you always wanted to become a Gentoo Qt developer , now it’s the chance. We could mentor you as well as helping you with your ebuild quizes.

So, feel free to contact us via qt[at]gentoo[dot]org if you are willing to contribute :)

Tags: Gentoo, qt, qting-edge

Please, oh please, help us maintain your applications …

May 1, 2009 · Posted in Linux · 4 Comments

Ok, this is getting really annoying lately…

{kde,qt}-apps.org are the places that I m “monitoring” for cool applications. Some of them are hitting the portage as well.

The first thing that anybody(?) would do, is to download the source tarball and try to build and use the application. A proper ( or common if you like ) build system is the following:

./configure or qmake

make <-build the sources

make install  <-install the binaries etc

However, many many many apps dont have a ‘make install’ step. Is this so bad? It depends of course. Someone could easily say : “Why are you making this such a big deal? Just put the binary on /usr/bin (using dobin or whatever ) and you are done.”

Sure, this is a nice way to install an application. But, what if the application uses stuff like images, translations, documentations, guides, etc etc etc from the current directory? Oh boy this is fun! As you understand , installing just the binary under /usr/bin is not enough. The application would be b0rked since it wont be able to detect images,docs etc. The binary is searching the “.” (current) directory for all those stuff. That is /usr/bin. WHAT!!?!?? o_O

Apparently this application follows the “Download the tarball, unpack it on your $HOME, compile it , use it” path.

So, upstream guys, note that not every user knows how to download and compile sources. Many many users dont even visit {qt,kde}-apps.org to find new applications. They just open the {synaptics,portage,pacman,yum} and install the packages via the PMS. You need to understand that many many users could use your applications and provide vital feedback if you could follow a standar way to build and install your packages.

We (as in maintainers) cannot always patch and fix the build systems. The patches are usually big,complicated and they dont apply on the next version. it is yoursresponsibility to fix the build system. Many developers ( including me of course ) wont bother spend all this time to fix it for ya…

Tags: build, packages, upstream