Linux Posts

I’ve been a happy Gentoo user for the last few years. There’s so much to like about it: built from source with only what you need and Portage beats the pants off RPM, among many other reasons. But lately, I’ve been getting a little annoyed with it. My annoyance has to do with the releases … or lack thereof. And, the communication about said “delays” … or lack thereof. There used to be four Gentoo releases a year. A few years ago, they went to two releases a year. Last year, they completely skipped 2007.1 release. Now, we’re three months into 2008 and the 2008.0 release, which was supposed to be released to the public as stable on March 17th, hasn’t even been seeded to mirrors for public beta yet. 2007.0 is still the official stable release of Gentoo - a release that is more than a year old at this point. This wouldn’t be a big deal if I didn’t really need an updated live CD to do installs with. I have new machines with an onboard SATA controller that isn’t supported by the kernel in the 2007.0 release but is supported by the 2.6.23 kernel which was in the Gentoo sources at the time. I was at an impasse, unable to install Gentoo on my equipment until I got around it by compiling my own updated kernel and rolling my own live CD. But, I wouldn’t have had to do that if the Gentoo release team could at least come close to hitting their release schedule. I’m not asking for the universe - just get within the same month as the schedule says and we’ll call it good. There’s also been disturbingly little communication about the reasoning behind these “delays.” There was one post to the site about the 2007.1 release being cancelled. There’s been no communication on the site whatsoever about the delay with 2008.0. The things on the front page right now talk about the monthly newsletter and some new trustees of the Gentoo foundation. I know it’s free software and I shouldn’t complain, but for those of us who make our living using Gentoo, it’s a bit annoying to say the least. You won’t need trustees of a foundation if there’s no foundation … because everyone goes somewhere else because the distro is updated less often than a phone book comes out.

Recently, I’ve been expermenting with PHP’s PS functions - the PECL extension that allows you to directly output PostScript from your scripts. There are other projects that come to mind (html2ps is another one that will render to PostScript) but I wanted somsething more tightly intergrated into my script. Mysteriously, when I went to install my scripts on the new Poweredge I bought, I began to get there strange errrors: ps_findfont() [function.ps-findfont]: PSlib warning: Trying to insert the glyph '.notdef' which already exists. Please check your afm file for duplicate glyph names. I couldn’t understand what was going on - it was working fine on the previous server. After googling about the web and wracking my brains for about two hours, I checked the versions of PSlib  installed on the two servers. Both were masked by Gentoo’s Portage system, but the unmasked version on the previous server was 0.2.6, whereas the one on the new server was 0.4.1. After I masked out 0.4.1 (thanks to Gentoo’s awesome package.mask) and downgraded back to 0.2.6, everything began working again. So there you have it. Apparently the PECL PS extension is not completely compatible with the most recent version of PSlib, and downgrading back seems to work. Hope this helps somebody!

One of my big complaints about Gentoo is how they can’t seem to do the same thing on two different days. Portage is easy until they mess with it. Take, for instance, MySQL. I was upgrading PHP my test box to 5.1, and I figured I would go ahead and upgrade to My5 to take advantage of all the new features in some of the apps I’m working on. Unfortunately, someone at Gentoo who builds the MySQL ebuilds decided to do some weird “slotting” thing wherein they allow you to have multiple MySQL installations on the same box. So Portage was installing everything as “mysql-500” instead of “mysql” like it should. It also didn’t install a corresponding init script, making it essentially useless lest I have to go make my own init. In Googling about to find a solution for the problem, I find that “Due to the negative response from our user base, the MySQL team has decided to go back to unslotted MySQL.” They simply haven’t delegated the updated packages to all the mirrors yet (I synced before attempting) and still have the packages masked. So I had to unmerge the MySQL package I had installed, unmasked the working unslotted packages, and reemerge the newer “unslotted” version. This really sucks because this situation should never have happened. A change like this should never have been merged into the main tree without having been tested among a group of users to find their input. Instead, this package was put into the main tree to wait for the general userbase’s comments. It’s what I call the “Microsoft Method” of software development: why bother with testing when you can have your users test it for you?