KDE 4.0.1, 3.5 Loop2, Entropy, eeePC
Hi all,
there are a lot of things I need to tell you and I have about 15 minutes to write them all.
Let’s start:
1) KDE 4.0.1 is hitting our Entropy repository (yay!), it’s still masked and will be kept this way until 4.1, strictly following Gentoo policy. You could ask why, I have an answer that probably no Gentoo dev will ever tell you: ebuilds. There are a lot of ebuilds with broken DEPEND/PDEPEND/RDEPEND: in two ways, first they didn’t get a proper *DEPEND split (have a look at x11-libs/qt-3.3.8-r4, NO RDEPEND declared => do you think I also have time to report every single bug? No, sorry, I don’t have much, I can’t be in charge of it too), second, some ebuilds don’t respect slots in *DEPEND, some contain atoms like “>=kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.5″,”kde-base/kdelibs” instead of: “=kde-base/kdelibs-3.5*” or the new way “kde-base/kdelibs:3.5″. So, those are, I bet the main reasons to keep KDE 4.0.x masked on Gentoo. Things that could be fixed by just using grep and having 1-2 spare hours.
2) 3.5 Loop2, yeah, I think we’ll have the second beta for the end of February. Unfortunately, donations are slowing down and I had to dedicate a little bit more time to something more remunerative. I wouldn’t ask much, but to pay bills, I need about 1000€/month. Anyway, don’t worry Red Bull is helping and we’re still on track, with EXCITING THINGS coming (read below)
3) Entropy: what I can say, it’s getting better and better, faster, stabler and Spritz is on the way and will hit our repositories before Loop2. I’ve rewritten the caching infrastructure, added dynamic library brekages check, improved memory usage (now reduced at about 15-20Mb, worst case). The TODO list is always long, we got crazy ideas every day, like the trick I’ve found to reduce repository database by a good 65%, from 13,5Mb to 6,3 by using a combination of internal tables compression and LZMA (.7z, which is 10% better than bzip2). Most of this stuff is already implemented but we need to wait a little to allow old clients to continue to work. It’s just a matter of enabling it.
4) eeePC, it’s coming! Exciting things will happen, stay tuned! 