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Hi, all. |
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|
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I spent about half of this week debugging a particularly nasty build |
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issue that I was bumping heads with. I eventually determined that the |
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problem was that I had canceled a Catalyst build when it was only |
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partially complete, which corrupted my entire build environment. This |
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corruption was silent, subsequent builds would complete seemingly |
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successfully, only would I find out at run-time that some packages had |
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been only partially emerged. |
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|
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For the rest of the week, I focused on adding the finishing touches to |
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Plan 9 From Gentoo. It's now in a fairly usable state, the only |
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remaining thing to be done is to get Portage up and running on the |
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liveCD, as that was a feature mentioned by someone during my original |
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proposal and something that I assume the community would be interested |
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in having. I now have an introductory message on startup that |
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introduces new users to some of the userspace paradigms introduced by |
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Plan 9 (i.e. actually "drawing" a window on the screen) and, further, |
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the message points them to a number of resources where they can learn |
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more about the components shipped by Plan 9 From Gentoo. |
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|
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In addition to working out some of the startup niceties, I wrote an |
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ebuild for the 9vx application and added that to the Glentoo overlay. |
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Plan 9 From Gentoo now ships with 9vx and a Plan 9 tree, so that users |
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can run Plan 9 VMs from Plan 9 From Gentoo's command line just by |
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executing the 9vx command. I think this is a pretty neat thing to have |
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and, hopefully, it will appease some of the Plan 9 natives who may be |
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put off by the remaining Linuxy goodness provided by Plan 9 From |
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Gentoo. |
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|
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After this was accomplished, I began porting the Glendix patches to |
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the latest git kernel. I have everything in a build-able state, but it |
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still needs to be tested. In hindsight, I should have ported my |
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patches to the latest Gentoo kernel instead of the git release, as the |
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git kernels use a different style of ebuild and, which I found out in |
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testing a newly generated liveCD image with a git kernel, fail to |
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build correctly with Catalyst. Tomorrow, I will rebase my rebased |
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patches to a different release kernel (2.6.39.2 probably). Hopefully, |
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the patches will not exhibit any run time failures and I will be |
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sitting pretty. Rebasing the patches should not take long, but -- |
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should there be run time failures -- debugging may take a day or two. |
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|
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Once Glendix has been forward ported to a more recent kernel, I will |
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begin porting more syscalls from Plan 9 to the Linux kernel with the |
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goal of getting the native Plan 9 version of the sam editor running on |
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top of the Linux kernel and shipping with Plan 9 From Gentoo. I am |
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still waiting for Anant to get back to me with some more information |
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on porting the syscalls and how to move forward. If he has still not |
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gotten back to me by the time I am ready to begin work, I will once |
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again poke Robin about setting up a project page for Plan 9 From |
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Gentoo and getting space to host both the stage3 tarball of Plan 9 |
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From Gentoo and the liveCD ISO. I may also see about taking over as |
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maintainer of (or just gaining access to) the Plan 9 overlay, as much |
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of my work in the Glentoo overlay should probably be moved to the Plan |
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9 overlay, seeing that it is useful for more than just my liveCD and |
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maybe some Gentoo-ers would like to permanently install plan9port or |
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similar on their machines. |
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|
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I also must fill out my midterm report for Google at some point during |
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this week. |
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|
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rps |