[gentoo-dev] A few mgorny/ projects for upstream-grabs

[Michał Górny]

Hi, everyone.

My time for Gentoo is quite limited right now (you gotta start working
for money at some point :)), and the little time I have I'm trying to
use for the Gentoo work I consider most important. This sadly means
that many of my past tools are earning their share of bitrot and would
really use a new contributors, or possibly even full-time upstream
maintainers :).

Here's a long list of projects along with short description, their state
and planned TODO items that I won't have time to implement anytime soon.


app-admin/eclean-kernel

  The tool to clean up old kernels. A bit controversial in the end
  because /boot is a mess.

  status: works with some /boot layouts, fails hard on some, has some
  known bugs/requests

  TODO:
  - figure out how it sanely could work,
  - support /boot shared between multiple systems,
  - support BootloaderSpec (maybe),
  - clean up the code, possibly rewrite in something saner than Python
    (C++?).


app-cdr/mirage2iso

  Quite an old tool to convert various image formats to .iso using
  libMirage.

  status: working, no known bugs, may use a little cleanup

  TODO:
  - support selecting track to read (right now it reads first supported
    one),
  - support extracting multiple tracks (sessions) -- options to pass
    track list and output filename pattern,
  - support converting to .bin + .toc/.cue,
  - support for more track types (right now, Mode 1 & Mode 2 form 1 are
    supported),
  - support for audio tracks (how? external converter? a library?).


app-portage/cpuinfo2cpuflags

  The tool to get CPU_FLAGS_X86 for your system :). Not really
  abandoned but I have some TODO items I won't be able to do soon.

  status: working, no known bugs

  TODO:
  - replace /proc/cpuinfo parsing with CPUID assembly/intrinsics --
    support more kernels than just Linux,
  - possibly extend to non-x86 arches.


app-portage/diffmask

  A tool to maintain package group unmasks in sync, and clean up stale
  unmasks. Quite specific since it requires unmasks to be copied
  exactly from mask file.

  status: quite working, not exactly proud of the design

  No real TODO items but it would be nice to think a bit about
  the design and figure out if we couldn't do something more user-
  friendly (i.e. not being that strictly bound to package.mask).


app-portage/flaggie

  The package.use (& make.conf) flag management tool. Pretty high
  priority.

  status: rather working, has a few bugs, certainly would use some new
  Portage features

  TODO:
  - remove make.conf editing support (it's very complex and broken --
    can eat random '$' from the file in some cases),
  - therefore: edit global flags via '*/*' entries in package.use,
  - support writing 'FOO_BAR:' format for USE_EXPAND in package.use,
  - support parsing 'FOO_BAR:' format for USE_EXPAND on command-line
    (i.e. 'flaggie libfoo VIDEO_CARDS: +radeon -nvidia'),
  - remove implicit '*' expansion in package names and flag names --
    package.use can handle '*', so leave it as is and just expand it
    when checking if the flags are supported,
  - possibly clean up package.use writer (or rewrite it since I'm
    no longer able to figure out how it works exactly :)).


app-portage/gentoopm

  A wrapper providing nice API to all three Package Managers. Used by
  gpyutils, smart-live-rebuild...

  status: stuck in EAPI 4 era, might have some hidden bugs

  TODO:
  - add APIs for EAPI 5 -- but this requires Package Manager APIs first,
  - maybe some cleanup.


app-portage/install-mask

  A tool to update INSTALL_MASK in make.conf using well-known file
  groups. Uses make.conf manipulation code from flaggie.

  status: working, make.conf manipulation broken as in flaggie

  TODO:
  - the tool should be killed, and INSTALL_MASK group support should be
    moved into Portage :). Alike:

    INSTALL_MASK="@systemd @locale -@locale_pl"

    with matches being applied sequentially, and groups being defined
    in $repo/metadata/install-mask.conf [and masters].


app-portage/pms-test-suite

  A GSoC project and as such, totally abandoned. Not sure if anybody
  really cares these days.

  status: stuck in EAPI 4 era, waiting for EAPI 5 in gentoopm...

  TODO:
  - support EAPI 5,
  - find some use for it?


dev-util/atomic-install

  A nice one -- tool to quasi-atomically install files from $D to live
  system. The idea is to replace live files as fast as possible,
  and quickly revert that if it fails in the middle. Never finished but
  nevertheless a good idea :). If someone's up for it, I'd love to see
  it working one day.

  status: never reached 'fully working' state

  How it was supposed to work (and mostly works):
  - writes 'journal' synchronously with file lists and current status,
  - copies (CoWs, hardlinks) files from $D to live system renaming them
    to .${filename}.NEW.${random-id-from-journal},
  - copies (CoWs, hardlinks) existing files in live system to backups
    as .${filename}.OLD.${random-id-from-journal},
  - does a quick rename() run to replace files in live system to .NEW
    variants,
  - if all goes fine, removes .OLD files and the journal,
  - if it fails, does a quick rename() run to replace files in live
    system back with .OLD variants and cleans up copies afterwards,
  - possibly: use some fancy btrfs features :).


sys-apps/uam

  The udev-based automounter. Used by a lot of people who don't like
  udisks, and also on some non-Gentoo distros.

  status: working, one known bug :)

  No real TODO items. I simply don't use it anymore, so I can't handle
  bugs properly :).


www-servers/pshs

  A simple HTTP(s) server using libevent to share files passed
  on command-line. This one I'll probably keep maintaining, yet there
  are some features I'd love to see patches for :).

  status: working, there's some problem with UPnP on my system

  TODO:
  - figure out why it longer figures out the external IP via UPnP
    (maybe libminiupnpc API change),
  - support HTTP authentication,
  - support uploading files (via upload form),
  - support recursive directory sharing,
  - awesome, pretty ncurses output with progressbars on active
    downloads using background color (like aptitude),
  - think of more fun features to support!


x11-libs/libtinynotify*
x11-misc/sw-notify-send
x11-misc/tinynotify-send

  A 'more lightweight' library to send notification-daemon
  notifications. Its cool feature is support for pseudo-systemwide
  notifications -- if you give it root privileges, it's going to look
  hard for active D-Bus sessions and try to send notifications to all
  of them!

  status: works, didn't see a change in a long time

  TODO:
  - figure out if there's anything to do :),
  - maybe improve the systemwide API -- right now it's rather dumb.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny